I want to tell you about what I just did before sitting down to write this, but before I do, let me tell you about this coming week.

At 6:00 am Sunday morning, eight teens and four chaperones (me included) will be meeting at the international terminal at BWI and we will fly to Costa Rica. This group has worked very hard to get to this point, and I am quite proud of them, and confident that we are going to have a great time, everyone will stay out of trouble, and we will grow as Christians. If you’ve ever heard one of our sermons preached by our graduating seniors, these pilgrimages always come up. For them, the process of earning the trip and going together is life changing.

I will be out of Church on Sunday and Jackie Pippin, who has covered for me quite a bit, will be back in the pulpit. There are a lot of good priests, and she is one of them. The Episcopal Church is incredibly diverse in its religious expression. Among the pool of good priests, a minority of them will have a good fit at any individual Church. We are lucky that Jackie appears to be competent and a good fit. This runs the risk for me that you all might like her better than you like me. To be honest, if you do not appreciate how I preach or lead worship, I hope you like her better. We cannot be everything to everyone, and having a plurality of voices and leadership can help ensure more of our people get fed. Consider this a request to go to Church this Sunday to pray for our pilgrimage and to see how Rev. Jackie does Church.

Ok, now that is said, let me tell you about what I’ve been up to with the pastoral care group. Eventually I would like us to grow into doing weekly services at the local retirement homes. The first week of the month would be one place, the second at another, and so forth and so forth. Right now, we just do these services at Paul Springs once a month, and we are getting in our stride. We start off with doing a short Eucharistic Service in their little theater. This week there were eight of us, and Rev. Peanut joined us with her cowboy hat, which was very popular among the residents. This service is pretty straightforward, and other than the dog wearing a hat, it’s not that goofy.

The next part of our ministry there takes us to the memory care unit. Serving these populations was a big part of my ministry in my former Church. I was in an area that was heavily Baptist and Pentecostal, and people were used to doing Church activities, but because of their memory situation they had very short attention spans. Other Church always had a lot of music and things like that. Considering I am not musically inclined, I came up with a different strategy. In addition to the dog in a hat, I would bring a big bag of candy, and we would play, “The Answer is JESUS!!”, which is a bible trivia game of my own design, where the answer to every question was “JESUS!” That crowd ate it up. After trivia we did a super short communion service and would chat with everyone.

While I feel that I am making headway with this group, you can tell they don’t have the same enthusiasm for Bible trivia as my group in southern Virginia. They do still really like Peanut and the candy, so it works but there is room to grow. I am starting to get to know the residents a bit more and what they seem to be looking for, and I also learned that some of them have no family at all and do not receive any visitors.

I cannot help but think of the story of Zaccheaus that we told at Vacation Bible School this morning. If you are not familiar, he was sort of a well-known scoundrel that was too short to see Jesus, so he climbed a tree. Jesus joyfully went up to him, and said he’d be dinning with him that evening. We do not know what was discussed, but Zaccheaus vowed to sell half his property, give the money to the poor, and return all the money and more he defrauded from people. The point wasn’t the dinner; it was how the dinner changed people. I invite you to help me be sneaky like Jesus, with these services.

With this group, the Bible trivia, worship and talking about dogs is kind of like the dinner at Zaccheaus’s house. It was the pretense to the ministry, but not necessarily the ministry itself. Going around and listening to people and making them feel remembered and loved is our actual mission.

I can get dinner ready, but I need someone who speaks French that doesn’t mind speaking it to someone who can’t speak back to them. I need someone you can listen to, someone as if they were an old friend and hold their hand, even when you don’t know what they’re talking about. If you can help me with this, let me know. There is room for our pastoral care team to grow and today was a reminder that we do not need to travel far to do serious ministry.

-Nick