For a guy who hears a lot “you’re really fun – for a priest" I felt upstaged a bit when a local mega-church cancelled services and put the Seattle-Chicago NFL game up on their big screens this past Sunday morning. This story made it on the T.V. news and on the front page of the paper. They showed some of the guys at church wheeling in a keg (at 10 in the morning), serving pulled pork sandwiches and whooping it up until the Seahawks took gas and went down in flames. The church band played Lenny Kravitz’s “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over” to no avail. The final quote in the newspaper story was from a woman at the church for the game who said, “For the first time in my life, I actually looked forward to coming to church.”
I use this as an illustration that church needs to be fun. And that this is big news.
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Traffic started about a mile from the entrance of the church.
Police and volunteers guided vehicles through the parking lot maze. At every door, greeters with genuine smiles welcomed us. They held eye contact and sometimes put a reassuring hand to a shoulder: "We're so glad you're here today."
An usher who had grown up with me in a traditional United Methodist church handed me a bulletin.
"So you go to church here?" I asked.
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When the Twin Towers tumbled down, I held my newborn daughter tightly and prayed that we would work to end the violence, to find a way to connect despite different faiths and cultures.
I suspect Christina-Taylor Green’s mother felt the same way as she cradled her newborn daughter, born on that day of infamy.
Christina’s life was bookended by violence – from birth on Sept. 11, 2001 to death on Jan.8, 2011, slain as she waited to shake hands with her Congresswoman, as one elected official to another.
While Christina’s mother spent the day figuring out burial plans for her third-grade daughter, I spent the day with mine, packing up the ornaments from the Christmas tree, playing tag and snuggling for the end of a movie.
Whether the vitriol in the political arena motivated the shooter or not, it is time for us to step up, share the blame and acknowledge that we must change how we communicate with each other or more mothers will bury their children.
Instead of engaging directly with people who rail against the government on Facebook, I block their messages from appearing on my wall. Instead of confronting family members about forwarded e-mails proclaiming Obama is Muslim, I delete them without comment.
I thought that was the best way to handle the situation – but I realize now that it allowed two conversations to carry on simultaneously without any intersection. I haven’t tried to understand how they feel. Instead, I gather with like-minded folk and self-righteously congratulate our perceived open-mindedness.
I find that we do this in church too. If a congregation doesn’t agree with viewpoints on an issue, people leave. The rhetoric of the Episcopal Church too often mirrors that of the political landscape, with the loudest, most opinionated on the right and left dominating the conversation, and the middle 80 percent putting our hands over our ears and pretending not to hear.
I’m not suggesting we hold forums on homosexuality or the new health care plan in perpetuity. My goodness, I feel like every other workshop since 2003 has dealt in some way with Bishop Gene Robinson.
But I yearn to find common ground – to find a place where we can explore our differences without using analogies about bringing a gun to a knife fight or placing bullseye targets over opponents. I hope this common ground can be found in our churches – but we need to model civility, compromise and cooperation.
I think my generation -- sandwiched between the hippy movement of the 1960s and Reagonomics of the 1980s – has a lot to offer in this type of relationship-building – but we need the boomers to let go of the microphones.
My dad can hold a grudge.
When someone has really wronged him, it’s hard for him to forgive. And forgetting doesn’t even enter the equation.
This is one of the reasons I believe in a God that changes hearts and transforms lives.
Three times a week, dad goes to prison. He teaches Bible studies and workshops on how to live outside the bars. On Sundays, he worships with the inmates.
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We greened the church yesterday.
An afternoon of draping fresh-cut evergreen boughs from pillar to pillar, arch to arch, inspired me to draft “greened” into service as a transitive verb.
It occurs to me that our celebration of Christmas should be like a transitive verb. For Strunk & White aficionados, this needs no further explanation. For others, a transitive verb requires both a subject – and a direct object.
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I just got off the phone with a friend who’s been priest-in-charge of a congregation that's grown from an average Sunday attendance of 30 to about 80 in a little less than two years.
"It’s a tough day!" she exclaimed. It was only noon. I'd called out of the blue, just after she finished meeting with a Vestry member – one on the verge of resigning. "It was a good conversation, a necessary conversation," she said. "But a hard one."
Putting aside my original purpose...
I broke with tradition last night.
Normally the tree decorating ends in tears – mostly mine. See, I like my tree to be just so. The artificial limbs spread out in an appealing fan, the favorite ornaments occupying the prime real estate.
When my young children clump the ornaments at about three-feet up or my husband leaves an entire side light-less, I feel my idea of the perfect tree-trimming evening slipping away. Then I get grouchy, the kids start to pick at each other and the evening dissolves into a mass of disappointment.
I promised myself this was the year to break the cycle.
When my son made z-shapes out of the limbs, I smiled. When my daughter begged to hang one of the favorite ornaments in her room, I conceded. When I spotted big holes in the tree, I waited until my husband went into the kitchen to fix them.
Letting go of my need for perfection allowed me to experience the evening as I’d always imagined. The kids even listened to stories about the ceramic Santa I painted as a Girl Scout and the bedraggled bell that my mom made the year I was born.
Advent and Christmas are full of traditions and expectations.
I wonder what I’m willing to give up, what my family is willing to sacrifice, what our congregations are willing to change, all that we might prepare the way for the coming of Christ.
My 6-year-old is moving out.
He informed me that on his 18th birthday, he’s having cake, then packing. He’s going to move in with one of his buddies so they can run a web show.
But I’ll miss you, I protest.
Well, he says, you better appreciate me now.
My heart falls to the floor. After all, until his sister informed him that it was illegal, this is the child who swore that he was marrying me when he got older.
Then I started thinking about this nugget of wisdom: Appreciate me now.
Appreciate me now.
I’m writing this blog post on my flight back from the Nuevo Amanecer Conference, an event I attended on behalf of the Episcopal Church Foundation. This conference is a once-in-two year gathering for those who are involved in Latino ministry. Attendees included leaders in Latino ministry, organizations like ECF and Episcopal Camps and Conference Centers, as well as representatives of parishes who are seeing their neighborhoods change and want to extend la bienvenida to those who’ve recently arrived. To be perfectly honest, my mind is still dizzy from all the wonderful people I met, as well as from the music and palpable sense of hope - but I know I need to jot down what I saw and heard immediately or I will forget these insights in the coming weeks.
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The first semester of our experiment ends tonight.
My church is a typical county-seat congregation in the foothills of Appalachia. If only Christmas Eve were our typical attendance on Sunday mornings, we’d be a packed 150. Instead, most Sundays, we’re half that, with each family getting their own pew.
In the past five years, we’ve tried lots of techniques to build up Christian education. Sunday School – on Sunday morning – was a flop (before – and after – the main service). We tried a once-a-month Evensong, with activities. No traction. Our Beer and Bible study had been a hit for three years, but attendance fizzled.
Last school year, we picked up kids from school and brought them to our house for two hours of GodSquad. The kids loved it – but it happened in a vacuum, 20 minutes from church and away from all of the adults (save two teachers).
We wanted a program that integrated...
A chance meeting at a jewelry party reminded me that I should have gone to church.
I don’t sleep in on Sunday mornings very often. I’m a clergy spouse and a diocesan staff member and mother of two kids who love hanging out with their church buddies. But we just finished diocesan convention and 3 ½ hour drive home so hunkering down on a rainy morning won out.
But I was able to roust myself for an afternoon jewelry party with some girlfriends. When I filled out the order form, the jewelry representative asked me about my diocesan e-mail address. Turns out she’s an Episcopalian in our diocese, about two hours from home.
The day before...
E-mail addresses are gold.
By Olympic award standards, the bronze medal goes to snail mail addresses. Cell phone numbers snag the silver.
But e-mail addresses rise to the top of the podium.
Managing the database for a congregation or a diocese is a huge challenge. It was hard enough when only physical addresses were needed. But communication methods have changed.
Over the last five months, we have made a concerted effort in my diocese to bolster our database with e-mail addresses. When someone registers for an event, we add the e-mail. When administrators send in leadership lists, we add the e-mail address. Sometimes I’ve even copied the email recipients from a bulk send and put them into our list.
One of the most successful methods...
My diocese is not known to have many money problems.
But when a committee started drafting the 2011 budget, they realized we were facing a shortfall. Like every church organization, we’ve tightened our belts, frozen salaries, and made tough decisions. Still revenue is down in many congregations, which means mission share – the portion each congregation contributes as part of the diocese – also is down.
The budget committee could have...
The separation of church and state is a key cornerstone of the U.S. government. At the same time, everyone at my noonday meeting on Tuesday had cast their vote in a local church.
This juxtaposition struck me today as we move from one of the most contentious, fractious election cycles in my lifetime into a new era of leadership. Our churches serve as polling stations as a way to support their communities. But we have so much more to offer, especially now.
But we have so much more to offer, especially now.
Have you voted today?
I love Election Day. Anywhere. For me, it epitomizes the essence of democracy: citizens taking time from their busy lives to vote, to make a choice that at the end of the day, determines the future direction of their community, their country. Voting means taking a stand, making a difference.
As a Christian, I believe that voting is
Faye laundered money. Literally.
At the small, rural church, she collected the offering at the end of the service and hid it in her clothes hamper until she could make it to the bank.
We discovered the occasions when she washed the purse with the rest of her laundry. The ink would run off the checks, and she'd call, asking how much we had given.
Today, on All Saints Day, we remember the guardians and martyrs of the faith, the Saints of The Church.
I also like to remember the saints in my churches.
Faye was nearly 90 years old -- and widowed for half a century, but she turned up at the church nearly every time the doors opened. Her shoulders hunched over and her knuckles looked like walnuts, but she never failed to clean up after potluck dinners or to give a pat to the child who hugged her leg.
She didn't offer herself to the lions or spark a reformation, but Faye and so many others seem to fit the definition of a saint -- a person of exceptional holiness.
Give a shout out to the saints in your churches, in your lives. Post their first names here. Add a sentence or two about how they have been extraordinary examples of the living Christ. And then give thanks for their witness and saint-likeness.
Amen.
When he didn’t win the pumpkin contest, I felt the tears sting.
For most of Saturday, we worked on Cinderella’s coach, pulling the slime out of the pumpkin, carving windows, fashioning a door (that really opened!) and decorating the coach as befits a soon-to-be princess.
My 6-year-old son was sure his creation would win the contest. So when it didn’t, he was crushed. And so was I. He was robbed. Hanging chads and ballot fraud.
At home, I talked about how much fun we’d had creating the pumpkin. And I presented him with a dollar-store plastic trophy: the Bibbidi Bobbidi BOO pumpkin won first place in our house.
I think he saw through the ploy but took the trophy anyway. The next morning, I saw he’d climbed on top of a chair and on the tips of his toes, placed the trophy beside his other treasured keepsakes.
Whenever I carve a pumpkin, I think of one of my favorite children’s sermons. The priest takes the pumpkin and carves it with the kids, talking about how God’s grace cleans – forgives – our sins. When we accept this grace, the light of Christ shines in and through us.
It’s a simplistic metaphor. I know that. But sometimes it’s the simple things that tenderize our hearts and transform our lives.
Hollow me out, O Lord.
The Hope Conference (Healing Our Planet Earth (HOPE): Singing a New Song of Hope) was held in Seattle in 2008. Featuring keynote speakers Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and Bishop Stephen Charleston this event put the Episcopal Church on record as a “green” denomination.
At the conference my Bishop, Greg Rickel of Olympia, worked out a deal with the city of Seattle to launch a pilot environmental program to retrofit several churches for electrical efficiency to reduce their carbon footprint. My parish, St. Andrew’s, was one of them.
Let there be light.
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