I may not have finished my sermon (which is my customary Thursday task), but I made my first mozzarella and some very tasty multigrain bread! Bon Apetit!
Man it’s only Thursday and I am getting fired up for Pentecost…. I think, in fact, that Pentecost is one of my favorite celebrations of the church. And this year, it has been made all the more meaningful through the conversations that I have had the privilege of being a part of.
One conversation that sticks out for me most strongly is really a conversation that I have had with many folks that I care about, and for whatever reason they have clustered this week. And that conversation has to do with community and belonging. As I was reminded this week, the consequence of blogging about one’s loneliness is that suddenly one is likely to receive a lot of phone calls, emails, and personal check ins from people that care making sure that a person is alright. Some of those check ins have become important conversations about the experience of true belonging to a place or a people. Moreover, many conversations have also dealt with the importance of invitation to a person’s sense of belonging.
And as someone who spends her days as a pastor, all this talk about belonging and invitation, of course, got me thinking about the church. Because ultimately, what is the gospel other than an invitation to community? What does Christ do, if he does not welcome outsiders into the family? Consider Pentecost. The way I read it this week, the Holy Spirit’s appearance on the scene is primarily a radical invitation to all people. Scripture says in Acts 2 that every person who was in the room, no matter what their native tongue, heard and understood the words of the disciples as they spoke through the power of the Spirit. Every person was acknowledged by the Spirit’s presence; no one was left out. How often does that happen in our daily lives? More often than not, our common experience is one of being left out rather than brought in, and yet the Spirit makes a space in which the exact opposite is what is possible. That invitation, the offering of the gospel to all people regardless of their language, shifts the conversation from one where the focus is inward to one where the focus is outward. All those people have heard the invitation: how will they respond?
Ultimately, what I take away is the following: we cannot control how people will respond to our message, what they will decide to do with it. That is between them and God. But if Pentecost teaches us anything, it is that we are called as the church to offer the invitation that is the Gospel to everyone who has ears to hear, no matter what divides or separates us, to give them the chance to accept or reject the invitation. This work will take us out of our comfort zone, but the HOly Spirit will be with us. We will not be alone. And what’s more, what we offer is so important, because it essentially amounts to us saying, “You don’t have to be alone. We can be a community, together. We can work out our differences. Our language may be different, but the gospel is the same. The good news is for all of us.”
Not a bad antidote to a lonely few days.
Posted in Church Stuff, meandering thoughts | Tagged community, gospel, invitation, Loneliness, Pentecost | Leave a Comment »
Difficult, difficult, difficult. It has always been so difficult for me to acknowledge and embrace the part of myself that can suddenly be overcome by loneliness, whether I am alone or not. The person who, in the midst of a room full of people, many of whom she knows, will become increasingly aware in the midst of that room that she feels invisible, unnoticed, passed over.
Perhaps it has to do with who I am and how I see myself. I am the eldest, and I have always wanted to be liked, to make my parents and those I admired proud of me. I have always wanted to be someone that other people knew and that folks liked to be around, and I think it would be fair to say that I have coveted the approval of others throughout my life. But I also know that I like to forget the part of me that was so lonely as a child–I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I often was picked on in school (I was a bit of a nerd, and before that, I liked “little kid” games like make-believe well into middle school, and before that, well, I was sort of a tomboy). The friends I had were closely held, and often not very many at any given time. As I got older, I had more “friends,” but almost all of them were not the sort I shared your life with–more the kind that I ate my lunch and took my classes next to. We were more like friends by geography than choice.
I wonder if that hasn’t persisted to some extent into my adulthood. Sure, my sister commented in college that I seemed to know everyone, but I rarely felt as though anyone knew me. MOre often, I felt like folks knew my name, and knew what I did, but didn’t really share my life. Same with seminary–I was a decent schmoozer, but I left seminary really with one good friend, and I didn’t meet her in school at all.
