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You are Seen

Friends,

I write this as I return from Paul Spring Retirement Community, where we do monthly services. The first service is for the general population. Nancy Morrissey is St. Luke’s unofficial representative at Paul Spring, and she always does such an amazing job of creating community and inviting people to Church. The little theater they put us in felt full in today’s service! The service is sacred, but most people go for Rev. Vanilla Bean, my dog, who always goes to Paul Spring wearing one of her hats. After that service we go to the memory care section and do a trivia game called “The Answer is Jesus!” (The answer to every question is indeed Jesus) and then celebrate a short service. A retired pediatrician with no family who is also a holocaust survivor, always comes. Even though she is non-verbal, she gets the most out of the service. She generally stands in front of me and insists on holding my hand when we bless the bread and wine.

Annual Report

Friends,

I am writing this annual report weeks after I intended to do so. The tremendous amount of ice and the subsequent creation of “snowcrete” all over our community has been a consuming issue. I feel as though the past week and a half has been abnormally busy, but I have accomplished very little of the tasks I would have been tackling if we were not faced with such abnormal weather.

In the short term, I want you to know that our Sunday worship has been profound for my spiritual life. I woke up to heavy snow on January 25th. I hope you got one of the many emphatic messages urging you not to come, even if you felt only slightly unsafe. A couple of people drove, and a dozen or so walked to worship. We live-streamed from my laptop. It was amateur, and it felt like family. At this time last week our parking lot looked like an ice-skating rink. Much effort was made to clear the ice, and locate salt, but our efforts were in vain. We knew that those in the congregation with heavy equipment were slammed with clearing roads and other areas, so we were hesitant to reach out. The call was made to cancel in-person worship and with great humility to start reaching out to those families. We were humbled with the rapid response we received from Rosemont Landscaping, and to our shock, by Saturday afternoon it was clear we could have worship in person. We had minimal music planned, no printed bulletins, but we invited people to join us anyways. I printed off 50 reading sheets, thinking that would suffice with the small crowd we would have. To my shock, the Church felt full! It was not up to our normal standard, but it felt like family.

The World is Not Working the Way it Should: But I Have a Tractor that is Helping Just a Little Bit

Friends,

Before I try to tap into some meaningful touchy-feely stuff, here is the most important things you need to know:

First and foremost, know that the world is not working the way it should. We knew this going into the storm last Sunday, but this is to a significantly greater degree than I had imagined. Our strategy for plowing the parking lot made sense; however, we inadvertently created ideal conditions for making a thick layer of ice directly on the asphalt, and it is nearly impossible to get up. Snow plows do nothing, we have spread all the salt that we could find, and I even brought my little tractor down to try to break it up, and the parking lot is still very treacherous.

Patina

Friends,

Behind the altar are two sets of beautiful new benches, and if you pull those back there are four discreet doors that open if you give them a good push. The far right one houses materials for the Ghanian Church that uses our space on Sunday afternoons. The far left one houses things for my Day School Chapel services. Until this week, the contents of the middle two were a mystery to me, as I simply never took the time to open them up and peek inside. When I was going through some things with Susan Harris, who is currently one of the leads for the altar guild, we opened one of these and I found three beautiful crosses and a pair of brass candle sticks.

Growing Together

Friends,

That was a weird year.

First, let me now specify. It was a profoundly weird year with domestic issues, politics, the government shutdown, the military, global affairs, assassinations, law enforcement, and what is happening with this whole Venezuela thing and those oil tankers?!?!

Very specifically, I am talking about our Church’s finances which have been dominating my attention against the backdrop of unexpected, bizarre and often tragic events. Our parish administrator, treasurers and finance committee generally have a supernatural knack for financial forecasting. Each month’s finances followed predictable trends, and our spending and income have generally been right in line with our estimates. They are genuinely weirdly good at this task. For the first time since I have been at St. Luke’s, things did not follow our forecasts, and we were looking at a grim financial situation at the beginning of December.

St. Nicholas of Myra Saving Pickled Children and/or Drowning Sailors

Friends,

I am shamelessly using this article around Christmas time for the third year in a row. I think I am a fairly unique but ultimately mediocre writer, but I really like this bit I wrote about St. Nicholas. I think about St. Nicholas often. Not just because we share the same name, rather because I think it is fantastic that he is still remembered, and remembered for being kind and being a man of faith.

-Nick

Money and the Church: Nuts and Bolts Addition

Friends,

On Monday at 11:30 the staff and I will be meeting at a restaurant where will have our little staff Christmas party and exchange white elephant gifts.

Those in attendance will be:

1. Yours truly: last year my white elephant gift was a jar of Marmite, which I quite enjoy.

2. Sue Bentley, our full-time parish administrator.

3. Kate Weber-Petrova, our ¾ time organist/choirmaster.

4. Stephanie Kaye, our ¼ time communications minister.

5. Rachel DeMarco, our ½ time facilities manager.

6. Genn DiFillippo, our full-time Day School Director (her position is funded by the Day School, but she’s an integral part of our church community).

7. Ara Stephens and Laura Moss, our ¼ time interim Christian Education Ministers.

8. Cecil Alan, our hourly sexton.

9. Kyle Munroe, our seminarian whom we do not pay a salary.

The End of Everything

Here is some prerequisite information:

· The Church year is divided into season, which each season telling a different part of our story of salvation. Each season is represented by a different color that shows up on the altar hangings and on my stole (fancy churchy scarf). After Pentecost is the “season after Pentecost”, which just means this is where they stick all of the lessons that don’t neatly match the other seasons. Some call it “ordinary time”, and it is honestly my favorite season. It takes up just under half the calendar year and its color is green. After this season is Advent, which marks the beginning of the next liturgical year.

