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Dear People of Christ Church,
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Tomorrow is the end of this long Advent journey, with John the Baptist and Mary and all the rest. From Alicia’s Children’s sermon about how God makes straight the crooked places and makes the mountain a plain, to Bishop Alan’s time with us reminding us that “bedlam” and “Bethlehem” have a lot in common, we have traveled some distance.

We will, I imagine, never come to Christmas Eve after the journey of Advent and find ourselves completely ready. Whether it’s the unsent Christmas cards or the charity requests piling up, or the present list that’s not been written, much less checked twice…there is often so more to do. And yet, and yet, Christmas comes anyway. We spend all of this time with John the Baptist being told to “prepare the way” that we forget that God can travel on the bumpiest of roads. That’s what God does. Neither our negligence nor our faithfulness will speed or delay the unfolding of God’s time.

So today, rather than continue with more words, I invite you instead to take a breath. (If you want words, there will be a Christmas editorial from me in the Waltham News Tribune tomorrow, based on this last week’s message about our many Gospel stories). Now, take a deep breath. Imagine that God has already received every offering you have to give—your kindness to God’s people, your attention to the “least and lost,” your worries, your fear. Because when given to God, even your fear is a gift—God so wants to be able to care for you, and came to be born with us for this.

Blessings,
Sara+
P.S. I’m experimenting with putting sermons online—if you missed last week, it’s on Soundcloud. Hopefully Christmas Eve will go up tomorrow night, too!

Dear People of Christ Church,
For this year’s Advent series, we tried something new, an intergenerational Bible Study. From week to week, we looked at the different stories of the origins of Jesus Christ—the traditional nativity story in Luke, with the manger and the shepherds, the cosmic Christ through whom the world came to be as described so poetically in the Gospel of John, the beginning-that-is-no-beginning offered by Mark, who just launches into Jesus’ ministry with not a word about where Jesus came from. And, of course, Matthew, who gives us Joseph’s dream and the visitation of the Magi.

Each Gospel is written from a different perspective, and each one teaches us something different about who Jesus is and what God desires for us. Each time we met for our Advent conversations, we asked the question: what if this were the only story we had? What if we had magi, and no shepherds? What if we had the manger, but no cosmic poetry?

The fact is, we need all of these stories.  We need them all because we need to spend some time with different emphases—we need the cosmic Christ to remind us of God’s intimacy with the world, always and from the beginning. We need the birth of a messiah heralded by outcast and dirty shepherds, Mary a pregnant teenager with no place to stay, to remind us that God always goes to the places of powerlessness. But we also need Matthew, to tell us that Jesus is a King in the line of David,  that Jesus comes in “majesty and awe,”  too. The kings of this world aren’t the only ones with gold and frankincense.  We need the jolt of imagining God in a manger, and the familiarity of imagining the kings visiting Mary in an ordinary house.

God speaks to us in many different ways.   Whether Jesus is born indoors or out of doors, or whether the Gospel gives a story of his birth or not, the wisdom of our tradition has invited us into all of those different realities. God’s truth, even within Christian teaching, is varied.  And how much more do we need to remember that as we, with Mary, “ponder in our hearts” God’s working in the world in other faiths.
God speaks however God will, whenever God will. God speaks shepherd as well as king. God speaks more languages than we can know.

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
Whenever I send out the e-crier during Thanksgiving week, I always share the litany from the prayer book for thanksgiving—for a secular holiday, Thanksgiving is a very theological idea. The other thing I always share at this time of year are resources around end of life issues. We live in the shadow of the cross, but the light is cast by resurrection—our faith gives us a freedom to consider our death as a time when “life is changed, not ended,” so we can be brave in discussing these questions even if the wider culture tells us it’s “morbid” or “negative.” It’s real, and pretending we won’t die does not make it so.

Every summer, our own Rob Atwood, a social worker for hospice care, and I lead a conversation about planning for the end of life. What kind of medical interventions do you think you want? Who is authorized to make those decisions for you? What hymns shall we sing at your funeral? Answering as many of these questions in advance as possible is one of the greatest gifts you can give your loved ones. The guide Rob and I put together is here, and there will be print copies in the entryway narthex on Sunday.

Some other resources:

MOLST Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment is a Massachusetts state document that presents clear and concise summaries of choices that are made at the end of life; this is filled out by a patient in cooperation with their doctor

A 2013 WBUR story on home death care has fabulous information. One of the people they interview likens it to the choice for a home birth as not right for everyone, but still a right that everyone has.

The Conversation Project was founded by journalist Ellen Goodman and has locals like Liz Walker and Donald Berwick among their advising team, has great conversation starters and a “starter kit” you can download to get yourself thinking about what you want for the end of your life.