All of this is prelude to the fact that I am struggling these days with the profound gulf that I will sometimes find myself trapped in. I know I can’t be alone in this, but I can’t help but feel alone in the midst of it. My job is one where being extroverted and knowing everyone is good, but one drawback is often that you know a little bit of everyone, and they know less of you. And given my education I sometimes find myself struggling to analyze my experience, but I am not sure that is the best antidote either… is it really going to help me, for example, to try to try to diagnose my loneliness, or is that just another way to avoid acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, this is a part of who I am? Maybe I would be better off just sitting in it and feeling it, rather than hiding it away.
I do have to say though, I find it amusing that today I was feeling lonely in, of all places, a church in which the mission statement could probably decently be described as welcoming all people in so that loneliness diminishes and community increases. And here I am feeling like the odd man out. I have my reasons, I suppose, but I did find it to be unexpected territory.
If someone brought this problem to me, I suppose I might be tempted to wonder, “Where is God working in this,” or “what lesson might we learn,” or maybe something more clever that connects the spiritual to the emotional. And I do believe they are connected somehow–I almost never worship myself, these days, and I find it interesting that I feel so lonely when I do. But I gotta be honest, I don’t feel like answering the questions right now. If I could be blunt, I just want to feel less like the island I experienced today. I want to be a part of things, and for others to want me to be a part of their lives, rather than just a number or a person who can give them something.
Posted in life and love, meandering thoughts | Tagged community, God, lonely | 1 Comment »
A Sermon for Mother’s Day:
Title: True Parenting
Scripture: Acts 16:9-15, John 14:23-29
Posted in Church Stuff | Leave a Comment »
…is that they often become a chore. At least, that is how I felt about running on this past Sunday, as I forced myself to get myself over the 20-mile marker for the week… I felt like crud, and running was the last thing I wanted to do, but I also didn’t want to fail my first week of my new goal, and, well, I had been the one who had left a few miles until the last day. So I forced those miles in, and what do you know, it felt good to make it 10% closer to my goal!
Given my struggle to hit 20 miles at week 1, I wondered if this whole project might turn out to be more difficult than I thought… imagine my surprise, then, that this week has borne little resemblance to last week at all! My runs have not been easy all the time, but they have been much more manageable, and what’s more, I had a record speed day last night, clocking 6 miles at something like a 7:10 pace per mile. As of this afternoon, I am over 15 miles, which means that I basically need to run tomorrow and then I get the weekend off. It is a good reminder that every day and every run is different, and a new opportunity to progress.
In other news, the garden is coming along. I have had more than a couple losses, mostly cucumbers, which has taught me a valuable lesson about my plants: something things aren’t meant to be started inside! Tomatoes are looking great, though, and the strawberries and radishes are getting close. The Kale is going nuts, and the chard looks as though it may be recovering from whatever was eating at it (literally) a few weeks back. Only time will tell.
Okay, off to clean up and then meet the hubby for a dinner date!
Posted in Food, life and love, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Things are beginning to slow down a bit on the work front (at least, in terms of programs) and so I have had some time to read again, as well as to think over my own activities and engagements. I had been trying to run more recently, but I had been having trouble with consistency. And so I came up with a goal to impose consistency on myself: 20 miles a week. It isn’t much, under 3 miles a day, in fact, but the real kicker is that I have to run at least 4 times a week if I am going to make it (mostly because I am not a big fan of long runs). Further more, to give the goal some weight, I have decided that I will reward myself if I can make it to 200 miles on this goal: that’s 10 weeks, to be precise. If I can make it 10 weeks on this goal, I get to buy my own homebrewer’s kit, and start experimenting with beer-making. I have wanted to do this for a while, and so I see my coupling of the two as one more way to reinforce my desire for consistent exercise.
I am doing well for this week (up to 13.1 miles as of Wednesday night) so hopefully I will be brewing beer come July 9th.
Wish me luck!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged beer, consistency, goals, running | 2 Comments »
Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the heights!
Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his host!
Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars!
Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens!
Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created.
He established them forever and ever; he fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed.
Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps,
fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command!
Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!
Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!
Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth!
Young men and women alike, old and young together!
Let them praise the name of the Lord, for his name alone is exalted;
his glory is above earth and heaven.
He has raised up a horn for his people, praise for all his faithful,
for the people of Israel who are close to him.
Praise the Lord!
-Psalm 148
I have been fascinated this week by the words of praise offered by the Psalmist above… drawn almost viscerally to the images of everything from sea monsters and topography, weather and celestial bodies singing praises to God.
It got me thinking about praise, ultimately, and its role in Sunday worship. I know, at least for myself, that the first image that comes to mind when I hear the word praise is praise bands, conglomerations of too-happy pregnant women with one hand in the air as they sing and pimply teenagers rocking out to cheesy love songs for God, all in the name of contemporary and “lively” worship.
But praise has such a richer texture than my, and not doubt many others, gut reaction to the word. The word praise actually comes from the Old French preisier, which means “to value” or to set a price to something. Which I find interesting, since the word worship, from the anglo saxon wurdscip,traditionally indicated reverence given to something that is worthy, or worth its value. Taken together, then, the words praise and worship seem inseparable: Worship consists of praise, and praise is the essence of worship, which offers us a strong clue as to what we ought to be engaged in on Sundays. We ought to be praising God.
Of course, that sounds deceptively simple. Many of the things we do on Sunday seem obviously praise-y, while others are more difficult to connect to the concept. Add to that that each person finds meaning in different aspects of worship, and we arrive at a place where people are asking one another: if it is all meant to lead to praise, then why do we do the boring stuff, or the stuff that I don’t like?
Well here is where I like the Psalm above. The psalm doesn’t tell us what each part of creation does to offer praise, but it does offer a vision that I think is worth emulating in our worship: the value of both unity and diversity offered in the praise of God. Certainly mountains and sea monsters could not offer praise in the same way, and I imagine that the heavenly host’s means of praise is completely different from that of the snow and the frost. Nonetheless, when each offers their true voice to the project of praise, the harmony is strengthened. In a similar way, our worship offers innumerable ways for each worshipper to find a voice to praise God with. Whether that person needs to praise God for the act of gathering, or for the grace that comes with sin forgiven, or needs to be reminded by hearing the word, or simply wishes to belt out a hymn by literally singing, each aspect of worship is a path towards praise. They may not all work for every person every week, but the opportunity is there, waiting, every time we gather. And what is more, when we gather together we are reminded in song, in spoken word and in prayer that we do not praise God alone, but are joined by our neighbors and the heavenly choir which sing praise eternal. We can even find comfort in knowing that even the sea monsters sing with us.
Pretty awesome if you ask me.
Posted in Church Stuff, meandering thoughts, Uncategorized | Tagged community, praise, psalm 148, worship | Leave a Comment »
Gawrsh it’s been a while…I got myself lost in the Lent-Easter vortex and am only now starting to pull myself out… didn’t help that I also became not a little bit attached to watching television on the web–I am officially caught up on more shows than I care to admit.
But seriously, it has been a pretty busy last few months! I turned around on tax day and realized that A and I have been married now for 8 months, which just goes to show how time can fly when you keep yourself busy. Before we know it, we will be edging up on a year….whew!
In other news, spring is in the air, and like many other amateur gardeners I have gotten a bit antsy to play in the dirt. Up in Belvidere, the farmers started tilling the corn fields about two or three weeks ago, and that for me was a sure sign it was time to begin playing… add to that that nights are almost 10 degrees warmer on average in Philly, and I have been cultivating my own little strip of earth with joy. As it currently stands, I have my row crops (carrots, beets, parsnips, radishes, kale, chard, salad greens) in the dirt, as well as some snow peas and cucumbers. I was a bit nervous about the cukes but I have plenty of backup if something goes wrong. I also splurged on some tasty looking strawberry plants, and they are going wild in the back yard in Philly.
Additionally, I have been starting to have fun with my sourdough starter–yes, I became one of those people with a weird jar of goop in my fridge. A and I are really enjoying the bread we are getting, even though I still feel like a beginner at this. I still have some slow downs and hold ups (like this Sunday when my sponge didn’t want to rise in time for a children’s sermon based on it!) but there are lots of classic church ladies in Belvidere to tell me what I am doing wrong and help me correct it when I do… ah i love those ladies 
A and I are also considering a foray into cheesemaking and beermaking, so we shall see what the future holds. I joked with him that my goal is to turn us into alternative “live off the land types,” but really I just want to be able to make the things I like best–aka, cheese, bread, beer, jams and pickled and canned veggies–on my own because it feels awesome to do so. I really like the idea of putting up food for the winter, or caring for my own starter, or even–although A swears he will allow it–raising my own hens. Something empowering about knowing how to manipulate seeds and food products.
So that is more or less what is going on with me right now. I am biding my time with my ground cherry and tomato plants, but the warmer days are on the horizon, and before long I will probably be complaining publicly about all the pests bugging my crops but until then, I am at least comforted by the notion that there are tasty things growing outside, and that I might get to eat some of em.
Posted in life and love, meandering thoughts, Uncategorized | Tagged bread, church, Food, Gardening | 1 Comment »
I was posting sermons for family back home and then–*BAM!*–our apartment got broken into and our video recorder was stolen.
Thanks in no small part to the generosity of my grandparents who visited last week, we are now in possession of a new flip video, which means that Alex has been taping sermons again (or , as a parishioner noted last Sunday, “he’s texting during your sermons again!”)
So without further ado, especially for a dad who has been asking, here is my sermon from 4/18, entitled, “Gone Fishing”, based on John 21 and Acts 9:1-20:
And, also, if you are interested, last Sunday’s (4/25) sermon, entitled “A Good Shepherd,” based on John 10:
Posted in Church Stuff, Uncategorized | Tagged Easter, Sermons, United Presbyterian Church in Belvidere | Leave a Comment »
I often tell people that my work situation is ideal, that it is absolutely fantastic to be able to enjoy the benefits both of the city of Philly as well as the comforts and quiet of Belvidere. Folks readily assent to the perceived benefit of being to be able to have time in and away from both, of having a physical boundary that separates me from a half-time ministry job, making it impossible for me to overwork myself for not enough compensation.
But the honest truth is that this is only half the story. The truth is that I like being kept busy, I like doing things, and that the separation can at times feel like isolation. When I began my work, I was also taking a unit of CPE, which kept me as busy in Philly as Belvidere. And while I often joked that I “couldn’t wait to be free of CPE,” it is only a week out and I am feeling trapped in the city. Trapped by the reality that I don’t have a whole lot of friends in the Philadelphia-area, or even in Belvidere for that matter. Trapped by the reality that I don’t have much to do while my husband is at work. Trapped by the reality that I feel as though this life has in some ways been imposed upon me rather than chosen, as though I am missing out on something important: proximity to my family, close relationships with distant friends, you name it.
And while I don’t relish the pity party, it can be difficult to extricate myself once I find myself there. I find myself getting angry at my husband, jealous that in his work he is surrounded by his friends, that he feels no urgency to leave and come back to me in the way that I urgently desire him to come home–because, unlike him, he is perhaps my only close friend in this city. And to admit that makes me want to weep, because I feel guilty, as though perhaps it is my fault I don’t have more friends, as though I shouldn’t feel this way.
Ultimately, I remain confident that things will sort themselves out; they always do. But it is difficult to fine myself in the interim, to find myself unable to see the shape that the other side of this feeling might take. All I can really do is trust that God is working all things to the good, even this, and that ultimately, something new and beautiful can be wrought even in the most angsty and deepest feelings of isolation.
Posted in life and love, meandering thoughts | 1 Comment »
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