Feb 22nd: The Practice of Hearing the Call and Responding, with Rev. Dr. Ken Hood.
A Part of the Series:
Rev. Dr. Steven Koski
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The Practice of Hearing the Call and Responding with Rev. Dr. Ken Hood. Series: Life as Pilgrimage, Lent 2026 A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Genesis 3:14-24.
Curious about where you are in your own journey? Join Rev. Dr. Ken Hood this Sunday (online or in person) as we explore starting “close in,” rethinking Adam and Eve’s story, and navigating life’s seasons of change. Come as you are, bring your questions, and see what this bigger, messier, beautiful life might hold for you.
Transcript:
Start close in by David White, start close in. Don’t take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing, close in, the step you don’t want to take. Start with the ground that you know, the pale ground beneath your feet. Start with your own questions. Give up on other people’s questions. Don’t let them smother something simple. To find another’s voice, follow your own voice, and wait until that voice becomes a private ear, able to listen to another. Don’t wait. Don’t wait. Start right now. Take one small step you can call your own. Don’t follow another’s heroics Be humble. Focus. Start close in. Start close in. Don’t take the second step or the third step. Start with the first thing, close in, the step you don’t want to take. I love this piece from David White. It’s one of the first poems that I I heard from from him. It has a lot of meanings for me. One of the meanings is it’s an invitation to be here now. It’s an invitation to me, to me, to you, to be right, exactly where we are with all the good, the bad and the ugly. And this is hard for us. This is hard for me, because I have a part. I suspect you have parts like this that is kind of a perfectionist that this part looks at where I’m at in my life, but it’s thinking, it’s comparing where I’m at to where this part thinks I could be or should be, and then this part is not satisfied with what’s in my present moment. It’s saying, Oh, this could be better. This could be different. This should be better or different. And so this part never lets me be right where I am. It’s always wanting to push me. It’s always wanting to push me to be somewhere else, to accept and be right where I am. Almost feels like a giving up to this part and yet And yet, to be wherever this part thinks we should or should want to be. In order to get there, we have to do the work of where we actually are. We have to start close in our text this morning, as with Adam and and Eve and where they are on their journey, they’re in a difficult place. And one of the things I noticed with this story is we don’t start close in when it comes to the story of Adam and Eve itself. I suspect if, if you’re a church person at all. You heard about this story. You heard what this story was about before you ever read it. My guess is, if you’re a church person or a church adjacent person, somebody told you what this story was about before you ever laid eyes on the actual text of it. Somebody told you the story of Adam and Eve is about sin. The story of Adam and Eve is about a fall, a terrible collapse, and that Adam and Eve sinned and fell, and then it like messed up and ruined all of all of humanity. And the thing of it is when we start close in to that text, the word sin, the word fall, it doesn’t exist in the in the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew Bible never describes the story of Adam and Eve as sin happening or as any kind of fall. Our brothers and sisters in the synagogue have never articulated the story as anything like sin or original sin. To be sure, all of that came about 300 years after the time of Jesus, from from a guy named Augustine. A lot of you probably know, and I love Augustine, but I’m, I’m really disheartened for this particular part of his legacy, because for Adam and Eve, what if? What if this story isn’t about a terrible sin or a terrible fall, what if this story is simply about leaving a situation that it. Is time for them to leave and then moving forward. Them moving forward into another form of life, a fuller form, a bigger form, a more difficult form, in some ways, all right, Adam and Eve, they had everything they needed in that in that garden, they had everything except their freedom, their sense of self, their sense of separation from one another, and got it, and all they had was that little garden. This story isn’t a story about a fall. This story is a story about transition and growth, of leaving a small place where they had had grown accustomed maybe it was too small for them, and stepping forward into life, stepping forward into a larger life, a life where there would be Grand Canyons and giant oceans and all of these things they never would have had In the garden. But this journey towards this bigger world, this journey, it is difficult. Labor was painful. There, there were consequences, not punishments for living East of Eden, but consequences. I wonder where you are right now, if you could allow yourself to start close in and just examine every part of your soul and your life, where it is that you