Finally, the Litany for Thanksgiving…
Let us give thanks to God for all the gifts so freely bestowed upon us.
For the beauty and wonder of your creation, in earth and sky and sea,
We thank you, God.
For all that is gracious in the lives of your people, revealing the image of Christ,
We thank you, God.
For our daily food and drink, our homes and families, and our friends,
We thank you, God.
For minds to think, and hearts to love, and hands to serve,
We thank you, God.
For health and strength to work, and leisure to rest and play,
We thank you, God.
For the brave and courageous, who are patient in suffering and faithful in adversity,
We thank you, God.
For all valiant seekers after truth, liberty, and justice,
We thank you, God.
For the communion of saints, in all times and places,
We thank you, God.
Above all, we give you thanks for the great mercies and promises given to us in Christ Jesus our God;
To Christ be praise and glory, with you, O Father, and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever.

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who are making our annual stewardship and roof campaign possible. From stewardship co-chairs Heather and Chris Leonardo who have invited us into our dreaming and reflecting on our past, present and future, to Michael Mailman reminding us of how the light comes through the windows and Jonathan Duce presenting us with the shingles that had blown off the roof, to Doug telling us the story of our 2011 campaign and how his family had just joined, and how far we’ve come since then. I spoke in my sermon about how our building is a container for grace—how this is a place where transformation happens. Whether people coming for AA, or Chaplains on the Way contemplative prayer, or REACH’s trainings on elder violence or yoga for survivors, or each one of you, your imagination caught by some indescribable something that reminds you of how God is present and moving in your life—750 Main Street is a place where things happen.

This is a place where things happen for us and for our city. Where the hungry are fed at Grandma’s Pantry, the wet baby gets dry at Diaper Depot, and our Sunday School classes invite our children into times of wonder and joy at the stories of God’s living Word.

Our 2011 campaign is on track—bathrooms and carpets and parking lot are all being funded and rolling along, but to avoid jeopardizing all of that good work we need to attend to the roof. When he started working here last summer, Daniel, our music director, didn’t know that it sometimes rains over the organ! So there is much to do, and so many people passionate for the work of God who are doing it. If you weren’t in church, please check out their videos on youtube. I’m also sharing a recording of my sermon here.

Finally, I can’t let this week go without offering some words about the current moment in our country regarding Syrian refugees. The fact that a Syrian passport was found near one of the terrorist’s bodies after the attacks in Paris has led fully half of US governors, including our own Charlie Baker, to say that Syrians are not welcome in their states. Not only are the vetting processes for refugees coming to the United States among the most stringent in the world, to single out a single nation as somehow more suspect than any other is simple intolerance. You can read their whole letter here, but let me close with these words from Christian leaders across the state, including our own bishops Alan and Gayle, as well as Mass Council of Churches Executive Director Laura Everett:
Refugees do not bring terror, they are fleeing from it.
As Christians we try to live our lives in accordance with Jesus’ Great Commandment—to love our neighbors as ourselves. We want safe homes, the freedom to worship, stable governments and opportunities to thrive. Our Syrian neighbors desire the same. Our faith also teaches us to welcome the stranger. Syrians seeking refuge, as well as the Somalians, Bhutanese, Iraqis, Central Americans and others, are neighbors worthy of our welcome and in need of our care. Our nation is founded on this welcome. We must make sure that we do not allow fear to overwhelm us, crowd out our compassion, or fundamentally change our character. We refuse to live as a Commonwealth scared of those unlike us.
Amen, Amen, Amen.

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
Last Sunday, parishioner Maria Aleman invited us to think about our “big dream” for Christ Church. She talked about how delighted she and her wife had been to find a community where they could ground their marriage in their faith. She talked about how Christ Church reaches out into the community in welcome and love. She said her big dream was for us to be a place for learners—where a school could ground people in love of God and love of knowledge. Or a place for newcomers to the US who need to learn English, to offer support and instruction for those in need of new skills. She talked about her big dreams. What are your big dreams?

A colleague of mine recently described me to someone as the priest from “the diaper church,” because we are known for our outreach to families in need. When I first started working here the parish used to hold 4 rummage sales a year, taking over the whole lower hall for months at a time. Our “white elephant” room was well known around town. I once received a phone call from someone asking, “Is this the church where you come and get people’s stuff when they die?” Indeed we were. We’re also the senior food pantry church, the church that has a Ugandan Church, and “the big stone church.” Those are all ways that we’ve been known, and are known. How do you know us?

