Pastor Alice

Message for July 2007

I readily admit it. At least most of the time. Sometimes and in some situations, I get defensive and reluctant, but most of the time I’m the first to admit that I have as bad a case of I‘d-rather-do-it-myself as any I’ve ever seen.

Maybe that sounds presumptuous of me to say. Why should I pretend to come out on top of the pile? It’s just that it comes so naturally to me. Instinctive almost. I’m so used to multi-tasking that I don’t even think to let someone help. I saw myself do it again just the other day. There I was, holding the backpack under one arm, holding the water bottle between my knees, so I could open it with both hands and pass it off to my friend, that I didn’t even see the friend’s outstretched hands – ready to help, wanting to help. That’s okay. I’ve got it taken care of. Before that, there was the day that I was driving, opening my package of chicken strips, setting them on my lap, reaching for the honey mustard sauce (I don’t have any idea where I was going to put that), while my peripheral vision failed to register the pair of outstretched hands suspended to my right. And those are just a couple of the times I’ve been aware of. Or that have been called to my attention. How many others have I been oblivious to as I trip along in my efforts to balance and manage and take care of things the best I can – by myself?

Part of the problem with that is that something important gets lost in the process: community. Cooperation and collaboration. The connection that can follow carrying a load together. The laughter that can be born in shared foibles and mishaps. The accomplishments that increase exponentially when 4 hands (or 10) rip through projects it would have taken 2 hands all week to work through. Better ideas emerge, ownership and investment are shared. It’s amazing how at the end of a cooperative effort, instead of having one exhausted and bruised person, there may well be a multitude of energized and enthusiastic people. Sure, there are projects that take deliberate care and concentration. Not everything is done better by committee – some things need to be worked through alone. But not as many as we tend to think. Just because there’s only room for one set of hands in a tight corner, doesn’t mean there aren’t other parts of the room where others can be working. Sometimes I need a quiet open space to let myself think and listen in order to create, but if that’s the only place I work, I miss out on a whole heap load of friendship and laughter and support and community. Those are mighty precious gifts to spend a life missing out on.

One of the reasons I think of all this now is that our country is about to observe another Independence Day and I worry about that. Sure, I celebrate our national freedom from dictatorships and oppression and outside rule as fully and enthusiastically as anyone else. But I tend to think we’ve gone overboard in declaring we can do it by ourselves. Whether it’s treaties we refuse to sign or alliances we consider skeptically or national interests we promote at the expense of other nations or the deep agony of others that we overlook because it doesn’t effect us personally enough, I think there’s a heap of cooperation and community we’re missing out on. Just think of the creative solutions we could create if we worked together. The starving children and AIDS orphans we could protect and shelter. The planet we might save if we pooled our resources.

I can’t promise to overcome my independence affliction overnight, but I do promise to try. Will you try too? And while you’re considering that, could you get the door for me? Peace, my friends.

Message for June 2007

                        When you plow, don’ lose yo’ track, cain’ plow straight an’ keep a-lookin’ back,
                        Keep yo’ han’ on that plow, hol’ on.

                        Keep on plowin’, and don’t ya ti-yah, Ev’ry row goes high-ah, high-ah!
                        Keep yo’ han’ on that plow, hol’ on.

                        If you wanna get to heaven, I’ll show you how, keep yo’ han’ right on that plow,
                        Keep yo’ han’ on that plow, hol’ on.

                        If that plow stays in yo’ han’, head you straight for the promis’ lan’,
                        Keep yo’ han’ on that plow, hol’ on.

Since you can’t hear the amazing harmonies and rhythms that are playing in my head, those words may not work for you. For me, they represent Alice Parker’s arrangement of a wonderful Spiritual that the group I sing with has been doing recently. But more than that, they are words I keep coming back to. I referenced them recently with a person whose life is being inundated with surgeries and unemployment and unexpected medical emergencies and academic woes. Hol’ on, I said. I think of the person who talked about trying to mow the lawn in a straight diagonal line, only to get most of the way across and look back – to a very unstraight line. To which I said, cain’ plow straight an’ keep a-lookin’ back. Pick a tree, a stone, a landmark ahead of you – and hol’ on!

And I think of this congregation. Very honestly, I came away from the Annual Meeting feeling pretty beaten up. I heard in that room a lot of pain, a lot of frustration, a fair amount of anger. We wrestled together with a budget that no one liked, and no one really knew what to do with. Some motions were made to cut it, but nothing passed. Some suggestions were made about increasing income but nothing was adopted. I can’t describe the pain I felt at listening as tears described a cut in income and an increased pledge and the unsustainability of it all. And I went home saying, some leader you are! Help them! Lead them! If I’d let myself, I might have gone so far as to say, fix this – but I know that’s not my job. My job is to hol’ on. Keep my han’ on that plow, keep our eyes on the goal, keep all of us headn’ straight for the promis’ lan’. We’ll find the way. I know we will.

I’m not going to pretend to you (because then I really wouldn’t have any credibility) that we’ve fixed it all, but I can’t begin to tell you how much better I feel now, nearly a month later. Two days after the annual meeting, I received a phone call from a parishioner asking if I had a few minutes. When the person arrived, I was handed a $5,000 check along with the words, this might help the budget. Since then, I’ve listened deeply to some of the pain as well as some of the hope. I’ve spent two days in a training seminar that offers us an amazing path toward tackling the restoration of our 238 year old treasure of a building. I’ve seen us working together at a celebration of Dena’s life, dreaming about and critiquing our observance of Advent and Christmas Eve, designing a new ministry to welcome folks with more openness and grace, laughing in hysterics at the antics of children, crying together at the horrible death of a person in the midst of chemo. And still the words echo on. Hol’ on! Hol’ on! We are good and faithful people, and God is indeed leading us. Keep on plowin’, and don’t ya ti-yah… Keep yo’ han’ on that plow, hol’ on.

Message for May 2007

I just got off the phone with Shelley Thompson, a reporter with the Eagle Tribune/Derry News. Dena Spofford died early Monday (April 23) and her obituary is running today (April 25). Because of that, Shelley is working on an article that pays tribute to Dena, and called and invited me to tell stories and reflect for a bit about her. I wondered if she knew what floodgates she was opening, but she’d already talked with several others about Dena, so I’m sure she did. She also told me about having spent two days with her a few months ago in relation to a Pinkerton piece she was doing, so she had her own stories and memories to bask in. At some point in our conversation, Shelley said to me, Dena really loved that church. To which I could only say, And this church really loved Dena!

What a gift she was. What a legacy we have to celebrate. The list is endless, from office volunteer to Deaconess to Apple Pie Festival chairperson to Sunday School Teacher to Treasurer and Assistant Treasurer to newsletter collator to breakfast dining room worker to Se-Lo-Ki member to doughnut maker to quilter to weathervane gold leaf guilder to maker and deliverer of Thanksgiving and Christmas baskets. And those are just some of the ways she gave to the church. To say nothing of the ways she served Parkland Hospital and the community as a whole. To say nothing of the people who found welcome and shelter and warmth in her home.

Those positions and roles say a lot, but they don’t describe other aspects of this woman. The one who, just recovering from a mastectomy, went to Florida and Disney and got in line to ride the roller coaster. The attendant there could tell she wasn’t feeling all that well and asked if she was sure she wanted to go on; to which she snapped, I certainly do – and proceeded to tuck her glasses safely away and climb aboard. Or the woman who had an accident that knocked out a couple of teeth; rather than bother a dentist with her little problem, she crammed the teeth back into place where they healed on their own. You have to have a few of those sorts of stories to get a feel for the Dena that this church loved so much. Or the kind of fingerprints she left all over this church.

Something exceptional has happened in and to this church in the past 6 weeks: we have and are saying farewell to two of our treasures. Last month’s newsletter carried a tribute to Don Houston, who had been a member here for a month shy of 61 years. This month we give thanks to God for Dena, a member for 42 years and 7 days. They were born on opposite ends of 1915 – and what a pair they were. While they served in very different capacities, their impact was similar: huge and profound. We have been truly blessed, shaped and molded by them, their wisdom, their leadership, their stories, their humor and the deep vein of faith that ran to the very core of their lives. We have countless other good and strong and gifted leaders in this church as well, but there was a unique quality to the gifts these two people brought to our life together. Gifts for which we need to give God thanks and praise. Gifts which we need to grieve, celebrate, affirm, learn from and preserve. Gifts that we need to pass on to those who will come after us. Gifts that we can’t hope and shouldn’t try to replicate, but on which we can build and grow.

Join with us on May 12 as we gather at the church to celebrate Dena’s life. Join with us in the months ahead as we carry on the legacy of faith these two have left us. Peace, my friends!

