Call me enchanted, but I have seen nature’s labor up close, and she does the far greater share, turning the planet around and to the light so it falls just right on my little garden. I did not do that. Blowing rain clouds past my place to shower my flowering vines for free. Bees, hummingbirds and butterflies sent to pollinate them in their season. None of that was me either. My part has been negligible since I poked the seeds into the ground. Which isn’t to say farmers don’t work hard, only that all our labors are in consequence to the miracles of nature. Great or small, the miracle is worth remembering when we sit down at our laden tables. 
0 Comments
Beloved: Jesus’ trio of stories about lost things has been on my mind since last Thursday when I discovered the stone has fallen out of my wedding ring. I’ve crawled on the floor with a flashlight at home and at church. I’ve shaken out my sheet, swept my kitchen and sifted dirt from dog hair to no avail. Hoping against hope, I even called our insurance agent only to discover lost jewelry isn’t covered. I walk with my head down, stooping for every glint or glitter of light. So far I’ve found staples, Sunday School glitter, foil, a straight pin, gravel galore and oodles of onion skin bits. Who knew onion skin was so glinty! It could be in the chicken coop or the garden. It could be in a trash bag at the landfill. The only place it cannot possibly be is nowhere. To his ever-loving patience and my joy, my husband has been nothing but comfort. “Ah well,” he said when I told him, “we’ll just have to get another someday.” More seriously he said over and over, “It’s just a thing.” And while I still mostly walk along looking for glitter on the ground, I absolutely believe him. Life is too short and the world is too beautiful to spend a moment grieving over what can be replaced instead of enjoying what is ours right now. I pray this gorgeous day is full of light and love as you move through it. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette P.S. These pictures are of a rogue cucumber vine growing from a pot on my porch. Can you see how the end of it looks like a giant praying mantis?
Once upon a time I’d not have considered picking up a snake, and am still not likely to handle a very big one. But the design and the mechanics of their bodies is truly fascinating. They can move sideways up a bucket wall then stop and stay still for long minutes at a go. It must take enormous energy to stay up there, because the baby tumbled down and rested awhile before starting up again, getting a little higher with each successive climb.
ALSO - Please remember the wedding shower for Heidi & Chris at Wednesday Night Supper tomorrow, August 28, 6:00 PM. Since they already have everything a house requires, we are giving them what every family needs – CASH. Bring a few greenbacks to pin to the money tree and enjoy a wonderful summer meal and some cake!
August 20, 2019
Beloved: Just when it seems that writer’s block has gotten the best of me, along comes a congregant to save the day. Thanks, Donetta, for the delightful article about life together around the church supper table. You can check it out here. We break bread together plenty and yet never too often. Making these meals happen is one of the ways we feed each other, body and soul, and how we draw new friends more deeply into our life together. When I am a very old woman and I’ve forgotten every Bible verse I ever knew and every sermon I ever preached, I pray I remember feeding generations of babies, kids, and teenagers in this church basement. I pray I remember the bushels of corn we’ve husked and pies we’ve made together in this tiny kitchen. I pray to remember the cooking disasters that made us laugh and the triumphs that made us sigh with pleasure. I pray to remember the mouse invasion of 2018 that nearly unhinged Heidi and me but has left us laughing hysterically about it since. I pray to remember the hundreds and hundreds of Chinese dumplings we’ve rolled and pinched and boiled together on countless Global Women Tuesday afternoons. Surely I’ve consumed at least a million church food calories and I don’t regret a single one of them. That said, the time for making memories around the table isn’t close to over. We’ve another Wednesday Night Supper next week, August 28th, and this time we’re adding on a wedding shower for Heidi and Chris. No ordinary presents requested, just some cash to pin to the money tree. We’ll have a wedding cake and good wishes to share along with a summer meal. Jodi has a list of folks willing to feed a student or two after church on September Sundays. E-mail her or text her to add your name there. The blessings will be at the table, no matter where the table is. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette Article: https://babylonbee.com/news/crock-pot-introduces-new-430-gallon-model-baptist August 13, 2019 Beloved: My goodness but didn’t it storm last night! The hens are extra grumpy this morning, no doubt for loss of sleep, but the hydrangeas appear much refreshed. Coming round the bend of late summer such soaky good rain is a treat for these plants who have taken care of business so faithfully for months. Other joys this time of year: neighborhood school kids at the bus stop in their new shoes and backpacks, international students loading their bags into Uber out front of Target, and nights almost cool enough to sleep with the windows open. Best of all – y’all are back from your summer travels, so Sunday morning attendance has picked up again. Along with the busyness of town we’ve oodles going on at church these days too. Check it out. Today ~ Pridefest Volunteer Training this evening. If you signed up you have email with details about this. This weekend, August 17-18
It really is the most wonderful time of the year to be called University Baptist Church. Join me in making it mean something very special to the guests who are arriving daily as we pray for them, receive them gracefully and offer them a place in our life together. The joy will be all ours.