Maria’s talk got me thinking about how my big dreams have changed over the years. When we started planning our work on the entryway narthex and our tower in 2011, we learned that the whole structure was unstable, from the floor of the narthex to the cross at the top—at that point, the big dream was that no one would risk bodily injury coming to church! Those dreams were dreams I never even imagined we’d need to tackle—and while it sounds modest to dream about a secure building, in the year 2015 it’s actually not. Waltham has said goodbye to Immanuel Methodist and to the Evangelical Covenant Church, both beautiful, historic churches that were once part of the lifeblood of our town. The Episcopal Church in Wayland closed last summer, and we’re receiving the Stations of the Cross from St John the Evangelist, which closed this fall.

So, yes, my dreams do include the stability of our building, because I love what other dreams it makes possible. My big dreams are of a place where everyone knows that God loves them, that Christ can be found in every single person. My big dreams are of a place that gets to be the church that really, truly welcomes everyone, where you walk in and think, “Wow, something is happening here that is getting me curious about what God might be doing in my life.” My big dream is of a place where you can lose yourself in transcendence and awe and then walk out the doors and remember that Jesus is hanging out on the park bench as well, not only met in bread and wine. My big dream is that we can remember that, to paraphrase the prayer book, we come for “strength, as well as solace, for renewal, as well as forgiveness.” My big dream for Christ Church is that we become a place where we take risks together, knowing that Christ’s heart beating in us makes us strong. My big dream is that wandering toddlers bless us all with their sense of freedom while elders bless us with their wisdom and generosity.

What’s your dream?

Blessings,
Sara+

P.S. Here’s the link—apologies for the cut off! (watch here).

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I’m delighted to share that our Tuesday night education for all ages went off swimmingly, with about 15 of us gathered for dinner, conversation (both a kids’ section and one for adults), and Eucharist. We all looked at the same lessons from the book of Kings—the adults with text and the kids with felt and wood. We heard about the prophet Elijah, as he was fed by ravens, supported by a widow, and imparted his “Spirit” to Elisha, his prophetic successor. Godly Play defines a prophet as “someone who comes so close to God and God comes so close to them, they know what God wants.” I am not a prophet and I’m not sure who in our world now I’d offer that appellation, but I know that the prophetic call is part of our faith, even if we wouldn’t adopt that identity. To be close to God and listen for what God wants—both for the world and for ourselves.

In Scripture, there’s a unity between the prophet and God’s desire—God’s desires become their desires. And, maybe, their desires become God’s desire. God provides, not always as they might want, but as God wills. Someone in Tuesday’s conversation laid it straight on the table—“Am I really supposed to believe this?” That someone lived in the wilderness and didn’t starve because the birds fed him? That the widow who gave him her last morsel of food had a miraculous bag of flour and bottle of oil that never ran out? Here, as I often do, I find it’s helpful to hold the meaning of “belief” a little lightly. I believe in the wonder of a God who makes something out of nothing, in ways both small and great. I believe that, as we remembered the prayer of St Francis on Sunday, “in giving we receive,” and that each of our small generosities add up to something enormous and holy, something that’s only possible in community. I believe in a world in which three women at our service for domestic violence month could get up in front of the church and speak the truth about their experience, that they were done wearing masks or pretending things were fine. That going forward is not the same as “moving on.” That those who are hurt by violence and evil can respond with love, kindness, and generosity without giving those who hurt them the last word. These are all prophetic tasks, whether or not those who embody these graces would claim that title for themselves.

So yes, yes I do think we can believe it, but maybe more in the traditional Latin sense of the word credo, rather than the usual sense of the English. Credo means “I give my heart to.” Sometimes it’s intentional, choosing to invest ourselves in something bigger than ourselves. Sometimes we slip into it, like falling in love unexpectedly. And sometimes it’s something like faith, where the answer is sometimes yes, and sometimes no, but step by step we walk the path together.

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, I write with a mixture of joy and sadness. Joy at the amazing gift of the ten year anniversary of ministry celebration on Sunday—truly, it is a marvelous gift to be your priest—and sadness, with the death yesterday of Christ Church friend Paula Tatarunis. Paula had been on a complicated road of recovery from an AVM in her brain that came to light in February, and had been in various states of consciousness since then, almost recovering in April and having a setback when her brain began to bleed in a procedure intended to prevent future strokes. Paula was a brilliant, creative, dedicated, thoughtful, and just generally remarkable human being. She went from lurking in the back pew to being in charge of the altar guild in about five minutes, and helped to keep the choir together in some pretty lean times. She read everything from classical and medieval theology to inter-church debates over Anglican polity with the same intellectual fervor, humor, and some skepticism. She was a doctor at the clinic at Lawrence Memorial in Medford, but had also spent time as a “jailhouse doc” at MCI Norfolk, with a deep passion for justice for the men who were incarcerated there. Paula never rested on anything so simple as tradition or custom in her own spirituality, but was unfailingly dedicated to embodying the wider church tradition, setting the altar with a military precision pretty impressive for someone who was more of a pacifist.