Food From Furloughed Feds

Friends,

Last week a small group of volunteers mostly composed of St. Luke’s members were worked as federal employees and members of our outreach committee, filled three shopping carts up with the food and then packed fifty bags of groceries to hand out. We had an online sign-up where we invited anyone affected by the shutdown to sign up to receive some groceries. We threw in the extra bean soup mix from the pumpkin patch, and a church member donated some dog food as well. A few of us hung out for about three hours while people came to pick up their food on that Tuesday evening. Now that big push to do something to help those acutely affected is over, I am still processing everything we learned. Here are some of my take aways:

There will be snacks!

Friends,

There’s already an announcement about our Welcome Sunday event in the e-news, but I wanted to pause and give you some more thoughts on this event. First and foremost, I hope that you know this event is for you, if you are looking to get more involved at St. Luke’s or just want to know about about our community. It is clear that St. Luke’s gets a gold star for drawing people into Church, but we could do a better job of incorporating new members into the life of the parish.

Fall Wins

Friends,

Not just in this moment, but in the zeitgeist of our current culture, Fall is winning the seasons war.

Each season has its own benefits. I feel that I am in the minority that favors summer. I do not mind very hot weather, and I love the spending all my time outdoors. I am in the extreme minority in that I am occasionally skeptical of air conditioning. Winter speaks to those who love winter sports and enthusiasts for all things cozy. Spring is great for those who thrive off gardening and seeing the world come back to life. Of all these worthy seasons, Fall is king.

May the Gourd Be with You

Friends,

Pumpkin season is among us!

On October 11th a semitruck will arrive early in the morning at St. Luke’s and a small army of volunteers will unload thousands of pumpkins to sell in our grove. Our annual pumpkin patch is amazing on many different levels. The business model is a good thing unto itself. We work with a company called Pumpkin USA, who sources their pumpkins from the Navajo Nation, and we get to keep an increasing percentage of the profits based on the percentage of pumpkins we sell. We get to made money for our ministry, while benefiting the Navajo Nation and providing our local community with those amazing decorative gourds. So far, so good.

Sunday school

This Sunday is our Kickoff Sunday! This is when all our normal programming comes back to life, and this year we have a lot of new offerings. Elsewhere in the e-news you can find specifics, and I will resist the urge to go in-depth with each program, as I will not do as good of a job as Stephanie! Just know, that regardless of your age and interest, there will almost certainly be something for you. At 9:00 am there will be an open house with our offerings, where you can go and explore what is available and learn the ropes a little bit.

Falling is a Prerequisite

Friends,

As part of my wife’s master’s program, she read a study that measured people’s access to information and how informed they were. The first part of the results was not surprising. If you don’t have access to information, you were ignorant. The second part was quite surprising. The category of people with the most access to information showed similar levels of ignorance as those with the most limited access. I remember her telling me about the study and how interesting she thought it was. I hope I am not miss-remembering it too badly, but I believe I have the basics of it right. Regardless, how I remember the story has always resonated with me. It is when I am being bombarded with information, that I often feel the most powerless and the least composed. For me, this has been one of those weeks.

The White Water Damaged Whale

Friends,

As people of the resurrection, we have a complicated relationship with death and endings in general. Eternal life is a gift, and so is the precious life that we are given. Leaving one for the other was never meant to be easy, uncomplicated or overly embraced. Eventually all things come to an end, and we can mourn all sorts of things, even when new life is already sprouting. It’s ok to be excited and sad all at the same time.

Unexpected Blessings

Friends -

This has been the summer of unexpected blessings. As I shared on Sunday morning, I returned late Saturday night from the youth pilgrimage to Costa Rica energized by the experience but exhausted as well. I also returned to news of an unexpected and abundant blessing for our Parish.

Dinner

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.

Chores

I absolutely love the scripture that is assigned over the summer. We are in the gloriously ambiguous “Season after Pentecost”, or as some people call it, “Ordinary Time”, and this is where the powers that be assigned the great passages that didn’t fit into the themes of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Easter. Keeping in mind that scripture existed well before our seasons of the Church, it goes with reason that there are neglected themes and lessons that fall outside of the general framework in which we tell our salvation story. These fantastic parables, stories, prophecies, and teachings have found their way to this amorphous season, and if you join us on these hot Sunday mornings, you can also live into some of the lesser known passage from our sacred texts.

Routine Vs the Spark

You all got that last’s week’s article was completely produced by AI, right? I was trying to be all cute and I got ChatGPT to write a poem about me using AI to write my devotion while away. I even got it to generate an image of me on vacation, which I really hope you realized wasn’t me! I didn’t realize I was so vain until I saw what it thought I look like, plus fedoras are not quite my style.

Our trip to England and Wales was wonderful, exhausting, and spiritually edifying. We got to do fun touristy things, but our main goal was to go wedding for people we love, and to visit old friends. It was wholesome.

Bricks, Plaques, and British Weddings

I am in the final moments in my office before I leave for England for ten days for the purpose of attending not just one but TWO super fancy British weddings. I am excited and out of time.

Here are somethings for you to consider about our physical plant: