 November 6, 2018
Beloved: We’re burying spring bulbs today, those of us who gather for Global Women, along the sidewalks and in the beds where they will sleep all winter. The ones the squirrel and moles don’t eat will return the favor in every shade of yellow. Just in time for Easter, which comes late next year. Because Global Women’s Gathering isn’t a religious program doesn’t mean it isn’t holy. Friendship, family, food and nature are our constant themes, each of which is sacred. Micro-diplomacy, better known as hospitality, is our chosen strategy for peace. Besides, it’s prettier, calmer, more fun, and it tastes so much better! Every time you pass a stranger is a moment to cross a border. To reach out in kindness. To smile. To bless someone’s child with your eyes and attitude. To offer help if it looks like help is needed. Or pray. We can always pray. Praying, seems to me, will have us carry ourselves through this world like the people God hopes for us to be. I love you. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
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 October 29, 2018
Beloved: Love one another, Jesus said. It’s everything. It begins at home and then it goes next door. I pray much love and peace for our precious neighbors at Congregation Beth Shalom in the wake of this weekend’s terror attack at the synagogue in Pittsburgh. My idea is to hang this banner on the bridge between our parking lots and fill it with notes of sympathy and love. If you can’t get by to write a note yourself, email one to me and I’ll write it on the banner for you. There are sharpies in the porch mailbox. Like you, my heart is broken for our neighbors and how they must be suffering. How do they explain such terror to their children, alongside such empty promises and lies from leadership too compromised to lead? A banner seems slightly absurd in the shadow of such atrocity. But friendship isn’t. Neighborliness and hospitality aren’t. Solidarity, kindness and partnership in the work of justice are not. These tiny acts of human decency are all we have for debilitating hate. In the meantime, do not fail to pray for peace with each and every breath. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
Everything important takes practice. And the best at anything are people willing to fail and learn from their mistakes. Being awesome isn’t the same life goal as doing something well, any more than following Jesus is the same as being like him. Following Jesus is a daily choice to live each day a certain way, less an accomplishment than a direction and a pace, a willful pulling of one’s focus to the holy in each and every moment.
I wish it were more profound than this, than simply practice, practice, practice; that in the practice of this faith, this faith’s gifts are found. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette  October 16, 2018
Beloved: A man named Dave is coming to my house today to measure for new window blinds. I’m also waiting for word on a child’s funeral arrangements later in the week. That such triviality and tragedy share space in my brain appalls me. To live deliberately in such space is the constant work of faith. To receive both the trivial and the terrible without explanation. To give space to pain while living through the ordinary. To sit without an answer to the screaming WHY? To remember that life is all one thing . . . . Joy and heartbreak flow in the one and only stream. Eternity. We don’t get one without the other And God is God is God is God is God. No matter how we feel right now. God will be God, today. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette October 9, 2018
Beloved: This week's devotional comes from Reverend Anthony Pompa, Dean and Rector of Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I’m grateful to Susan Harrington for sharing it at the very moment I needed this exact word. peace & prayers, pastor annette Burden or Blessing I am mindful that if you are fortunate enough to belong to a church community, you may be unaware of just how powerful you are. I say this in complete mindfulness of the great divide that has arisen in our secular lives. I feel if we are not careful, we may find ourselves giving our power over to the evil and sinfulness that our Baptismal Covenant calls us to resist and repent from. What evil? The evil of a tribalism that is calculated and strategic to separate us from one another by ideology, opinion, race, class, and economics. This same strategic use of tribalism invites us not to see one another innocently as different, but as a shameful enemy who must be defeated. Why sinful? It is sinful in that when we fall into the patterns of seeing one another as an enemy over the opinions and ideology we may hold, we fail to see one another the way God would have us, as children of God sharing a future of hope and goodness that has literally been born out of sacrifice. Be careful folk. Be careful. I said earlier that we are fortunate if we belong to a community of faith because we will, I pray, hold our bond together as children of God over and against the evils of tribalism our society is now seduced by. It means we can be together in love, in life, in mission, in hope, in service defined by Christ and not primarily driven by ideology or political persuasion. It does not mean we are without our convictions, but it does mean we put the way of love first, and live together as holy people, even in the midst of our differences. It means when we bump into one another’s sensibilities we can walk the extra mile to reach out in love to one another to dialogue, to pray, and to gain understanding, and to be open to being convicted by our faith and transformed by it. It means we can even change our minds and more importantly our hearts. It takes every ounce of power to live this way. The way of Love. It is in our current climate a swim against the stream. It takes power! . . . . . In a Celtic worldview, we are invited to see ourselves as part of a carefully woven pattern of relationships that breathe with all of God’s creation. (All of it). Carefully woven with the stars in the sky, the air that moves, the trees in the fields, the streams as they flow. Carefully woven with the sun that warms us, the moon that lights our dark nights, the animals in the field, our brothers and sisters of this race we call human. Together we are knit and together we breathe the life air that is the gift of our very existence. We, the human ones, have a choice in our place in the weave. We can bring with us Burden or we can bring with us Blessing. Let us bring blessing. The phrase civic duty has been rolling around in my head for a few days and I realized I don’t have a precise definition attached to it. So I looked it up and, turns out, I’ve mentally mingled civic duty and civic responsibility. They are close but not the same. Duties are legally enforceable and vary with each state. Paying taxes and obeying laws are civic duties. Responsibilities are necessary for civil society, but not legally enforceable. Serving on juries, voting, volunteering in the community, helping our neighbors are civic responsibilities.  Which naturally got me to thinking about Christian duties and responsibilities and the slightly jolting thought that neither word necessarily applies. Kingdom citizenship is chosen, not inborn. Jesus chose us, one and all, but we choose him back in becoming his disciples. The daily choice to do as Christ is freely accepted or declined. The grace of God persists when we are true to him, and when we are not. It’s not grace but justice hanging in the balance.
Insofar as life in Christ includes either duty or responsibility, I’ve no doubt it has to do with justice. Like two margins on a page, bringing the contours of life this side of heaven into line with the kingdom life Jesus described over and over again. A life where people live at peace not through strength of law, but by the law of love. By the law of love, all people are regarded fairly and with kindness. For the sake of love, all people are helped to live in safety and in peace. By the law of love, enough to eat and a decent place to live are simply human rights. And so much more, of course. Human dignity and safety . . . equality and respect . . . . We might call them duty and responsibility or, simply, the ordinary ways of life among those who choose to follow Christ. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette Beloved:
Every now and then I hanker for a different house. Something smaller to neglect like I neglect my current rooms and flower beds. Just the thought of moving kills the hankering, and I remember that I can only ever occupy a single spot on earth – so how about I occupy this one fully? I might choose to watch the seasons pass through the trees of this backyard. To learn the different sounds of traffic on this stretch of highway. Were I to pay attention long enough, I might become an expert of this place, the expert not only of this plot of ground but the terrain of this particular human heart. If I could just stay here, of course, which is the hardest exercise of all. Trusting there’s nothing inside the memories and dreams which I cannot afford to sift through, like forgotten souvenirs. “They can be ours to relive and be glad for, or to weep over and forgive,” Richard Rohr* writes, “without ever having to fix them.” So, practicing the wanting to stay put is my thing these days. It hardly rolls off the tongue like prayer or contemplation but amounts to pretty much the same. Be here, Now. In this house, with these people. On this ground, with these plants and animals. In this body. In this mind. In this heart with all its shadows and regrets. Visit often and stay longer every time, long enough to discover that there is always more to see and hear. More light. More beauty. More life, than we can ever, ever hope to comprehend. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette * Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs - The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, Crossroads Publishing, 2003 September 18, 2018