Over the years, Paula came to find that she and Jesus were working through some differences that felt irreconcilable to her. The amount of translation she found herself needing to do to be in church was just too much. The mystery of God for Paula was silence and stillness, out taking pictures of dead weeds. God was harder to find for her in the particularity of Jesus and the practices of the church. We emailed off and on throughout her sojourn away—she was always still wrestling, always still seeking. Last December she came one Sunday and as we were emailing afterwards said it felt good, but that she felt like her vocation was in the outer darkness. She had so much light, though. It was a privilege to be her priest and a daunting wonder to plan her funeral for this Saturday.

I don’t know how other clergy do it, but I fall in love with each of you every single time, and it’s always bound for heartbreak. I cry at your funerals and your baptisms, just astonished at the grace of God and the fleeting nature of it all. This, of course, is the way of the cross—it’s the shape of human life that loss and grief weave through unbearable beauty. One of the graces of the time of accompanying Paula through her journey these last months has been getting to know her husband, Darrell, who, though he dismisses himself as an “agnostic Jewish heathen” shows a love for his wife so deep I can only see God there. The way of the cross is the way of life, as, too, resurrection. Whatever Paula finally thought about the theology of the Trinity, I am so sure that Jesus was just as in love with Paula as those of us who were blessed enough to know her in her life.

Services for Paula will be at Christ Church this Saturday at 1pm, with a larger memorial service with poetry and jazz planned for late October.

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I’m thinking about stuff, preparing for our blessing of backpacks—and phones, ipads, briefcases, brooms, and whatever else you use to make the magic of your work or school happen. Things surround us—books and papers and clothes and dishes and whatever else. On the one hand, I do my best to try to feel unattached. I remember my time this summer in the stark, empty beauty of the Utah red rock wilderness, “needing” only everything I could carry five miles into the woods. Listening to Scripture—Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.—I try to extend this to clothes and books and whatever else I get distracted by.

On the other hand…there can be a thin line between being anti-materialistic and falling into the trap of our disposable culture. Lose one water bottle? Get another. Computer slowing down? You’ll just need a new one soon, go ahead and get it now. It’s just stuff. I recently read Marie Kondo’s book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and it’s 100% materialistic—but in a very careful way I really appreciated. The author is Japanese, and it’s grounded in kind of a Shinto spirituality that asks where you’ve come from and how you want to live your life. After you figure that out, how do your possessions support you in that? If your sister gave you a sweater that you hate and every time you see it hanging in your closet you remember how she doesn’t really know you, it’s time to let it go. It has fulfilled its purpose of being given, and you can say thank you and goodbye and stop feeling bad every time you see it. The question is whether things spark joy. If not, let them go with gratitude. It goes perhaps without saying that in the face of the rampant disrespect for human beings evinced in the European refugee crisis (and some of the toxic language in the US around immigration) that the question of our materialism is pretty minor.

Of ultimate importance or not, in the Christian tradition, we do have a long legacy of blessing things. It’s not 100% heretical to think that our things can bless us back, that God is able to be present with us as we encounter the world around us. I don’t know what Marie Kondo would think about the special candelabrum to be used on St. Blaise’s Day (February 3), for blessings throats. But the material world is important. Jesus was resurrected in his body, and famously told Thomas to put his hand in his side. Our bodies are holy. The earth is holy. These are material things, and they matter, though as with all things the invitation is to keep perspective, not to confuse the thing that helps point us toward God with the immaterial unsayable true nature of God.

Our material surroundings are part of the story of Christ Church, too. In seminary there was an expression that always came up in our liturgics classes: “The building always wins.” You can try to make the most airy, contemporary and laid back liturgy, but if you’re doing it in a space that has more in common with a cave, it’s just not going to happen. But things still grow and change. The building of Christ Church has been as much a living thing as the congregation over the years—it’s changed and grown. In 2006 we put in the freestanding altar in memory of Bob Hughes Sr, and the cross that hangs over the high altar was a gift from Muriel Nurse in memory of her mother. She told me the story of how she and Father Bill had chosen it out of a catalog and “hoped for the best” waiting for it to be shipped from England. 42 years later, I think it still works.

So our building, and our community, continues to grow and change. See the announcement from vestry below about the Stations of the Cross—another decision, another opportunity to say “yes” to something new or “no, that’s not right for this place.” Please let us know what you think, and don’t forget to bring your backpack or gear for work or school this Sunday!

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
I’m delighted to be back writing in this space again, and so grateful for our ministry together as well as the space for reflection and time away. Thanks to senior warden Victoria Sundgren and junior warden Sasha Killewald for holding down the fort when I was away, and especially for Sasha’s kind words in this space two weeks ago about my work! Parish ministry really is a strange and wonderful, and most particularly, shared thing. Christ Church didn’t belong to Frederic Fales, the first rector of Christ Church (though our parish halls are now named for him), and it doesn’t belong to me. The ministry of this place belongs to God, and we individually and jointly are honored to participate in it.

This year when I was away, I found myself returning to the idea of wilderness. Much of our vacation this year was in Utah—canyons and red rock wilderness that stretches for miles and miles and miles, climate and landscape totally unlike the northeast. Mostly we hiked, and mostly the beasts of the wild kept to their own corners—except one backcountry trip when a rattlesnake got too tail-shakingly close to 5 year old Adah and we woke to find that a mountain lion had been through our campsite. Creation is a complicated place—we humans imagine that we are at the top, but it’s not that simple.

One of the most striking experiences we had over vacation was visiting first Mesa Verde National Park, and then the Ute Mountain Tribal Park just over the border in New Mexico. Both are home to literally millions of artifacts of the ancestral pueblo people who lived in the area between around 650 and 1300. We toured cave dwellings and pit houses with guides from the National Park Service Mesa Verde and with a Ute guide at the tribal park, and the views of history are so different. At the Ute Tribal Park, the artifacts were scattered around. Black and white pottery sherds were in mounds not far from the side of the road, exposed to wind and rain and, even more perilously, eight year olds. We picked through them and found our favorite designs. At Mesa Verde, artifacts like that were behind glass—old-style museum history, not living history. The National Park Service guide talked about the astonishing mystery of why such an archaeologically advanced culture would pick up and leave—maybe drought, maybe warfare, crop failure or over hunting. The Ute guide just said that it became clear to them that it was time to leave, so they left. It was time. They were supposed to go at one time, and supposed to leave at another. Allowing the artifacts be where they were was part of honoring the past.

Planning fall liturgy with Daniel, our director of music, our relationship to the past is a living question. Instead of potsherds, we have prayers. We worship a living God who moves in our lives today, but our forms are 2000 years old. How often do we sing the traditional Gloria, how often a more contemporary song that praises God in different language? How do we “sing to the Lord a new song” (Psalm 96) in our lives today?

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
I’m writing late this week as I get everything ready to leave for vacation. Clergy in the Episcopal Church are blessed with good long chunks of vacation—no three day weekends, but four weeks a year to take whenever I want is pretty great. Time for conferences, retreats, and education, like Wild Goose Festival where I traveled a few weeks ago, is separate. It’s great for me, but it’s also great for you—Revs Anne and Norm, who are each taking two weeks in my absence, are totally different preachers and thinkers than I, and after ten years of me rattling around in that stone building it’s important to get me out of my enclosure once in a while. My family and I will be backpacking and camping the National Parks of Utah and Arizona, so if any pastoral emergencies come up the very faithful and capable clergy of Redeemer Lexington, Revs Kate and Andrew, will be on call. I’ve got one more Sunday, though, until I’m away, so I’m looking forward to being with you this week. The Gospel is a blockbuster—in John’s version of the Feeding of the 5,000, Jesus walks on water right afterwards. One miracle isn’t enough.

Meanwhile, vestry and I have been having some great conversations about what we’d like to work on for 2015-16. I’ve been working on my own goals as well—I’d like to focus more on structuring my work time for better preaching preparation, and I want to try having regular open office hours at Café on the Common. As I get drawn up into ideas for activities and programs, though, I keep pulling back and remembering what the actual mission here is—the mission is not the program or the attendance at whatever Tuesday event is happening. The mission is the reconciliation of all people with God. If Tuesday night programs help out with that, terrific, but if they’re not, then we should do something else.

So then the question is:
What do you want to do next year?
From the beach or the mountains or Moody Street, wherever you find yourself this summer, take a few minutes to imagine with each other over time and space. I’ve created this google doc to be a big whiteboard—anybody can write on it (no google ID necessary). Throw out all your ideas, sign your name or not, just use your imagination. In the Gospel passage we read last Sunday, Jesus taught the people who gathered “many things.” What does he want to teach us now? What does he want us to teach each other?

Blessings!
Sara+