The Practice of Hearing the Call and Responding, with Rev. Dr. Ken Hood.

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.

About the Series, Life as Pilgrimage, Lent 2026: Our sacred stories are filled with journeys from the familiar into the unknown. This season invites us to become pilgrims, open to being changed along the way. Through shared workshops, contemplative practices, creative expression, and time on the trail, we will make space to listen deeply and be gently transformed by the spacious love of God.

Join us each Sunday, 10AM at bendfp.org, or 11AM KTVZ-CW Channel 612/12 in Bend.  Subscribe/Follow, and click the bell for alerts.

At First Presbyterian, you will meet people at many different places theologically and spiritually. And we love it that way. We want to be a place where our diversity brings us together and where conversation takes us all deeper in our understanding of God.

We call this kind of faith “Spacious Christianity.” We don’t ask anyone to sign creeds or statements of belief. The life of faith is about a way of being in the world and a faith that shows itself in love.

Thank you for your support of the mission of the First Presbyterian Church of Bend. Visit https://bendfp.org/giving/ for more information.

Keywords:

David Whyte, start close in, be present, perfectionist, Adam and Eve, transition, growth, cycle of renewal, passion, doldrums, mini transitions, cocooning, getting ready, self-discovery, pilgrimage., presbyterian, church, online worship, bend, oregon

Featuring:

Rev. Dr. Steven Koski, Rev. Sharon Edwards, Becca Ellis, Brave of Heart, Guests

Transcript

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Welcome to worship at First Presbyterian. We, at First Presbyterian, practice a spacious Christianity, which means, no matter where you are in your faith journey, you belong, and there is space for you at the table, there is space for your doubts and questions. We believe doubts and questions are a gift that invite us into deeper conversations and a more authentic faith. We believe diversity is a strength. Every story is sacred and everybody matters. We do our best to live the spacious and radical love of Jesus so that all might have a chance to flourish in this world. We are so glad to connect with you in this way. We would also love to worship with you in person, if you're ever in the neighborhood on Sunday mornings at 830 or 10am and never hesitate to reach out to us to learn more about us or how we might support you. I hope you enjoy this worship service. Welcome. Welcome back to the second week of our Lenten pilgrimage together. Our reading this morning is from Genesis 12, one through four. Listen for God's word to you now the Lord said to Abram, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you, I will curse and in you, all of the families of the earth shall be blessed. So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was 75 years old when he departed from harans This second week of our pilgrimage together, Sharon and I are working from a book called The Soul of the pilgrim by Christine Walters, painter, and she makes a really beautiful distinction between a pilgrim and a tourist. She says that a tourist is somebody who journeys similar to a pilgrim who journeys, who goes on an adventure, but they see things, they hear things, and nothing really touches them. They they see all these things that are unchanged inside, whereas a pilgrim goes on this journey and they see all these sights, and they hear all these things, and somehow they can take it in and inside it, it touches them and and transforms them. I find this really, really helpful, this thought of being a tourist and being a pilgrim only. What I would say is that it isn't either or we're never entirely tourist or entirely pilgrim. Are always a bit of a bit of a blend. And so if there are those of you here this morning that are feeling more like a tourist because everything's so busy and so difficult, tourists are welcome here, and if you are feeling more like a pilgrim, or if you're wanting to lean into more pilgrim energy, then this morning is is really an invitation towards one way of of doing that and one way towards leaning into our pilgrim is called unlearning. Unlearning. Most of us are familiar with learning. I love learning. Learning is is acquisitive. Learning is gaining new thoughts and new mindsets and new skills. I remember when I was a kid, learning my timetables, you know, one through five was pretty easy, but then at six, I had to work a little bit more in seven. But I had this sense of accomplishment and this sense of building week after week as I learned more and more, and I love learning. That's why we have degrees and certifications way more than I probably need. But there's this sense of a building body of knowledge, if you will. So learning, learning so important. But this morning, we're going to be looking at the gift of UN learning. And unlearning is the awareness of the awareness of thoughts and beliefs that we have been given that may have served us at some point in time, and they may have some truth in them, but as we gain awareness of these and we gently examine them, we discover that they don't entirely hold up to the world as we know it now, and we can begin to gently loosen our grip on these beliefs that we may have carried our whole life. That's the process of UN learning. It's letting go things that we thought were true, or maybe were true for us for a time, and at least in my work with with people, unlearning is the harder of the two paths between learning and unlearning, but it's also the pathway that bears the most transformative fruit. Our text this morning from from Genesis, if, if last week with Adam and Eve, if that's the earliest pilgrimage in Scripture, I think Abrams and Sarah. Eyes journey away from the home where they they grew up and knew everything. I think this has to be the most famous pilgrimage in Scripture. I have found, though, that sometimes we don't think about their journey as accurately as I as I think we might. I've heard people describe Abraham and Sarah leaving everything they ever knew as like, Hey, have you ever traveled across the country? You know, you moved homes and and I have, I've, I've lived in different parts of the country, and it is challenging. You know, I've lived in Texas, I lived in New Jersey, I've now live in Oregon. Very different cultures, but we had the protection of laws, and there are a lot of things that I could assume would would be here when Abram and Sarai leave every what and everything they've ever known. This is a radical call. It's a call to become a migrant. It's a call to become an alien, a resident alien, and being a resident alien in the ancient world, it's considered a form of punishment, second only to death. It's one of the worst things the state could do to you. If they didn't kill you, they would push you out and make you like Abram and Sarai, because they as they traveled through the lands, they would not have protection of law. They often wouldn't share the language or know the customs. And the ancient world was as welcoming to migrants as our own, which is not much. This is why the Hebrew Bible, over and over, stresses that people of faith are to care for to have compassion for migrants, because we once were strangers, also in a strange land. I think the hardest part of Abram and Sarai leaving everything they ever knew. It's not so much the geography or the danger of this leaving it's, I think the hardest part was leaving behind their beliefs, leaving behind their face, Abram and Sarah. Sarah, they grew up in a culture that believed in many different gods, and there's even a Jewish story about Abram's father being an idol maker. They believed in multiple gods, and they believed they could build statues that then they could have communication with these, with these gods and Abram and Sarai, and following this wild land without any map in any sense of timeline, it is also leaving behind their family's faith tradition, their family's beliefs. And a lot of you know something about that kind of unlearning and how hard it is, how painful it is. A lot of us grew up in religious traditions where we were told we were told things that we were told were absolutely true. But then as we, as we aged, as we, as we grew, we tried to match these beliefs with what we were experiencing in in our world, and they didn't always fit. So many of us have been or are in periods of what we call deconstruction, and we're teasing apart, taking apart, aspects of our beliefs, and we're trying to come together, cobble together a new faith that fits for where we are, who we are today, at least in Abraham and Sarah's case, it was a pretty radical act. They were actually leaving behind all of that faith tradition, they decided there was really nothing that they wanted to