Beloved: A little one in church this week had an especially hard time sitting still. At children’s story time she roamed up to my lap and then took a lap around the room on her way back to her seat, sing-songing all the way. Later we had a little chat, about how important it is to listen. As if I know anything at all to be giving her advice. Of all the time I say I spend at prayer, it’s but a fraction that I’m praying. My thoughts wander like a herd of goats to every corner of my mind. Things I need to do today . . . what I ate last week . . . the weeds that fill my garden . . . is that bird a rooster or a hen . . . is that a freckle or do I have cancer? Nothing is too small a speculation to pull me from my prayers. Every saint I’ve ever read reports the same phenomenon: the impossibility of prayer – along with its grace; how, despite its aggravations, the very act of trying has some way of righting the world just a little more. One says that his prayers are like a donkey that keeps escaping from the barn. The work of prayer is gently leading him back every single time. For all her wiggly antics, the little one at church loves church. She’s always glad to be there. She dances during hymns and sings when it’s not her turn. She passes out hugs like candy canes on Christmas. Who’s to say she’s not way ahead of us, when it comes to knowing how to be when we come before the Lord? Do take care, dear people. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
Turns out my ash tree isn’t special but just another victim in a scourge that begin in Michigan sixteen years ago. A pretty little green bug apparently crossed the ocean hiding in a wooden Chinese shipping crate and her family migrated in every direction. Emerald ash borer is her common name, and one clan can suck the life from a small elm in months, from a giant one like mine in three or four years. They’ve killed tens of millions of trees in North America and Canada already, and they are found further from Michigan all the time. I am both horrified and wildly impressed at the industry of such tiny creatures. What they do with their jaws humans can only do with hard hats and rigging. Oh, and saws. Lots of very noisy saws! There must be millions of bugs in my tree by now, chewing all the time. I wonder what it sounds like to their little ears. Do they have some tiny noise-cancelling earmuffs built into their tiny heads? Of course I’ve never stood and listened to my tree. Maybe it’s alive with sound to those with ears to hear. My neighbors already think I’m crazy, so I might as well go take a listen. I can’t afford five thousand nor for the tree to fall on my house, so we agreed that he will take down one of the four giant trunks and let the rest fall into my yard and forest, tomorrow or next year. Then the day will last a little longer, since the giant ash tree is to the west. The sun sinks behind it for several minutes before touching the next treetop line. I will miss her but I rather like knowing these are our last days together. I’ll pay better attention to her now, I think, and be grateful that we were here at the same time. All of life is so fleeting, isn’t it, and yet each moment is so full. I pray the day is full of life and love for you today. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette September 4, 2018
Beloved: Nature is the hiding place of God. ~ Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs Within another paragraph or two I want to close the book and scream, I feel so overwhelmed. In the simplest of terms, Rohr exposes God’s movement in the cicada buzzing on my porch floor, the begonia at my elbow, quivering a breeze too slight for me to feel. Once seen, it cannot be unseen and seeing is painful, both for its beauty and its sorrow. What kind of people might we be, could we live as seeing people, treasuring every element as the heart of life itself? How might we regard each other, with tenderness at the very least, rightly shy to ruin something presently so fine? We humans mostly choose a different course, one that seems less sorrowful to bear. We narrow down our focus to the necessary duties of one job, one house, one family. “This is more than I can manage,” we say, and mostly it feels true. “I’d like to manage something else” is the harder truth to tell. There’s awesome pressure in this world to have the perfect family, house, career; kids competent in class and sports; and colleagues convinced you pull your weight. Who has time to see a hummingbird flitting at the glass when there are bills to pay this week? Here’s the part of seeing that is so overwhelming: once seen, God cannot be unseen. God is at the grocery store - in the cheerful clerk teaching the Chinese student how the checkout line works, while her line backs up endlessly. God is in the power of those legs on the high school soccer field. Right there, buried in our to-do lists, God is hiding in plain sight. More than I can bear, almost, for the beauty of its presence and the sorrow of having missed it even once before. How can anyone sit still for so profound a revelation! ~ 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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February 2019
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