Saturday Morning in Boardman. Rain spattering from the skies. First day in my new church. First impressions count. I didn’t want anyone to call me a “Herr Pastor.” I want to be one of the guys, grizzled by the Eastern Oregon wind and able to coast a wheelbarrow, uphill.

Good Shepherd Church on Locust Road is on an incline with five green acres on its wide side, with enough space there to do a lot of Holy Spirit things, if the Holy Spirit is in the mood. If I dare say so, it is a sweet little church, handcrafted by men and women who loved it and still do. The former Pastor S., now retired, takes pride in being the driver of many a nail into its building. Inside its space, it makes me feel as if I am inside a ship, riding across prairie waves towards the sky. This is a good feeling to have inside a holy place, better than a Gothic cathedral and much easier to clean.

Many years before at my old church, they spoke very darkly of a former “Herr Pastor” of old times, who was averse to physical labor and dropped his wife beneath the floorboards to flush out plumbing problems and fix them. I do not want to be seen as a “Herr Pastor.” A modern pastor must be seen to have a go! So I dressed up in jeans, mud-enabled shoes and warm anorak to protect from the rain and wind and joined the men and women of Good Shepherd (aka The Flock) in a day of external cleansing. The winter had congealed pools of old leaves in the garden beds and things needed raking and sweeping to be in ship-shape order. Dirt, it is said, is just earth in the wrong place and there was quite a bit of it outside.

Inside the church, the carpets were shampooed and polished. Scurrying feet and brooms swept each nook and cranny. I enjoy the smell of shampoo and polish.

My little story of the tumbleweed in the East Oregonian had aroused the passions of a few to embark on a major tumbleweed exercise and we scooped up the lowly weed by the bushel load and piled it up in our top parking lot. We called the appropriate authorities to seek permission to burn it. Tumbleweed grew incessantly. Sin, remarked the great theologian Martin Luther, grew like a man’s beard and you had to keep hacking at it to keep it down. Tumbleweed, I think, is like that too. The more tumbleweed was cleared, the more seemed to roll in. If there had been tumbleweed I expect that Jesus would have come up with a good parable or two about it. He had the mustard seed and the fig tree. The mustard bush is straggly and grows wildly across the land, spreading (as was his point) like the kingdom of heaven. Tumbleweed, I expect, would have slowed things down a bit with its wicked prickles.

With permission we began to burn the wet, prickly tumbleweed. Kurt, one of the church’s founders, is an expert at this. His wife calls him a “firebug.” The plumes of tangled green barbed-wire slowly caught, giving off a strange, thick, green and oily smoke that poured like a river into the sky and making Marcus, one of our youth leaders, cough as it rolled into his face. Its dark green syrupy smoke looked like a special effect from a Harry Potter film.

We pulled out a path some feet away from our fence line, but looking into the fields, there was still what appeared to be vast swathes of tumbleweed, some of which were coiled into crowns of thorns. Far away, as if in some surreal living room, an abandoned sofa sat by itself. I wanted to move it somewhere, but I wasn’t sure if it was on our land. It could have belonged to some thoughtful Boardman philosopher who would peer at the stars at night and think great thoughts by the light of burning piles of tumbleweed.

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Colin Brown is pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Boardman.