carry, to carry forward that isn't that isn't how it is for for all of us all the time, sometimes we have a different kind of path of unlearning, where what we're discovering is the things that we were, that we were taught, that were given to us, they were partially true. They were partially true. But there is an expansiveness. There's a larger version of a faith or a belief, for instance, that that we didn't understand just yet. So what we're leaving behind is this, this small version, if you don't know, the amazing st Teresa of Avila. Today's the day to know a little bit about her. Theresa was born 1515, in Spain, and this was an incredibly tumultuous time in Europe. In 1517, Luther would tackle those 95 theses or complaints against the Wittenberg church door, and there was a just a civil war happening within Christendom all over Europe. Things are hard today, and we are divided today, and we are but we are not the first people to have experienced this kind of really painful and difficult division. We have grandmothers. Grandfathers in the faith that we can remember, have have walked these challenging roads too, and Theresa was one of them. She grew up as a girl very divided. On the one hand, she loved the church and she loved the faith of the church, and had this desire for a holiness and a sanctity that seemed very far from the world. She would play with dolls and play nunnery. She would play conven When she was a child, but at the same time, she is Spanish, and she had what folks call Duende. And Duende is this beautiful Spanish word that means something like fire or passion. And Teresa loved to dance, and she loved music and she loved beautiful food. She was a sensual person. She was an erotic person, and this became very challenging for her as she aged. When she was 16, her mother had died, and her father we don't know exactly what happened. We don't know exactly, but her father thought she was on the wrong path. We know she was reading romance novels. I didn't even know those existed in the 16th century, but he pushed her into a convent, and even if this was something, a part of her wanted, it was, it was incredibly difficult. But Theresa then entered into convent life, and she did so, and she suffered for many, many years. In fact, she wound up with a mysterious illness. She was unable to move for a long period of time. They actually dug a grave, believing that she would not survive, but she did, and part of what happened is she had a vision that's called the transverberation. She had a vision in front of a statue of the suffering Christ, and all of a sudden it's this non ordinary reality, this visionary state. There was an angel, a beautiful angel, with this golden spear, and he thrust this spear in and through her body, she said, all the way to the core, all the way to her heart only. It wasn't awful, it wasn't frightening when, when the spear reached her heart, she was filled. She was flooded with love, with God's love, and in an instant, she said she had this experience of God's unending love for her, for all the different aspects of her, for her holiness and sanctity, and her dwelling day, there was room for all of it, and there was love for this earth and and all within it. And when Teresa emerged from this vision, she emerged healed, both physically but also spiritually, and Theresa wound up becoming one of the most famous women in the church, because she left the convent she was in to found her own expression of faith, and no one was wanting this. No one liked this. But she was such a force of nature, and what she did by combining her sanctity with her Duende, is she created an order called the Discalced Carmelite, still very active today, but Teresa brought into the convent not only silent prayer, which we'll look at later this afternoon, at first press bend, but she also brought in castanets and tambourines. She brought in dance flamenca that was absolutely not considered godly or spiritual. But she brought in both and it was her passion and her sanctity, it was her sensuality and her holiness together that God worked through to create such an incredible expression of faith. Teresa had some unlearning in that vision, and her unlearning was that God could only work through churchy ways. God can only work through these sanctified ways. What she discovered is God does work through those ways that was true and right. The God we believe in works in all these other ways too. Who are we? Who are we to say where God can't be moving. So I'm wondering for you, I'm wondering for you, what sorts of beliefs have you had to examine and unlearn or let go? What beliefs right now are you wondering about, curious about, maybe, maybe it's time for for a look. I remember my my grandma, my grandma, cash dollar, that's my mom's family name. I loved my grandma. Cash dollar. She was our little pink grandmother. She was always very lovely and kind, also very proper. She was a presbyter. And a Sunday school teacher for decades and decades. My brother, my older brother, he's eight years older than I am. He came out as a gay man in college, and this was not on my grandmother's radar screen. This was not something she had any experience of, knowledge of, and it wasn't easy for her at first, she grew up at a time when being gay was illegal. It was considered a serious mental illness, and it's certainly not, there wasn't room for it in the church that she knew and so it it was really difficult for her at first. But somehow, somehow, this, this woman in her 80s took out these beliefs that she was given, these beliefs that the world told her were absolutely true, and she somehow held them up and examined them and compared them to the reality that she was now living in the reality of my brother. And she found a way to decide, you know what these these beliefs, if they ever were true, they aren't anymore. They aren't anymore. One last thing that I'll leave you with is Teresa left us so many gifts, but one incredible one was a bookmark that people found. It was a prayer on a bookmark that was in a book she she used in her room, and her prayer is perfect for unlearning. It goes like this, let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. Everything changes. I God alone remain. Hold patience for it. Nothing is wasted. Presence in all things, presence in all things. Amen. Friends, as you live your lives, know that God is before us and God is behind us, that Christ is above us and Christ is beneath us, and that the spirit is beside us and the Spirit lives within us. Thanks be to God. Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you enjoyed this worship service. If you would like to make a donation helping make these podcasts possible or support the many ways. First, Presbyterian seeks to serve our community. You can make a financial gift online@bendfp.org every week, we hear from someone thanking us for the gift of these broadcasts and what a difference they make. Your support makes that possible. Our church is committed to reach beyond our walls, bringing hope where there is despair, and love where it is needed the most. Your generous support helps us to be generous in love. Go to our website, bend fp.org, and click on the link. Give online. Your support is really appreciated and makes a difference in people's lives. Thanks again. I hope to see you next week.