Beloved:

I’m so grateful for this morning’s rain and hope it cools things off a bit.  These days, southern Indiana feels far too much like the Mississippi Delta for my liking, with all due respect to my husband’s kinfolk.  No gardening complaints though.  The squirrels are leaving my tomato plants alone, so I harvest every day.  I’m packing the freezer with yellow squash, blackberries and pesto.  Ben and Bailey found an awesome recipe and jazzed it up using our poblano peppers.  Find it in our recipe section.

The political conventions have had me a little world-weary, and then I read this by Reinhold Niebuhr, in his diary in 1926 when he pastored an inner-city Detroit church.  Mass automobile production was just underway and labor had not yet unionized.  Working and living conditions for the factory workers were horrific.  Niebuhr wrote, “The morality of the church is anachronistic.  Will it ever develop a moral insight and courage sufficient to cope with the real problems of modern society?  If it does it will require generations of effort and not a few martyrdoms.  We ministers maintain a vast and inclusive ignorance.  If we knew the world in which we live a little better we would perish in shame or be overcome with a sense of futility.”

His words ring no less true in our time.  To perish in shame or be overcome with a sense of futility is tempting but not inevitable.  Pastor Niebuhr’s own life is evidence.  He went on to write, to work and to speak tirelessly and forcefully on the moral tragedies of modern society, particularly during the long years of World War II in Europe.  He was a colleague and friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the Christian martyrs of that generation. 

These days, vast and inclusive ignorance is pretty hard to come by, given our constant diet of world news and images, a daily feast of the real problems of modern society.  Again I remember that even though I can’t do everything I can do something.  Today I’m planning to take some popsicles to one of the downtown parks where homeless people gather.  It won’t end a war.  It won’t end homelessness.  It’s so very small a thing to do.  It’s neither insightful nor brave.  But it is, in its own tiny way, the very opposite of anachronistic.  It says, “I see you, right here, right now, in this park, in this heat, in the same town as me.  We are neighbors.  Our lives are connected.” And besides, who doesn’t like a popsicle when it’s hot? Between Habitat Builder’s Blitz and Pokémon Go, dragging a beat-up cooler around has sort of been my thing this summer anyway.  I hope you find your own thing to do too!

~stay cool,
pastor annette

Beloved:

I’ve begun an amazing new book, Silence & Beauty; Hidden Faith Born of Suffering by Makoto Fujimura, a study on the famous 20th century novel Silence, by Shusaku Endo.  (Yes, a book about a book!)  In one passage he uses the metaphor of disease for traumas that shape both individual lives and entire cultures:  “to find a cure one must be willing to live with the disease.”  Which got me to thinking about racism as a disease our own culture has been struggling not to live with in the two years since Michael Brown died in Ferguson, Missouri. [article linked]   I say our own culture meaning our mostly white culture knowing that our non-white neighbors have had no such struggle.  Not in the last two years.  Not in the last two hundred years.  Our literally next-door, down-the-street, around-the-corner neighbors for whom racism is not some mystery condition in want of a diagnosis, not a body riddled with symptoms stemming from any number of causes. 

I can’t speak for all white people but I know as a white person that a secret part of me aches for our disease to be something else, anything else, than racism.  Not because I don’t want to overcome racism, but because I do not even begin to know how to do that.  I don’t really even know what that means and so I feel defeated and tired from the start.

But reading Fujimura alongside my New Testament, I’ve been wondering, “What if believing racism is the core problem doesn’t require me to know the solution?  What if we, both individuals and a culture, had permission to view what’s happening with eyes wide open and say, ‘Wow, that’s really racist and I have no idea how to fix it?’”

What if we started there .  .  . with just that much truth?  It’s not all the truth we need.  But at least there aren’t any lies inside that.  What if our fear and anxiety around the possibility that racism might be the problem is actually the first problem?  It’s not a cure but it is a diagnosis.  From there, we can start living with the disease as we search for the cure.  Inside there, it seems to me, there would be so much more gentleness with the ones who are hurting and so much more patience with the ones who are trying hard to understand.  Maybe, at this point, that is what loving our neighbors looks like:   gentleness and patience.  In which case, we all have a very hard job – but a good job, a job that works towards healing for everyone. 
​
God told us to love our neighbors, no exceptions, and gave us every grace to do so.  Neither fear nor arrogance are useful to the task.  Gentleness and patience, I think, are the words to carry into times like these, for people who seek to be faithful. 

~peace & prayers,
​pastor annette

It hurts to tell the truth.
And we are probably going to have to get over the fact that we are going to have some pain.
But the thing is - some people have already been hurting for a long, long, long time.
If enough people who profess faith in Jesus Christ walked and talked as if we believed with all our hearts
that every single human being is a beloved child of God. . .
more valuable than all the gold in all the banks in all the world . . .
these killings would NOT keep happening;
we would not stand for it.
There isn’t anything we wouldn’t do or give
in obedience to Christ and for love of humanity to stop it.
 
But the truth so far is this:
It breaks our hearts and makes us sad,
but we are so easily distracted by other things.
 
Enough time will pass and we will go on with our lives,
while the parents of other sons will keep doing their best to train their sons
to handle themselves in ways I never, ever have to tell to my own.
 
Having called us to love our neighbors and their children as we love ourselves and our own,
I believe God would not have us keep silent now
as if such fear  and death is acceptable.
“God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond your strength.”
I wish I knew precisely what this means, Friends.
But in days like these, I choose to believe it means that
sometimes we have to act stronger than we feel
and trust God to mind the gap.
~ lines from Sunday sermon on I Corinthians 10:13
July 10, 2016

Beloved:

    I came home from church on Sunday knowing I needed to cry.  A little tired from preaching a hard sermon and exhausted from the sadness of the week.  So much hate.  So much death.  I played with my dog.  I tried to journal.  Finally I turned on the Netflix show that never lets me down, Derek.  According to creator Rick Gervais, the big theme of the show is that “kindness trumps everything."  I started crying minutes into the first episode, not because it was so sad.  Because it is so sweet.  Then I’d laugh my head off.  And then cry some more.  My kids kept looking me, then looking at each other worriedly.  “I’m fine,” I would wail, “Really I am!”
 
    The world is so broken.  So much hate.  So much death.  Great is the temptation to stop feeling so as to stop hurting.  But that’s its own kind of death, so no thanks.  I’ll stick with kindness.  And gratitude.  And joy.  And community.  And faith.  And peace.  And gentleness.  With loving our neighbors and praying for our enemies and counting on the Lord for everything else. 

~peace & prayers,
pastor annette

Beloved:

The summer before sixth grade I convinced the librarian that except for the sports section I had read every book in the children’s department of the Bedford Indiana Public Library.  She took me upstairs to the Young Adult area and said I could check out anything my mother approved.  My mother did not censor my reading.  Until that summer, reading had felt to me something like a magic trick I did over and over to entertain myself.  Words were puzzles.  I solved one book-ful and picked up another.  Within months I had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, To Kill A Mockingbird, and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr – and the game was over, along with a part of my childhood I was sad to lose. 

  Judith Kerr’s book touched me most deeply, so I went looking for more, and I found Elie Wiesel before the end of high school.  I’ve read nearly everything he published.  His disappointment in God has tempered my preaching in ways I cannot describe.  His disappointment in and hope for humanity have made me, I pray, a slightly braver human being than I would be otherwise. 

I was truly glad for him when I read of his death on Saturday.  Always, in nearly everything he wrote, he spoke of the burden of surviving.  He carried it – the burden – with such solemn dignity, honesty, and clarity for nearly seventy years.  He did not shrink from the terrible task of bearing witness to evil.  I pray his spirit is finally at rest.  I pray to be faithful to his memory and to his teaching. 

Hopefully your long weekend was good.  I look forward to seeing you soon. 
​
~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette