A Blessed Holy Week

This year Holy Week was a beautiful, varied gift for me. You see I had the privilege of worshiping in five different communities as together we walked with Jesus through the horror of the crucifixion to the glory of His Resurrection.

Beginning on Wednesday, I drove to Glendo to join them in Stations of the Cross and then a soup supper. As we sat around tables enjoying the food a man entered. From his dress he was obviously down on his luck. Without any hesitation he filled a bowl and plate with food and settled down at one of the tables. Obviously, this was someone everyone knew. When I asked about him, I was told that he had settled in Glendo but was having difficulty finding work, and so the churches in town were doing their part to help.

Maundy Thursday was spent in Douglas. It was an ecumenical service with clergy and people from the UCC, Methodist and of course Episcopal Churches. The liturgy was a blend of each of these traditions giving new meaning to that day.

Good Friday I drove to Hartville. It is a church community with more diversity in its midst than any place I have ever been. Looking at it objectively it is a wonder all these differences can possible exist together -- and at times there is conflict. And yet, there is an incredible richness to this place that helps me to better grasp what it means to be the body of Christ.

Saturday was the Easter Vigil at St. Stephen’s. The Presbyterians joined us extending a tradition of sharing worship that has stretched all the way back to the founding of both churches. But the really neat thing about that evening was the way it was intentionally made family friendly using Godly Play to tell the scripture stories and ending with a real celebration of the Resurrection, horns and noisemakers blending with shouts of “alleluia”!

Finally, Don and I drove to Lusk for Easter Sunday. The service was marked by a whole bunch of children – most under the age of five. You could here them “singing” throughout the service, but not a cry was heard. It seemed such a fitting way to end Holy Week.

May we praise God for the wondrous gift he has given us through Jesus Christ, and take time this Easter Season to see the gifts of His Kingdom in all the times and places of our lives.

When the teacher becomes the student…

Having taught for over 20 years, there is one truth I learned long ago. I might be the teacher, but for me to really do my job well, I must also be the student. This lesson was reinforced this past week in Glendo at our book study.

After years of reading spiritual and theological books we chose something different this time: Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew B. Crawford. It is a book about working with your hands both creating and fixing things and how our culture lost something vital when we moved away from this kind of work.

What this book does not directly deal with is anything to do with church or religion. It is an experiment to see if we can identify where faith and communities of God are present in a non-religious book. Now I believe this is true in theory, but I really have no idea how to go about exploring this concept. So I have been coming each time with a whole set of questions and observations about the chapter, throwing them out until the discussion takes on a life of its own.

From the beginning this book study has attracted a few people who take their faith seriously but for whatever reason, do not attend Sunday worship. It turns out that they are the real teachers. Let me give you an example from our last session. In the chapter we were reading Crawford talks about the dilemma he struggles with in his motorcycle repair shop. A customer will bring him an old broken down bike, which will probably cost more to repair than the bike is worth. But the customer loves the bike and even with this warning, authorizes the repairs. Now the author takes great pride in his work, so he wants to do whatever it takes to make the bike right. The problem is that to do this will take so many hours of work that he doesn’t feel right charging the customer. This is especially true when he knows he can do an ok job and the bike might well run just fine for quite a while. Financially this is what makes sense, but emotionally it is a decidedly unsatisfactory solution. What should he do?

For me the answer seemed obvious. He should call up the customer and let him decide. It took quite a bit of discussion before I began to understand that the problem here is not giving the customer the right to decide, but rather getting a person emotionally attached to the motorcycle to hear the decision that needs to be made. It’s a process of learning about how to best serve the customer while satisfying the need to make things right.

When this finally made sense to me my teacher went on to say: “It’s like faith where we seek to serve others as Christians all the while we are growing in our walks with God.” Bingo!! There it was. - So simple. Yet I am so entrenched in my theological language and concepts that I could not see what was right before my eyes. It was a great evening.

We have such a need in our church families to invite and then listen to those people who are not entrenched in our traditions and teachings - for they will bring us new ways of understanding faith that will enrich all our lives.

Things are not always the way we see or hear them….

Having struggled with a hearing loss the past few years, I am sensitive to the acoustics in the churches I work with. Most of them have really good acoustics for singing but the sound tends to disperse making it hard for people with a hearing loss to understand what is being said. Many churches have sound systems, but this simply makes things louder – not more understandable.

About a month ago a new/returning woman turned up at Christ Church in Douglas. It has been years since she attended services, but the older members of the congregation knew her. I did not get a chance to visit with her before worship, but afterwards asked her if she had been able to hear during the service. Shaking her head sadly she said “no”, BUT Douglas has been experimenting with putting the liturgy on a screen in the front of the church and smiling she thanked us all for this because she was able to read and participate. She has been back every week since.

Now I have always thought of the use of screens as a way to appeal to the young and overcome the confusion of the Prayer Book for new comers while at the same time saving paper. It never occurred to me that it might also be an issue of hospitality allowing people with a hearing loss to join in the worship with others.

God is found in the most unlikely places??

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. ICorinthians 13:4-7

Having worked with many different churches over the past seven years, I have been to many and varied annual meetings. Last Sunday at St. Stephen’s was one of the best. But that is not what I expected. First of all they hold their annual meetings during Sunday worship, using the meeting instead of the traditional sermon. How, I wondered can the tedium and tension over elections and money possibly draw our attention toward God?

Secondly, I already knew there had been some tension the past year over issues that involved both control and money. Sermons are always a good place to address the role of these twin sins in God’s Kingdom, but was this the best place to address such things in the particular?

Finally, last month at the Ministry Support Team – the place where all the ministries share information and planning – it had been decided that they would try something new this year and set the annual meeting within the context of celebration. I couldn’t help but wonder if this meant they were going to avoid all the issues from the past year, something churches tend to do only to have them come back making things even more difficult.

The meeting lasted an hour and a half, but no one seemed to get restless. Everyone had a chance to speak. Several of the most difficult issues from the past year were addressed without much tension. And eight new people who have attended church for quite a while but haven’t been active in the ministries of the church stepped into new roles. Amazing!

What followed was a real celebration. Each person was given a small bag of m&m’s for mutual ministry and a party favor horn. Then each ministry was named – including the ministry of presence – and placed within the liturgy of the Prayers of the People as everyone ate candy and tooted their horns.

The celebration at worship ended with the Eucharist and then everyone went downstairs to the parish hall where ice cream Sundays and cake were served. It was a great day!

Who were the people in this story and how do they show God’s activity?

Dear Friends in Christ,

I don’t blog. I will only send a text message in a pinch. And although I have come to appreciate e-mail, it took a long…..long…time. But even a Luddite such as myself finds that she is pushed forward by the changes in our world. So…maybe I will try blogging.

I am an Episcopal priest in the diocese of Wyoming. However, I lived most of my life totally unaware of God’s presence in my life and the world around me. Perhaps this is why it seems so important to me to discover, celebrate and share God’s kingdom in our world. My job title is Ministry Developer which means I drive thousands of miles each year to pray, learn, and visit with five wonderful church communities: Casper (St. Stephen’s), Glendo, Douglas, Lusk and Hartville.

It is these communities that I want to share with others -- all the stories that I hear and experience in these places. Not necessarily dramatic stories, but all the ordinary events that are a part of every congregation. And then I invite all of you to find where God is most present in each of them.

One of the things I have learned is that worship is usually much less planned and formal in the small churches of Wyoming. At first this bothered me, having come from a larger and more formal church. I still love the beautiful music and liturgy of the larger churches, but I have come to appreciate the way worship in each church seems to fit the gifts and needs of that particular congregation

This last Sunday I worshiped with the members of St. George’s, Lusk. The building is small, but the sanctuary is filled with beautiful wood and stained glass. I always enjoy sitting in one of the pews and just letting its beauty and comfort surround me. But the sanctuary doesn’t really come alive until the people gather. There is a huge age range in this congregation - from less than a year to over 100 years and all ages in between. The pews were pretty well filled this week I think in part because we were planning to bless two new candelabras. I am never quite sure who the acolytes will be each time I am there, sometimes there are many more than we can accommodate and sometimes there are none. This week, I knew at least one would be there to help with the blessing. In the end there were two. As they robed, I explained quickly that their part in the blessing would be to light the candelabras after the last prayer. You always need to be ready with explanations that are short and to the point, because there is never much time to prepare.

When it came time to bless the candelabras, all went well until the acolytes began to light them. One of the tapers simply ran out of wick. Now in a more planned and formal setting, this might have created a problem, but here it seemed perfectly natural when the two acolytes simply shared the one taper that worked. But more than this, what really struck me when this happened was the congregation and the looks of encouragement and pride on all their faces. It was in that moment that I knew what it felt like to be a part of God’s family.