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April 16, 2019
Beloved: The journey into darkness is more difficult when Easter comes so late. Everything is so alive already! Lots of tulips opened yesterday and we are eating lettuce from my husband’s early crop. I cleaned out all my porch pots to ready them for planting and can hardly wait until May 6th, my self-imposed safe date for planting in the ground. All the same, Good Friday comes first. Its shame and sorrow are the context of Easter’s joy. Each requires the other be fully entered in. Yet they are not two stories but one, the story of Love’s willingness to walk through any fire and confront any power between that Love and us. Told in the smallest of ways, with words and songs and candles on Good Friday. With food and friends and music on Easter morning. Small, but not too small for our hearts to know what’s what. That we are loved by the Love that will never let us go. That life is therefore good and we have cause for joy! I look forward to worshipping with you Friday at 7 PM and Sunday morning at 9 AM. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette
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April 9, 2019
Beloved: The air outside is so sweet it practically hurts to be inside at a desk. The lovely consolation is, today’s inside work is fun: a wedding service and an easy-peasy letter of recommendation. Heidi, Chris and Kallie become an official family on Saturday, and Andy is after every college scholarship he can find. What a privilege to be invited into such joyful occasions! Pastoring is seasonal work, don’t you know, similar to farming. There’s work to do in every season of life, cradle to the grave with oh so many potlucks in between. Even the sadnesses are precious for all the love it takes to make things bittersweet. On the days this job drives me crazy I wouldn’t trade it for anything, which more than anything means it’s what I’m meant to do. For your part in this life together, I am grateful, for the gifts and labor that you bring and for the fellowship and ministry created and delivered, by which so many lives are sweetened and encouraged. I look forward to sharing the next few weeks of worship and joy with you. ~ peace & prayers, pastor Annette Saturday, April 13th Heidi & Chris get married at UBC Sunday, April 14th at 10:45 AM Palm Sunday Worship at UBC 4:00 PM Eastern Greene County Musical Theatre Production of The Little Mermaid, starring Andy & Emily, Eastern Greene Elementary School. Tickets at the door. Sunday, April 21st at 9:00 AM Easter Feast followed by Worship
As I turn it over in my mind, I remember a college minister shaking his head and saying, “Annette, you read too much.” Had he been the only minister I knew, I might have been broken-hearted but, instead, I just kept reading. Thirty-six years later I’ve come upon a new heartbreak. Even if my eyes hold out, I won’t live long enough to get through all I have left to read. I already barely do housework. I suppose I could hire a reader to do double time as I knit and sew. But then who will take notes? Can I afford a reader and a scribe? Posing yet another question and then another after that: Is it possible I read too much? That I might better spend my time? Or that I take too much pride in reading . . . or in these notebooks full of scribbles that no one on God’s green earth, including me most likely, will ever remotely care to read? Surely that’s just crazy thinking, for which the same college minister expressed concern: “Annette, you just think too much.” Maybe he’s right on both counts, after all. In any case, I’ll take my chances that he’s not, so long as my eyes hold out. And then I’ll find a reader, some young bibliophile upon whom the same spell is cast. They will read and I’ll drink tea, and we’ll talk books until my nap time comes around. If such a thing is even possible, then I know for sure that life only gets more grand. I pray you find some joy today! ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette Books I have going these days: Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, Reinhold Niebuhr The Hidden Life of Trees, Ben Wohlleben Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, Juli Berwald March 26, 2019
Beloved: The fruit comes late, wrote P.T. Forsyth, concerning prayer. The fruit comes last, actually, as it has to do with blackberries actually. I was checking my canes on the way to the henhouse yesterday. Nothing happening yet. Baby canes don’t get berries until their second year, so until these green I won’t know which ones will bear this year. The one-year-olds I’ll just prune all summer, lest they take the garden like Shelob’s lair. Prayer is mostly pre-fruit work. Waiting, rooting, growing, sun, rain, and patience. Pruning, pollination, buds. Flowers. Green berries. Red berries. Birds! Bird netting! Then, maybe, purple berries that get soft. For our yogurt, pie and jam. Every year the work’s the same, and every year ripe berries are a maybe. I’m still talking about prayer. Just like with the berries, it’s the praying that matters most – the tending and the patience to do so little for so long, even on days when nothing much is happening yet. This is the season of unseen movement; the growing is underground. Winter feels nearly over and Lent is halfway done. Do not fail to pray for one another, and I wish you much love today. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette March 19, 2019 Beloved:
Other signs of spring:
The season has no name I know of, but I love it all the same. Winterspring. Cold and warm. Not quite thawed and about to bloom. Being patient with what is and excited for what comes next. Not missing the end or the beginning of things happening together. Being present in the moment, one moment at time. Only when I am present am I also truly grateful. Grateful for the best of it and patient with the rest. Because all of it is passing, even as I watch. The moment lasts less than a moment, unless I pay attention. May the day treat you and yours kindly. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette March 12, 2019
Beloved: For Lent I’ve given up grazing, gorging, and eating on the fly. I don’t do it all the time, just in phases, and lately. I hate it. I don’t graze healthily. Is “healthily” a word? It tastes like a made-up word. Of course Lent isn’t so much giving up as taking up and, in this case, simply resuming grateful habits. Grazing, gorging, eating on the fly are habits of entitlement and privilege, access to food requiring no forethought nor planning, only money and mobility. To that end, my Lenten commitment is to eat what is already in the pantry and freezer, buying what will round it out to meals. I can make three whole meals on Monday, my day off, and we all eat well for a week. Turns out the time spent planning, shopping, cooking was way more fun than feeling guilty about getting takeout again. It was also way cheaper (go figure) and healthier all around. I wish I could say some spiritual motivation started me down this path, but Netflix is closer to the truth. Next time you wonder what to watch, find The Chef’s Table.* Stories of people feeding people and the healing that happens there, healing for the feeder and the fed. Every time we feed someone else, somehow we also feed ourselves. (Grammatically I really hate that sentence, yet it’s exactly what I want to say.) As usual at Lent, giving something up we find we have more than we thought we did. One of the meals I found at the Campbell’s soup website. I jazzed it a bit to use more of what I had. I only had to buy pork chops and mushrooms. It is yum-O! ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette *The recent episode about Asma Khan is one of my favorites. Chili Lime Ranch Pork Chops & Cilantro Vegetable Rice Ingredients
Directions 1. Heat the water, frozen vegetables and 1/2 package dressing mix in a 3-quart saucepan over medium-high heat to a boil. Stir in the rice. Reduce the heat to low. Cover and cook for 20 minutes or until the liquid is absorbed. 2. While the rice is cooking, season the pork with the chili powder. Whisk together the milk, soup and remaining ranch dressing mix. Heat half the oil in a 12-inch skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion, mushroom and garlic. Sauté until translucent and starting to soften. Take out of skillet and set aside. 3. Add rest of oil to skillet and heat, then add the pork and cook until browned on both sides (make sure the skillet and oil are hot before adding the pork to prevent sticking). Stir the soup/milk mixture in the skillet, return onion/mushroom/garlic to skillet and heat to a boil. Reduce the heat to low. Cover and cook for 10-12 minutes or until the pork is cooked through. 4. Stir the cilantro into the hot cooked rice. Top the pork with the avocado and additional chopped cilantro, if desired. Serve the pork and sauce with the rice.
As Jesus once made up his mind to go to Jerusalem, the church once made up her mind to proceed intentionally to Easter, in our worship, prayer, and devotion. “The season of Lent” we call it, beginning tomorrow with Ash Wednesday. Last year’s Palm Sunday palms burned down to ash, mixed with oil, and smeared on our skin as a sign of our longing – for obedience and faith we well know is beyond us. Longing for it is all we can manage, and barely that. Still, we gather. Still, we pray. Still, we sing and wear the ashes once again. These gatherings and prayers are the activity of our longing, the revelation of our broken hearts. If only to ourselves that surely counts for something. We come away knowing to move gently – against ourselves and one another, seeing as how everyone is cut and broken, headed for Jerusalem.
Cut and broken as we may be, we are not without hope. Spring is pushing through the snow. Easter won’t be stopped by any faithlessness of ours. It is done, and all our made-up seasons are but a play of the grace already given. I hope you’ll find an Ash Wednesday service tomorrow. Ours begins at 7 PM, and I’d love to see you there.
2/26/19
Beloved: Eleven eggs were in the hen house last evening, and the air smelled ever so springish this morning. It’s no good getting my hopes up, but I will anyway. However long a winter lasts, the earth can’t help coming back to life on her circuit back toward the sun. The Scotsman P.T. Forsyth wrote deceptively thin theology books a hundred years ago; but, with a bit of tweaking to his pronouns, his work is ever so prescient of now. He reads like Dr. King Jr., for one, and Richard Rohr as well. In his book on the atonement quoted here, he revived grace or, maybe, revived the church to recall grace. Grace and grace alone makes us who and what we are. Grace confirms that insofar as we are judged we are judged according to divine holiness, and the rule of holiness is love, divine love. Divine love took action toward humankind in the event of Jesus Christ, thus saying, love and not evil shall rule the day – for every day of human history, for every human being everywhere. All of which is just to say, Dr. Forsyth writes joyful theology. He is springtime to the soul and to the church, pointing us to the light and warmth and hope at the center of our faith. I pray this day allows you a new surprise of faith, one given or received. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette Give to all who seek rest and refreshment in your shade fruits to their liking regardless of your own, and may each of your branches bear only marks of grace. ~ Jean Pierre de Caussade, The Sacrament of the Present Moment February 19, 2019
Beloved: The nuns to whom Father de Caussade wrote saved his letters and eventually published them in 1741, feeling sure they would be as much encouragement to others as they had been to them. I for one am so grateful that they did! Father de Caussade perceives God’s will as something everyday and common, toward which we merely need to turn ourselves in this present moment, trusting God is about God’s business and will use us as necessary, in ways we may or may not know. In the few dozen pages of the book, he mostly says the same thing a dozen different ways so that everyone might catch it, but every chapter spoke to me. I hear him say God’s business is just that, God’s, and we need not fret so much over our place in it. He likes the word “surrender,” as in when we surrender our souls, that is the giving up of our own agenda to make room for what God brings to the moment. Much of the book reads like prayer or poetry like the quote above. I love the image of us as trees, standing quietly together, our branches bearing marks of grace, for those who rest within our shade. I’ve chosen this little book as our Lenten devotional this year. New and used copies are available for about $10 online at www.christianbook.com and amazon.com. If you prefer to borrow a copy, let Pastor Annette know. Book discussions will begin in late March. I pray the day is gentle upon you, that you have a taste or glimpse of God’s goodness. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette PS - Three cheers for Greg T. for discovering that our Lenten devotional book, published also under the title Abandonment to Divine Providence, is available online for free in multiple formats. Here is the link: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/decaussade/abandonment.html . February 12, 2019
Beloved: Friends I know are worried and afraid today – for loved ones who are very sick. Others are sick themselves, and some grieve great loss. Marriages that are shaking and employment that strips away integrity leave some people exhausted and discouraged. The weather is terrible and the news is worse. Is there a good word anywhere? Everything is grace . . . says Henri Nouwen in his book Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit. The movement from resentment to gratitude is a spiritual one, formed in persistently chosen ways of thinking, doing, being. Resentment is anger grown cold and hard around the heart, a worldview laced with suspicion and sprinkled with despair – while gratitude recognizes grace, even in our most miserable moments. Were it not for love, would grief be so hard to bear? That is grace. Were it not for peace, would violence tear at us so? That is grace. Joy and suffering are made of all one thing. It is grace. It is grace. Everything is grace. For in everything God is with us, and we can know it when we find the inner quiet to be still and live in each moment at a time. Everything is grace. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette |
I write a Tuesday morning devotional to members and friends of UBC. It is also posted here.
Enjoy! Pastor Annette Copyright
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April 2019
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