feel you are in your own journey, the things you like about it, the things that are hard, the Things that nag in your mind going, Oh, I wish it were different. It should be different. What if you could allow every thing that’s happening in your life, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and allow it all to be here simply because it is what’s here. I’ve offered you all a roadmap that I use on my own pilgrimage and the pilgrimages I walk with others in their journey to become themselves. This is from Frederick Hudson. It’s from the Hudson Institute. It’s called the cycle of renewal. Frederick Hudson was actually trained as a pastor, a theologian, and then became a psychologist and worked with with people, especially as adult lives began getting longer and the world began getting less certain. He helped people discover how to cycle in their lives and how to roll with what’s happening. He gives this, this, this map, I hope you’re able to see it, and he talks about four phases in our lives. And this is just an invitation to you to see where you might be, where you might fall on this map. We start with the go for itself, the passion itself. It’s up there on the upper left hand quadrant. The Passion itself is when we’re waking up and we just we know who we are. We love our work. We love our family. Our biggest challenge is just trying to not burn out and and, you know, enjoy as much as we can of this incredible life. But for all of us, we don’t, we don’t live there. We can’t live in that, in that space. And so from time to time, we will notice. We will wake up on some mornings, and we may become feeling some of the disenchanted self, something of the doldrums. When I wake up and I’m in doldrums, I don’t love what I’m doing, I don’t love who I am. I kind of hate who I am. I hate everyone around me. I can’t really tell them all that, so I’m having to hide all of that. It’s exhausting to wake up in the doldrums where I don’t quite know what I’m doing or who I am, but it’s a natural part of this cycle. Now, there are two things that happen, two ways to go in our life, pilgrimage, when we wind up feeling waking up in the doldrums a lot, sometimes we can do a mini transition, and so we can stay in the life chapter that we’re in. And most of us, most professional folks, especially, do mini transitions a lot. In a mini transition, you might go on on a vacation to refresh yourself. That might work. You might go take a class, you might look for another job, but within the same sector, right? So your life is pretty much the same, but you’re trying to do something to kind of re inject the passion into it. A lot of folks, right, are looking at many transitions, but sometimes, every now and again, a larger change is called for we might be the ones that are instigating this most often, though it comes from without these huge changes. This is like the change Adam and Eve are facing. They call us to become much larger versions, bigger versions of ourselves. This is when we move down into that quadrant called cocooning.
Uh, and down in the quadrant of of cocooning, it’s like stepping off a 10,000 foot ledge, and we we fall into this huge space where we don’t know who we are at all anymore. We are pulling away from from the world because we’re asking huge questions, big questions. What we’re really doing in cocooning is we’re letting go of the self we had become that was really too small for us and and we’re just rediscovering aspects of our soul that we used to know, where you used to have but we had let go of, right? And we’re beginning to form a new form of ourselves that’s a little bit bigger, a little bit braver, that encapsulates all that we were before, but now has these other facets, these other parts of us that we somehow had let go of. And in cocooning, we can’t live there forever, either, right? We begin to move into that getting ready phase. And that getting ready phase, we are this new and beautiful self, but it is new, and we don’t know how to be this person around other people just yet. And so in the getting ready, we craft experiments. Right? We try being our full and true selves just a little bit and see how it goes, right until we finally come, come back up into the light in the surface in the world again as this new and brave and bigger version of ourselves. I’m curious for you, if you look at this map, where does it feel you are? I remember the first time I saw this map, I was in the doldrums, but I didn’t want to be there, right? That part of me is like, Oh, you shouldn’t be there. You should be in the passion itself, or the getting ready, at least. But the reality is, I was in the doldrums, and the only way out of the place that you’re in us to do the work of that place that you’re called to do. So last, last invitation here to look honestly at this text, at this map, at your life. Instead of wanting to jump ahead and pretend to be in that life or that person you think you should be or whatnot, it’s an invitation to start close in and allow yourself to be the messy, beautiful, fascinating, fractured self that you really are right now, to do the work that God is calling you to do here.
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