Look here for updates on cancellations and other news related to the coronovirus outbreak.
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
Friends,
It is one of those weeks where I have a lot of unrelated things I would like to share with you. Some of them are relevant to the ministry of the Church. Others are just my musings. So here we go:
Pumpkins
By the time you read this, the patch will be closed! Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for making this possible. Whether you were there unloading the truck a few weeks ago, or worked a shift in the patch, you help create fertile ground for community, memories and families to grow. This is the first year that we’ve taken this on where the primary beneficiary of the patch will be our Outreach Committee. The funds will be used to support people and ministries in our local community. Many of our immediate members and Church members are facing financial uncertainty with the government shutdown, and I am pleased that our Outreach Committee is working in partnership with me and some of our furloughed feds to provide relief as feds and members of our military will soon be missing paychecks.
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.
On Sunday I was surprised that several dedicated St. Lukers did not know I always try to keep a jar of pickles from the farmers market in the pockets hidden in my vestments. This has been a thing for a while, so I thought I’d get us on the same page.
Whenever I greet a newcomer, I pull out the jar of pickles, give it to them and thank them for joining us. They almost always say something like, “What’s this?” I always respond sincerely with, “your welcome pickles, of course. We are glad you are here!” After a moment of silence and uncomfortable eye contact I add, “The pickles are homemade and the best I’ve had. Come back next week and let me know what you think!” You’d be surprised how effective this strategy is. Over the summer when a family returned to church after checking us out the previous week the father told me it was because the pickles were that good. He was deadpan and his delivery was perfect.
Friends,
Right now we are a dog family. I would like to get a cat in a year or so, but even if I will that negotiation, we must always have a dog. One day we may be a dog and cat family, but we must remain a dog family.
After Leandra and I were married on October 11, 2014, I was determined to get a dog as quickly as possible. My family had dogs growing up, but I craved to have my dog. The following May Leandra and I found a dog on the local shelter’s website that we fell in love with. Her name was given as “Danny” and she was a shepherd/husky mix and had beautiful heteroochromia (two different colored eyes) and one ear that went up and the other down. We were smitten.
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.
Over the summer, I championed a new nursery space. My desire was to have the nursery incredibly close to the sanctuary and for it to be as transparent as possible. Knowing that I could have easy access to my baby and for the space to be incredibly transparent to all would have made me more comfortable as a new parent. The space was beautiful, and I believe that everything was very well thought out. We have had record attendance the past two Sunday, the nursery got a ton of use, aaaaaaand it didn’t work out the way I had planned.
Just over a month ago someone died where I used to live, and rumor has it, by his own hand. He and his followers made my family feel intensely unsafe, and they wouldn’t let it go. I wouldn’t let it go either. More often than not, I feel like my approach was well-handled given the circumstances. I do have regrets, but not many. Since I received the message about his death, I have felt an odd cocktail of emotions. Relief, sadness and the temptation of vindication. I am relieved that he won’t be harassing anyone anymore. As with any bully, he was sad and wanted everyone else to be as miserable as himself. This is undoubtedly a sad story with a sad ending. A part of me wants to feel vindication, because maybe this is evidence of his own misery and my own righteousness, but this is immature and silly. This has nothing to do with me. Someone died, and this is a sad story.
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.
St. Luke’s has a unique tradition around Labor Day that I have come to adore. The Sunday of Labor Day weekend is a time to celebrate the ministries done by the laity, and a member of our congregation gets invited to offer a sermon. I get a Sunday off from preaching, and much more importantly, the congregation gets to hear the spiritual reflections from someone who typically sits with them in the pews. I am downright excited to hear Amanda Wallingford offer her sermon at the 8:00 and 10:00 services. The timing is quite poetic, because as I write this, a small crew of people (Lisa Maple, Richard Maple, Richard McFarland and Rachel DeMarco) are hauling everything back into the kitchen from a deep clean that Amanda organized in conjunction with Pawfectly Delicious. If you are not in the know, Pawfectly Delicious, is a non-profit run by different-abled adults that make dog treats. They share the use of our kitchen on Tuesdays and Thursdays to make their treats and create community, and they secured a grant to have our kitchen deep cleaned, and it looks gorgeous. The Church is busy with the labors of our members, and it is the ministry that we share that keeps the Church alive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.