Message for April 2007

Tony Bruno is a great guy who has worked for the Town of Derry at Forest Hills Cemetery for 30 years. He’s been doing a countdown now for longer than I remember, but finally he’s reached his date of retirement – he’ll be done before April begins. Tony came to the church office the other day to say thanks and farewell, and dropped a couple of numbers that caught my attention. This winter, the frost in the ground descended 41 inches. So far this spring, the first 8 or 10 inches have thawed; but below that, they have to use an air compressor to dig a grave for a casket burial. And I thought we’d had a mild, almost non-existent winter!

Rather than point out to you that the frost wouldn’t have burrowed so deeply if we’d had a respectable amount of snow (I really am ready to let visions of winter go for another 9 months), these facts prompted me to feel compassion for the daffodils that are beginning to poke their heads out of our lawn. What they have to endure if they’re going to blossom! And as I hear their story, they really do have to endure that 3 to 4-foot block of ice for some number of months in order to produce their blossoms every spring. Try to short-circuit the process, bring them inside to bloom, and we might get one round of yellow sunshine, but they’ll give everything they have to furnish us with the burst of color. They are nurtured in the cold and frost and dark and deep. It’s where they’re fed and restored, repaired and rejuvenated for repeated cycles of beauty and life.

I know that we like to short-circuit the brutal cold of winter and the long wait for spring when it comes to things like daffodils, tulips, and narcissus. But even more than that, I sense that most of us, if we have a choice, feel some inclination to bypass other times of cold and places of darkness. In fact, April opens with one of the seasons where the short-circuit temptation is most luring. We can begin the month with the parade and fanfare of Palm Sunday and celebrate Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem. One week later, we can come back for another festival, this one the unprecedented, unfathomable mystery and miracle of the empty tomb. Two majestic celebrations in a row! How exciting is that?

And yet. And yet, at the very same time, how much do we miss if we leap-frog over the other 6 days of Holy Week? We miss a banquet of bread and cup, of broken body and outpoured blood. We miss the pounding of nails through flesh, true. And the nasty taunts of the crowds, the bitter betrayal of a best friend as he tries to save his own skin, the lonely agony of weeping alone while a ragtag company of companions catch a few zz’s. But if we skip out on those pieces of the story, we also miss the offering of a love that knows no bounds and sets no limits; the gift of inclusion and embrace to someone who has no right to those gifts; a power of life that simply cannot be stopped or quenched; a promise that no matter how bad, how ugly, how hateful, how hopeless, God has yet more grace and truth and life and love to offer. If we skip out on the nastiness of Jesus’ final week, we just might miss out on knowing a companion’s presence in our hardest, darkest days.

Many years ago, I was given a Ben and Jerry’s bumper sticker that said, “If it’s not fun, why do it?” I’ve never been quite sure how I feel about that question. While I’ve rarely been accused of being light-hearted or carefree, I do love to have fun. And life is way too short to squander it being miserable or bored. But is fun the highest priority of a life of faith? Maybe there’s also a hard truth that needs to be named in love. Or integrity that begs to be honored. Or a challenging knot that needs to be taken on until it’s untangled and the strands pulled free. Or a wrong that needs to be made right. Sometimes there’s cold and dark and hard and deep that we need to pass through to get to a joy that is deeper than fun, a love that is richer than laughter, a beauty that is more than one season long. A clump of daffodils that bloom year after year beside an empty tomb.
Peace, my friends.

Message for March 2007

Orbitz called me before we left the church, so we knew our departure from New Orleans was delayed. That helped prepare us for the message on the self-check in kiosk: because your flight is delayed, you will miss your connecting flight; please see a ticketing agent. After a moderate wait in line, the 6 of us crowded around an airline agent, who was soon joined by a second. Together they typed and looked and murmured and searched for a flight with 6 seats and a connection that would return us to Manchester before midnight. Somewhere along the way, their murmuring began to include us, and one of them said, we’ve been dealing with snow for 5 days and have had enough. When we acknowledged that folks at home had been fighting a nor’easter while we were freezing our butts off in the south, one of them raised her arm over her head, commented on the depths of our snow, and said she marvels that anyone would ever tolerate or subject themselves to such horrific weather. To which I replied, I’ll take a blizzard any day over your weather! The reply bounced back to me, you may have a point, what have we had… hurricanes, tornadoes, locusts, pestilence – any other plagues that can come our way? Which was when I asked about frogs…

It seems clear to me that it’s all about perspective. Where one sits, how one looks, what one values. You tell me the groundhog saw his shadow, and I may say, only 6 more weeks? Are we going to be shortchanged yet again or finally have a respectable chance for some winter? I hear that it is finally warming up in Florida and the temperatures are reaching into the 70’s and I reply that it’s warming up here too – into the 30’s (never expecting it to even glance toward the 40’s). You want to vacation in the south and soak in the sun, while I will virtually always head north and toward the mountains – any time of year. Low interest rates are great news for people who are borrowing money and bad news for those who are trying to make money. Some people want a worship service bursting at the seams with people, pulsing with energy and rocking with spirit; while others crave quiet and calm. It’s all about where we sit, how we look, and what we value. It’s about perspective.

It occurs to me that one way to approach the season of Lent is to seek to ground ourselves in God’s perspective. As much as it pains me to admit that that set of questions probably won’t rotate around things like the weather, I do believe it’s so. God’s perspective is much more about issues of faithfulness and justice and wellbeing and wholeness than about the weather or sports teams or clothing or any of the countless other things we obsess over and let ourselves be distracted by. God’s perspective means growing in faith, practicing disciplines of prayer, asking the question of what is right and not just what feels good or is convenient. God’s perspective means asking how others are affected by my decisions, my actions, my lifestyle. And yes, though it’s not a question I ask often, God’s perspective probably means asking, What Would Jesus Do? Lent is a season for focus and clarity and faithfulness – whether that means giving things up or taking things on. It’s a season to open ourselves to the perspective of love and service and costly discipleship that are uniquely God’s.

See you on the journey, my friends. Peace.

Message for February 2007

There is currently a group of 12 or so gathering on Sunday evenings to study and discuss the book What's Theology got to do with it? Convictions, Vitality and the Church, by Anthony B. Robinson. I'll admit to being more than a little relieved when Debbie Gline Allen accepted leadership for the chapter on the Trinity (I get the one on sin, so I didn't exactly escape unscathed). I've been part of more conversations on the Trinity than I can count, and they've varied from blank stares to arguments about how Jesus can't be God to attempts to dismiss the whole concept since it's much more a creation of the church than a biblical teaching. And I'm always haunted by memories of the Sunday years ago when I used the sermon time to engage the congregation in dialogue about the Trinity, and it resulted in what one member referred to as a "Stump the Pastor" session. I like the ways Robinson helps to explain the Trinity, and I really liked an exercise that Debbie led us in, but what I want to lift up here are the observations and concerns the book raises about what happens when a congregation focuses on one Person of the Trinity over and against the other two.

He starts with questions about what it means to focus on God, often experienced as the Creator - of history, nature and cosmos. This God is beyond us, our ability to understand or control or name or really know. It's relatively easy to say we believe in God, in fact a lot of people do it; but what do they or we mean by that? From that sort of open, undefined place we're left ourselves a lot of freedom and room to define (or not) what God means for us. Robinson suggests that in doing that we run the risk of

…a faith that keeps God so vague as to be almost anything from sheer sentiment, to a love of nature, to personal conscience, or to seemingly noble ideals… Jesus gives content to the term God, as well as asking something more specific of us. That can be uncomfortable! Sometimes dealing with a vague God or a concept of God is much easier than with a particular life and way of living. (pages 71-72)

And for me, the most challenging statement of all: "We pay lip service but not life service to God. God remains distant, vague, and unrelated to our business as a church." (page 72)

From there he goes on to consider congregations that focus primarily on Jesus, often starting with the question: Is Jesus your personal Lord and Savior? While that question has power and worth, as Robinson says, it also feels like code language for defining membership to an exclusive club: are you in or out? It's also about a very personal relationship, perhaps to the exclusion of others.
Our code language seems to be an attempt to capture and control the living God, to reduce God to our limited understandings and experience. In this sense, Jesus can become too personal. Jesus, and thus God, is reduced to the dimensions of my heart, my personal experience, and my salvation. The God of the vast cosmos, the grand sweep of history, and the complexity of nature somehow seems to disappear in favor of my very personal and often quite individual God. Moreover, without adequate emphasis on the Spirit, this type of faith seems to reduce Christianity to a once-and-forever salvation experience, not an ongoing life of faith. (page 73)
The believer tends to be preoccupied with salvation as eternal life, with quantity of life rather than quality of life. And has a much more individual focus than care or concern for the neighbor whom Jesus called us to love.

Congregations become unhealthy when salvation is reduced to the merely individual. There is too little sense of church as a people of God and a new community. Individuals and souls are saved, but what of the redemption of communities, cities and the creation itself? (page 74)

And then there's the focus on Spirit over and against God and Jesus. In this case, the focus tends to be a concern for what gifts a person has been given or possesses. Gifts of healing? Speaking in tongues? Miracles? In First Church Corinth, believers tended to focus on their own spiritual experience while they ignored or overlooked others, both the needy and those who experienced God and faith differently.

Congregations are unhealthy when people so prize their own spirituality that they grow blind or indifferent to the presence and the needs of others, particularly those whose experience may be different than their own. Factionalism and dissension are often the result. (page 76)

As I sift through all of these options, I keep coming back to a phrase of a hymn text by John Bell: "One God in community." We need the three persons of the Trinity every bit as much as we need each other. The God of nature and creation and history who rules over the cosmos and moves mountains and is everywhere and knows everything and holds all power. And the God who came in the person of Jesus, who walked the streets and hillsides of ancient Israel, who responded in certain ways to specific pressures and demands, and both asked and expected a great deal from followers and who cared passionately about the needs and hurts of the people with whom he came in contact. And the God of Spirit that sweeps in and gives life, fills cowering hearts with courage, offers vision in the midst of clouded confusion, whispers peace in the presence of turmoil, sustains and nurtures and carries us along as we seek to be faithful.

Those are brief snippets of a larger conversation, one in which I hope we will continue to engage each other. Exploring our faith helps us to examine our individual lives and our life together as a congregation. I pray that in the days and weeks ahead, the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, will be more and more visible and present in all that we do as the people of First Parish Church. Peace, my friends.

Message for January 2007

            What can I offer, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.
            If I were a wise one, I would do my part; but what can I offer: all my heart.
                                                                                                Christina G. Rossetti, 1872; alt.

The Christmas season is filled with music and stories with a similar message: giving of ourselves is the most precious gift. In the midst of the hoopla and fanfare of the pre-season build up, it’s easy to focus outside ourselves. Storming the malls, scavenging the internet, stumbling upon hidden treasures in the back of out of the way stores, we scour the countryside for the perfect gift for everyone on our list. Or we succumb to that easy way out that truly does offer the recipient maximum flexibility: the gift card. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, it’s a joy to connect the people we love with the gifts we know they want or that will delight them with new adventures and opportunities. But now that we’ve moved into the second half of those wondrous twelve days, have picked up the clutter of wrapping and ribbon, begun to catch up on our sleep, cleaned the kitchen and started to catch our breath, we can also turn our attention to the question of giving ourselves. How? And where? And to whom?

One of the most visible during the month of January will be through the Stewardship campaign. This year’s theme of “Loving God Back” offers an especially provocative opportunity to help us reflect on the ways in which we give our love, our gratitude, ourselves. Yes, our gifts of money to the church are one invaluable and essential way that we do that. We can’t do what we’re trying to do as a church without our gifts of support. We also love God back through our times of service and outreach, whether in the kitchen or as a member of a board or teaching church school or fixing a leaking faucet or mailing notes or offering a ride. We love God back for all that God has done for us when we pray for others, open our homes and hearts to those in need, chaperone a youth outing, lift our voice in joyful song. It’s been given to us from a generous, loving God. Who are we to hoard it or store it up for safe keeping? Let’s love God back by generously loving others and sharing from our abundance!

Another rich and precious way we can give of ourselves is through things like the upcoming service trip to New Orleans, or working on the home of a family in Alstead, or even a person in our own community who has been identified for us through Community Caregivers and who needs a helping hand if he is going to be able to stay in his home. I don’t consider myself a hands on repair type of person, but there’s nothing quite like getting down and dirty for the sake of someone else who has suffered so much and who is deeply grateful for whatever I’m willing to offer.

Of course, there are the little things. I remember the day a neighbor showed mercy and used his snowblower to do away with my daunting task of clearing the driveway. Many of us have been deeply touched by the ministry of presence – those blessed times when people simply show up and are with us. No words, trinkets or acts are needed; presence is the gift that matters. A phone call, a warm hug, a shy smile, a card that says I’m thinking about you, a playful email. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive or formal or time consuming. Giving from the heart and giving of ourselves is the best and most loving thing we can do – even beyond the 12 days of Christmas!

Happy gift giving, my friends. And peace.