Beloved:

     I was awake at 4:30 this morning, thinking about Jesus as a pre-school teacher.  A sleepy toddler on his hip, Jesus wades through the rest of them, giving out snack, re-directing one kid, smoothing another’s hair, all the while keeping up a serious conversation on the differences between a stegosaurus and spinosaurus.*
     My default image is President of the Universe Jesus, busy with peace and justice, truth and reconciliation.  He directs his cabinet, disciplines as he deems necessary, holds back one disaster while releasing another. 
      The joke is on me of course, for imagining the two are somehow different; that working with presidents is more complicated that working with pre-schoolers, that their problems are more serious, that in the eyes of the Divine a president and a pre-schooler are even distinguishable? Put the presidents in the preschool classroom, in little suits and ties of course, and what does Jesus do?  Tends the children according to each one’s needs; food, comfort, conversation . . . . . . 
     Of course I have no idea what Jesus does all day. What I know for sure is in the wee hours, when my heart is so sad for another family’s great grief, this picture of Jesus with the toddler on his hip and juice boxes in his hand is an exquisite gift.  

peace & prayers, ~ pastor annette 

*Spinosaurus are armoured, with plates and horns.  Stegasaurus are not.  In case you didn’t know.
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 Beloved: 

 Sunday morning around 4 am,  the red oak tree fell.  “It was like a cannon going off,” said my neighbor who heard it.  “We heard crashing and shattering. It scared us to death,” said my daughter and her friend. 
    I didn’t know until morning when I looked out the kitchen windows.  A squirrel nest once 30 feet high is now six feet off the ground.  She didn’t touch the house or any cars.  My rose arbor is gone, along with one boxwood and at least half of one redbud.  She didn’t uproot and left neither a hole nor a stump. 
    I felt like I might cry, not for the damage but for the end.  Not bitter tears, but rather the kind we cry for ones who have lived long, suffered bravely and given much.  Tears of grief and joy and gratitude for the privilege of living in their shadow.  
    As her roots slowly pushed deep and her body grew tall, the world changed rapidly around her. She was born in the forest and died in the suburbs. She was already old when the men and machines came.  A woman came too and she decided which trees would remain.  She wanted to keep them all , even dug up some of the baby redbuds and moved them to the forest edge.  The red oak stayed and watched and was loved by the lady.  She put her flower garden half in half out of the oak's shade and planted accordingly.  
    A family came with kids and dogs and sleds much noise. And for six more years she shaded them with  grace and dignity.  When the wind blew, she sang and danced for them for free. She might have stayed another season or two, but for an ice storm.  The ice encased every branch and limb.  Her arms were so heavy and so she simply let go of the earth.  When she landed the ice exploded and she was free.  I like imagining her regret at waking the neighbors.  

peace & prayers, pastor annette 


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 Beloved:

    Never does the wind blow hard that I don’t expect the giant red oak tree to finish falling.  It leans like an old man’s umbrella caught in a gale.  It’s rotting from the inside out, turning to sawdust at the ground.  
    “Them there’s yer termites, mam,” the tree man told me.  He looked up a long time, taking measure of the branch span.  He walked of the distance, thought some more and said, “Good news is, she’ll miss the house.  But you can say good-bye to any vehicles in yer driveway.  Them redbuds ‘ll be history too. And that there woodshed.”
     “What should I do?” I asked.
     “My uncle has the equipment.  We can take ‘er down for ya now or cut it up when she falls.  Cuttin’ it up’s the cheaper way to go, ‘cept for the cars of course.” 
     “How long until she falls?”
     “Awww, now, mam, don’t nobody know that.  She could come down with the next big wind or just keep leanin’ a little more every year ‘til the top weight pulls ‘er roots out of the ground. No telling how long that might take.”
     That conversation was three years ago.  I still haven’t decided.  She’s beautiful, enormous and old.  She gives a meadow’s worth of shade and squirrels nest in her arms.  Only when the wind blows hard does the decision seem urgent and then only to me.  
    Left alone, she would have fallen in the forest and been home to beetles and bugs for another twenty years and eventually, the soil into and from which her great-grandchilden take root and rise.  
     As the forest is far wiser than me I’ve decided to let it decide. She’s been grace for bird, beast and me.  Mine is to be thankful.

peace & prayers, pastor annette
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Beloved:

Is there anything less interesting on which to spend a chunk of money than a vacuum cleaner?  To fix my old one will cost almost as much as a new one, a dilemma I detest.   But tumbleweeds of dog hair are rolling through my house so to the vacuum dealer I must go.  

