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A Message from Nancy Ingelson

But Love Doesn’t Make Sense!

By Nancy Ingelson

Last week a friend told me his tulips were coming up…

Seeing is believing.

My sister will become a grandmother in June. A few weeks ago, while visiting her daughter in the Twin Cities, she felt the baby kicking…

Touching is believing.

Gustavo Dudamel is a 26-year-old symphony conductor from Venezuela who summons from his orchestra a sound that rocks body, mind, and soul…

Hearing is believing.

Logan Suhr, five-year-old member of our church, offered up his “smencil” to me the other day — a real pencil that smelled like hot chocolate…

Smelling is believing.

At the Seder Meal for First Communion families this past Sunday, faces screwed up around the tables as children sampled the horseradish and parsley dipped in salt water…
Tasting is believing.

If you’ve come to any of our midweek Lenten services, you’ve been reminded that we need our five senses to make sense of life and communicate God’s love to the world. (I especially liked the suggestion that we are the fragrance of Christ, the mist “for others to walk into.”)

We rely on our senses to take in information we need to make good choices, to learn, to enjoy creation. It’s difficult to doubt the presence of a growing fetus, when you can feel its movement. Of course we accept that the grass poking up between our toes is real because we can see it, feel it, and probably even smell it. Screeching brakes alert us to danger. Freshly- baked bread reminds us of Grandma’s kitchen and the treat we’re in for.

But God doesn’t give us everything we need through our senses. God doesn’t limit love in that way. God would have no reason to give us faith if everything God had in store for us could be taken in by way of the senses and interpreted by the synapses in our brains. And without faith, how would our relationship with God be possible?

Isn’t it interesting that in this season rather short on sensory cues (have you noticed how drab the earth is?) we find ourselves on this journey to the Cross? Isn’t it interesting that while our senses crave stimulation, God offers up excitement of a different kind in the form of an audacious gift? I suppose we could say that hope and forgiveness and new life can be experienced through the senses. And that’s cool. But these things do their good God stuff, release their God-fragrance, if you will, as we have faith in the Giver.

We’re asking our 4th-graders, and a few 5th-graders, to hear in some new ways what God is up to in the sacrament of Holy Communion — this is my body, given for you; this is my blood, shed for you. Soon they will reach for the wafer, dip it down into the wine, and put the two into their mouths. Faith, not our taste buds, keeps us coming back. And this is God’s grace? Jesus Christ himself really present? Yes. Tasty, shimmery, mysterious gift. No logical explanation for why God loves us like God does. No empirical data that proves God is present in the simple act of coming to this table of grace. No sensory input to make us somehow more loveable.

So we come in faith, just as we are, with children about to do the same, yet in their own ways. Bedecked in stoles that delight the eye, these children come forward, new to the sacrament, but not to the table.

Let us make a place for them, just as Jesus did.

Nancy Ingelson,

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