 a fabric delivery man at work in Seoul, South Korea August 2017 If only all of life fell within the borders of our druthers. If only gardening did our taxes and reading fiction took out the trash. I’d love to knit my kitchen clean and quilt my inbox empty. What if drinking coffee on my back porch mowed the grass and cleaned the chicken coop? My home would be a castle and I would be its queen. A reorganization of household responsibilities has bequeathed me two new projects. The first requires long stretches of time spent in tedious quiet and focus. The second includes shopping. Care to guess which is moving along more sweetly?
Work is the word I’m after: the work we do for money and the work we do because we’re human. We work to earn and work to live. We work to care for neighbors who can’t, as well as those who won’t. Human decency demands it and every religion teaches it: work as privilege and requirement, to be done cheerfully and regarded gratefully. Whatever work today brings, I wish you joy and patience in it. Beloved: Years ago, a friend and I were talking about our parents’ aversion to buying anything new and she said, my dad has used at least $200 worth of duct tape to hold together a $25 part on his lawn mower. It still makes me laugh and at the same time hope some measure of his thrift might persist in this single-use economy of ours.
Given the Holy Spirit’s presence and activity, of course church can evolve inside our own lifetimes. We only need to be willing to change with it. And if just one way of being church should die in our own life time, let it be our need to have the moral high ground all the time. Think of all the time and energy that would be freed up -- time to seek the holy mystery, as Father Richard says. Along with energy to befriend ourselves and one another, to plant a garden and breathe in the Spirit busy in the soil. Best of all, time to do nothing and know not a drop of time is wasted, letting ourselves be loved by the Lover of the universe.
I pray this magnificent, beautiful, not so very hot day finds you joyful in to whatever you put heart and head and hands. I love you. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
Larger pests roam outside the garden fence, gnawing what they can reach with their snouts. I have decided to buy something the mowing man called deer sticks, two foot tall spikes stuck in the ground. On top is a plastic box that emits a sweet corn smell. When the deer’s nose gets close she gets a little zap, just enough to make that area unattractive thereafter. My idea is to protect my berries and beans and compromise by letting them free-range in my front flower beds.
Absolutely nothing slows down the summer more than gardening. How many days since I dropped those bean seeds in? Are they on track to blossom as the package promised? The answer is yes, but it seems like growth should happen faster. I am wise to the absurdity of having an opinion on how seeds ought to work. That it happens at all is the miracle. Light, water, dirt . . . magic – the seed becomes the food and flowers! One tiny cucumber seed can make a thousand more at least – abundance in my backyard for the price of a pack of seeds! Nothing grounds me more than digging, weeding, staking, pruning . . . even trying to outsmart the freeloading animals. Nowhere else do I stay so in the moment. I don’t miss my phone or fret about that list of undone duties. It is a hobby with the benefits of spiritual practice: contemplation before an open window onto God doing God’s business. I pray this beautiful day offers you some view to God doing what God does among us here and now. We’ve so much for which to be grateful. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
I survey the damage and think unkind thoughts toward certain of God’s creatures, then turn to this morning’s reading from Father Gregory Boyle, known as “G” to those he serves: We are our healthiest when we are most situated in awe, and our least healthy when we engage in judgment. Judgment creates the distance that moves us away from each other. Judgment keeps us in the competitive game and is always self-aggrandizing. Standing at the margins with the broken reminds us not of our own superiority but of our own brokenness. . . . The embrace of our own suffering helps us to land on a spiritual intimacy with ourselves and others. For if we don’t welcome our wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded. A raccoon can shimmy headfirst down a twenty-foot deck post in utter darkness. With his back legs he dangles from a wire to drink sugar water from a feeder clutched like a beer bottle in his tiny fists. The gymnastics needed to remove the feeder from the wire to smash it on the deck floor are equally impressive. While all that raccoon awesomeness doesn’t make me like them any better, it does prompt a wisp of self-awareness. I’ve chosen a house in the woods and a style of hospitality that might qualify as xenophobic. After all, I only welcome those whose ways contribute to the particular house in the woods vibe I’m after. So, hummingbirds and lightning bugs are welcome. So are frogs, turtles and turkeys. Deer can come so long as they only eat in the woods or stand stately on my lawn. Snakes are not invited but will not be turned away, as snakes are never noisy, messy, or destructive. Besides, snakes lend a certain edginess to the vibe. Raccoons and chipmunks are entirely unwelcome for reasons heretofore described. Chipmunks are simply raccoons in miniature. Foxes and hawks attack my chickens, so they aren’t received, nor skunks and most opossums, though a mother opossum with a backpack full of babies once crossed my yard and I smiled at the awesome engineering. Mosquitos, deer ticks, stink bugs, tomato hornworms, and a host of other insects too numerous to name fill my list of undesirables. They just don’t work for me. While he might not preclude the exercise, Father G did not have my relationship to woodland creatures in mind in writing his devotion. He’s inviting me to hear Jesus’ call to love and be loved among my human neighbors, especially those we think need what we already have: the poor, the refugee, the mentally ill. He invites me to lay down the false security of walls that protect nothing really, nothing but the pretense of our own superiority. We are just as broken. We are just as wounded. And we have a world to gain by mustering the awe necessary to cross the oh-so-shallow riverbed that separates brothers and sisters too long kept apart by fear. Please do pray for those who suffer right now from the abuse of separation, each of us doing what we can to love the ones whose paths we cross. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette * raccoon photo credit: Patrick Elting, Fort Worth, Texas nationalgeographic.com *For those of you asking for the partial list of companies currently profiteering from the building and maintenance of the migrant detention camps that I mentioned on Sunday, you can find it here: https://wearyourvoicemag.com/news-politics/companies-profit-migrants-detention?fbclid=IwAR0xrJhnStzx1xzgRCTPEOa3g3blzq08GvJ3f9z_a9xJv3_gKcq5iJ-w_us Beloved: I was in Birmingham last week to attend the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly. I got excited about the good work in progress that CBF is doing in so many places. Here are some examples:
No doubt, my favorite parts of the meetings are seeing people I know and meeting people I don’t. I met up with Southern Seminary folks I’ve known 30+ years, a few of whom look weirdly older than I feel. The best is when I run into students from my IU campus ministry days, now in their own ministry placements, and my heart nearly bursts with pride. My least favorite part of the assembly was the hurt and grief murmuring audibly just below the joyful laughter: hurt and grief for want of reconciliation regarding the inclusion of our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters. We’ve tried so hard to cooperate, we ended up claiming unity where no true consensus was ever reached. Is not unity the highest purpose of the gospel? LGBTQ+ friends and allies, myself included, feel expected quietly to submit to this feigned unity or be considered uncooperative, a term that casts doubt upon our commitment to ministry and missions. Perhaps this bind is less real than I imagine, but I sense its pull all the same. I even wonder if CBF friends with dissimilar convictions can also feel its presence. Such conditions strike me as akin to those which prompted Reverend King’s 1963 Letter From a Birmingham Jail, his response to an editorial by white clergymen arguing that civil rights ought be gained slowly and quietly through the court system instead of in the streets. Just how quiet, patient, and submissive are we going to be while those in power are constrained by fear of the inevitable future in which our children see what we cannot, just as we saw what our own parents could not? The unconditional and full inclusion of our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters in the life and leadership of our churches is just as obvious as the inclusion of women and people of color was once upon a time. We are Baptists! And the beauty of being Baptist is, we aren’t required to wait on our leadership to get brave. We can be brave right now. Another reason I’m glad to have cast my lot with you all, UBC Bloomington, Indiana. You have no idea how you shine every time I tell other Baptists how generously inclusive you are.  The hashtag #ITSYOURCHURCHTOO popped into my head last night. Jodi (the millennial) explained to us (the old people) how hashtags are supposed to look and then Laura Beth made it pretty. I love it so much and want to smear it on everything that has our church name on it, so folks who think church may not love them might find their way to us – and even if they don’t, we tell the truth as best we know it: the church belongs to everyone, no exceptions. I’ve gone on much too long, so thanks for your sweet patience. You are all so dear to me.
~peace & prayers, pastor annette #itsyourchurchtoo♥ |
I write a Tuesday morning devotional to members and friends of UBC. It is also posted here.
Enjoy! Pastor Annette Copyright
Everything on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which gives you permission to copy freely, provided that you attribute the work to me, that you use the work for non-commercial purposes, and that you do not produce derivative works. Archives
September 2019
|
RSS Feed