In her little book,  The Quotidian Mysteries ~ Laundry, Liturgy & Women’s Work, Kathleen Norris compares domestic chores to liturgy, drawing meaning from the repetition.  The seeming endlessness of cleaning, cooking, shopping are chores things I usually regard as things to ‘get out of the way.’  Out of the way of what? Other, better uses of my time I suppose.  Definitely, watching my daughter cheer and my son swim are more important than doing dishes.  Yet, the time (and money!) spent is time well spent, if I am present and grateful.  There is so much to be grateful for, including a house to clean and the strength to clean it.   

Lord,

may all the stay-at-home parents and students
the plumbers, teachers, doctors
drivers, lawyers, librarians and cashiers
farmers, social workers, musicians and painters
the writers,  the jewelers, the carpenters and secretaries
put hand and heart and mind to this day’s tasks with a grateful spirit.   
In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen

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January 3, 2011 01/04/2012
 
 Beloved,
A woman married 63 years took to sleeping in a twin size bed after her husband died.  “Trying to fall asleep alone, it’s like half of me is gone. The old bed was too big and too lonely.”  I think of her as my own husband packs for 3 weeks in Asia.  I’ll miss him bringing me morning coffee and calling me through the day, but mostly at night, alone instead of folded against him beneath the quilt.  

Every book I pick up lately concerns human aloneness.  In The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau  writes of the inescapable fact that we are all strangers in this world. InCadences of Home Walter Brueggeman reframes our aloneness, as individuals and the the church, as divinely designed and intended - God given for God’s purposes.  

So God wants us to feel lonely?  Maybe. Brueggeman argues that God wants us to know where we truly belong, where our true home is and that what we call loneliness, or aloneness, is simply a homesick soul. The task is learning to live faithfully and usefully in the meantime.  Instead of resisting or avoiding the loneliness, we can lean into it and discover its peculiar lessons and joys.   We can also, always, be grateful too; for what community we do enjoy here and now. Family, friends, church, art, beauty, prayer; the glimpses and glimmers of our true home beyond the veil of the here and now.  

I pray this freezy day finds you warm in all things soulful.  ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
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Beloved:

I pray your holiday week continues to be full of happy memory making.   Carl and Emily are on the road visiting cousins and friends in the Mississippi Delta while Ben and I are home; at least I’m home when I’m not driving him back and forth from 2-a-day swim practices and feeding him in between.  In the in between I’m reading, sewing and generally doodling around.


I finished Stephen King’s newest; 11/22/63.  It’s not creepy or gory and the story is interesting.  But I read him for the writing and learn from him every time.  Love In the Time of Cholera has been on my list forever and it did not disappoint, a perfectly heartbreaking love story.  I didn’t expect it to be so funny and I learned new things about South America. Now I’m reading C.S. Lewis’ memoir, Suprised by Joy, which is, no surprise, wonderful and myth correcting; namely that he was altogether an atheist before becoming a Christian.   

Donetta once said told me it’s good for teachers to be beginners at something now and then.  Toward that end, I’m learning to serge (sewing).  Mostly I fumble, make mistakes, re-read the directions, back up the video and rejoice over a four inch seam.  

As for doodling, I scored a very large sweater at Goodwill for $4 which I brought home and spent 2 hours taking apart and unknitting so I can have the yarn - about 1500 yards ($80-90 new) of the softest, blue gray wool ever.  

There is always work to do and problems to solve but peace and quiet is never wasted time.  I pray that we all enter a new year strengthened and grateful for the gifts of the season.   

peace & prayers, pastor annette
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  December 13, 2011
    If ever there was a picture to explain why Jesus came, it was on the front page of the  New York Times last Wednesday.  A photographer caught the immediate aftermath of a suicide bomb detonated in a parade of worshippers, mostly women and children.  A child stands where he stood moments earlier, in a circle of death and agony; mamas, children, babies.  She wears a brilliant green silk tunic and she is utterly bereft.
    It is a horrible picture, disturbing, inappropriate for conversation among decent people celebrating a happy holiday.  Yet, it falls to the center of our faith. In it our religious language gains traction in our everyday lives.  The deepest mystery of the incarnation being that Jesus came not only to comfort the bereft but to rescue the most broken among us, the perpetrator.  Most likely, he was a hired hand paid well and promised eternal bliss while his client lives on to kill another day, and another, and another.  And for him and his kind, Jesus came.  He came that instead of damnation, they should discover themselves divinely loved and turn from their wicked ways.
    In light of its deepest mystery, the incarnation is shocking, disturbing, begging the question, “Why God?  Why forgiveness for evil so intentional?”  Our theology cannot keep up with our questions. Its language is inadequate to the horror in our gut when we see such a picture. Regardless, the answer stands, “For love, for love so strange it overwhelms God’s desire to punish.”  
    In his memoir, The Pastor, Eugene Peterson labels the church, a colony of heaven in the land of death.  Rather like the girl in the green tunic?  We stand in this world, terrified, shocked, sick, angry. But we are not bereft, nor frozen in a snapshot moment.  With the strength God gave us, we get busy binding the broken, burying the dead, comforting the grieving, confronting the evil and praying for peace to come quickly to the hearts and minds of those so far from the knowledge of God’s love for them.
    May we be overwhelmed by the joyful mystery of the incarnation of our Lord this season, each and every one!  peace & prayers, pastor annette
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Not My Favorite 11/29/2011
 
November 29, 2011

“Not my favorite,” my 3-year-old nephew says when served food he doesn’t like or want.  “Not my favorite,” I thought about the weather this morning, driving my son to 5:45 am swim practice.  Cold, rainy, with slushy snow this afternoon according to wunderground.com. Yuck!  I’ll be damp all day and Global Women attendance will be low or nil and I have to go out twice tonight to drive kids.

     If I think hard (not too hard) I can probably come up with even more about which to complain.  Complaining  is a spiritual malady, of course, grounded in certain assumptions; the main two being that I am entitled to my favorites every day; my favorite weather, my favorite meal, my favorite schedule, and that my needs/wants should always trump the needs/wants of others. 

     So the struggle between Christ and culture lives on ~ in me and in the life of the church too.[1]  Which shall interpret the other?  Which shall rule our  thoughts, hearts and attitudes?  Complaining, if only in thought, amounts to the rejection of grace.  When I complain I push away the plate full of time, space, opportunity, connection and joy this day might otherwise contain.  “Not my favorite,” I say to God, imagining God doesn’t hear, doesn’t mind, isn’t disappointed at the sight of me tuning out and turning away to wait for a better time to be blessed.

     Jesus is everywhere.  Holiness abounds.  They are not bound by the weather or my attitude.  And who knows: maybe in less bright light Jesus becomes all the more visible.  Whatever the weather, may we be found looking, expecting and full of joy!  Peace & Prayers, pastor annette

[1] Reinhold Niebuhr, Christ  & Culture, 1956

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November 15, 2011

Beloved:

     “He has totally changed my life,” a young mom told me about her eighteen-month-old son.  She works seven days most weeks, at four pieced-together jobs, to support the two of them.  She showed me a picture; he’s all blue eyes and wispy blonde hair, like a fairy or an angel.  How much she loves him shows in her talk but far more by her walk, by the many hours a week she leaves him in order to love him so well. 

   It’s a short stretch to see in her the same love that drives the Divine on behalf of humanity.  Persistence, constancy, commitment, sacrifice, selflessness, a certain ferocity of love by which mountains are moved and what’s lost is redeemed. 

     The little one is unaware of all that of course.  He knows simple realities like cheerios taste good, my toys are in my room and my mom is here.  Her love is evident in the roof over them, the food before them and her abiding presence beside him. It is proved in the great joy she takes as his provider.

     I am humbled by her devotion and service to what she loves most; by her willingness to do whatever is required for him to be safe and to thrive; and by the intimate connection between her everyday life and the purpose of her life.

     She has no idea, I expect, of the gift she gave me in our five minute conversation. I came away with renewed amazement at God’s love and the privilege it is to live out the purpose of one’s life in the everydayness of family, work, home and community.  I’m grateful.

Peace & prayers, ~ pastor annette

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Beloved:

     Hearts are full all over town for two young men; so very young.  Adam and James, they might have been in first grade together not that long ago.  One admittedly shot and killed the other, for no particular reason according to police. 
     Hearts full of sorrow for the one now gone.  He had a fiancee’, three babies, a mom, dad, sister, brother, two jobs and a life plan.  He loved and was well loved.

     Hearts full of what for the other; anger . . . disgust . . . . pity?  He lives on but seems to me more lost than the one who worked so hard and loved so well. Who loves him and where are they now?  Is his own mother’s heart is breaking?   How does a human living right here among us become such a stranger to kindness, goodness, affection?  By what string of events does a person so young become so beaten, so hopeless and so careless toward life around him, including his own?

     The gospel floods through stories like this, to remind me of everything I profess to believe and to rest my life.  God’s heart breaks for him, even if his own parents’ don’t.  Left to smolder, sin destroys everything in its path; the sinner and anyone who crosses the path.   God loves us more than God hates sin and for the most broken and lost among us, Jesus came.  In God’s eyes and heart, this broken, broken boy is as worthy of redemption as all the rest.  I pray someone, somewhere loves him.  But I take courage in knowing for sure that he is loved and might someday come to know it.

~peace & prayers, pastor annette

* http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/stories/2011/11/07/news.qp-4949057.sto  
* http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/stories/2011/11/08/news.qp-7530058.sto

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