Pastor Lucy

Message for July 2007

On All Our Graduations….

It seems right, somehow, that graduations fall at this time of year.  As Alice discussed in her sermon last Sunday, this is the church season we have started to call “ordinary time.” The liturgical color is green, representing life and growth.  And the last few days have felt like one of those science movies in which plants can be seen to grow in fast forward.  In fact, Bob and I have a large shrub outside one of our windows, and if we don’t watch it, it may crawl right in.

As I saw the First Parish graduates stand up in front of the church and as I saw Emily and her class participate in graduation at Beacon High School, I couldn’t even begin to untangle the emotions I felt.  A kaleidoscope of images, shifting, swirling, moments in time, of sadness, of joy, of a simple exchange of words, of pride, of fear.  These all combined within me as I watched these seniors begin to take on the mantle of adulthood and move on to the next stage in their lives. 

So many of you remember these seniors as infants and I have known them now for a good part of their growing up.  That is the privilege of being church:  to be with others and to witness lives over a very long period of time.  The present we share contains the past we have known together and the future we might move into together.  This is nothing short of a miracle in our fast-paced world of constant change.

Relationships that happen over years’ time allow us to see people in ways that are just not possible when what we get are snapshots.  When we see people as people who are growing and changing as opposed to static, we are allowed a much clearer window into who they are.  It’s true that our minds tend to want quick identifications.  It’s true that we often want to be able to deal with others by saying, “oh, she’s the one who…..”  Kaleidoscopes can be so much harder.  It can be so much more difficult to allow ourselves to see different parts of people at different times.  To allow different parts of people to come forth, even if those parts haven’t been visible to us before.

Message for June 2007

Evangelism?

It’s not a word we mention a lot around First Parish.  There’s a certain discomfort associated with it.  Maybe even a feeling of queasiness.  It’s just not how we seem to define ourselves or our relationships to those around us.  We seem to speak with a different vocabulary.

So I was somewhat taken aback when I looked at the literature for the annual meeting of the New Hampshire Conference of the UCC, the annual gathering in June of pastors, delegates, lay people from UCC churches all over the state.  The key note speaker and presenter is the Reverend Martha Grace “Gay” Reese, author of the recently published book, Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism.  I have to say, it sparked my interest.

I opened the first couple of pages of the book and found this definition of evangelism:  faith sharing.  That didn’t seem too intimidating.  She wasn’t asking me to knock on doors.  She wasn’t asking me to stand on the street and hand out pamphlets.  She wasn’t asking me to be a televangelist. 

Faith sharing:  it’s something I do fairly regularly with those I know share a life in which faith is central.  But what about those the popular media seem to refer to as “the unchurched?”  Am I able to share faith when I have never before shared this arena of life with someone?  I’d have to answer honestly that I have some difficulty with that.  We have been talking a lot about “hospitality” and “welcome” around First Parish Church a lot lately and rightly so.  But how do these words relate to evangelism?  Do they relate?

God acts in our lives in ways subtle and sometimes not so subtle.  As I was musing over these issues, I was reconnecting with an old friend.  She has a good life with her husband and two children and has developed a successful career as a financial analyst.  But life has been changing for her.  She described to me this internal pull, almost like the pull of an ocean tide, deep within her.  She spoke of a restlessness, a desire for change, and didn’t know quite what all this meant.  She had been reading spiritual books of all kinds, taking meditation courses and exploring various faith traditions.  I listened to all this, but I have to admit I felt a bit reticent about sharing my own faith for fear of being intrusive.

But then she took the initiative.  Right in the middle of a meeting we had both gone to, she turned to me and said, “I have to talk to you.”  She said, “I’ve been reading the gospels and I want to know something.  I want to know why Jesus thought God had abandoned him on the cross.”  I was in awe of her directness.  Her hunger for faith poured out of her and opened my own floodgates. 

Jesus said, “feed my sheep.”  How do we in the UCC do this in our own particular way, not imitating the ways of others, but finding our own paths to faith sharing?  And yes, even to evangelism.

Message for May 2007

“A vision without a task is a dream.
A task without a vision is drudgery.
A vision with a task is the hope of the world.”
Anonymous statement found in a church in Sussex, England, from around 1730.

Why is it so hard to hold things together?

I’ve been aware lately how much my mind runs away with me.  If something is this way, it can’t be that way.  And if this is true, then that can’t be true.  Maybe my mind is smaller than I would like to think, but holding lots of conflicting statements in it can feel downright uncomfortable at times. 

Psychological counseling often deals with what can be named “thinking errors.”  Let’s see.  There’s all or nothing thinking.  (Either life is terrible or it’s ok.)  There’s black and white thinking.  We’re all familiar with that, I think:  the difficulty of making room for gray.  Or, to put it in a more spiritual context:  for fuchsia or magenta or lavender or grass green.  And then there’s the old box we can find ourselves contained in when we are advised to “think outside the box.”

The management guru Peter Senge talks about vision and reality.  He talks about how we tend to focus on one or the other, how hard it is to hold both.  We tend to be either vision people or realists by nature.  And when those two types of people try to discuss an issue, it can be very difficult not to become polarized.  The vision people tend to think the realists are stuck in their ways.  “We’ve never done it that way before.”  And the realists tend to think the visionaries are just, well, unrealistic.  They don’t have any sense of the way things actually are:  they’re in denial.  Both those characterizations may be somewhat true when one pole exists without the other.

But Senge talks about a rubber band.  He asks us to imagine the vision/reality question as a rubber band we have wrapped around our hands.  When we pull our hands apart, the rubber band is taut.  Not only that, but it vibrates with possibility.  It is music in its most formative stage:  think of a guitar, piano, or violin string.  Vision and reality, when held in this taut configuration with one another, vibrate as well with creativity, with passion.  But let go of one pole or another, let go of either vision or reality, and the rubber band becomes a shapeless mass on the floor.  Neither vision nor reality can exist without the other. 

As a pastor, I sit in many meetings at First Parish.  And some can be really difficult as we hammer out such things as the church budget.  But as I listen, and sometimes participate, I find myself really proud of our congregation.  We are full of both visionaries and realists and many (probably most) of us who are combinations of the two.  But as we work God’s purpose out among us, it seems to me that most of the time, we are faithful people ready and willing to hold that rubber band taut and to make music together. With Love, Lucy

Message for April 2007

Holy Week Thoughts

 Death and resurrection.  It’s a little bit hard to contemplate, to say the least.  We go on doing our normal routines, living our normal lives, and it feels as though suddenly we bump up against something monumental, totally incomprehensible.  I must admit that I often dread Holy Week.  It’s not just the work involved for me as a pastor.  It’s much more.  It’s as if this is an insurmountable barrier I have to face in my life, one which has the temerity to place itself in my path, year after year.

Yes, I know Holy Week is good news.  That I can appreciate.  In fact, that is something I base my life on, something that I hope to base my life on more and more as I try, with God’s help, to grow in faith.  But still.  Growth in faith seems more manageable, more of a day to day undertaking.  But this is different.  It confronts me.  It rises as if out of nothing and seems to demand something from me I’m just not sure how to give.

I have spoken before of Martin Smith, one of my favorite spiritual writers, and how he seeks to respond to Holy Week.  For him, it is like Niagara Falls.  It is like that thundering down of water – the waters of baptism magnified.  Water so loud we can’t even hear own inner voices in its proximity.  Water so powerful that, if we are not careful, it will catch us up, take us where it wants.  Maybe even kill us if we find ourselves too close to the edge.  Scary stuff, maybe even life -threatening stuff.

Smith’s response to this water-thundering Holy Week is to try and stand at its edge, thinking that he might be able to hold out a thimble in his outstretched hands.  His hope is to try and perhaps catch a bit of the mist.  That’s as close as he feels he can get.  Holy Week, he says, is about awe.  And we do ourselves and the power of Holy Week a disservice if we think it’s something we can absorb in one big gulp.

In many ways, the image of the thimble appeals to me.  It feels like a way we can at least begin to approach this death and resurrection.  As I reflect on Martin Smith’s words, I often think about the root of the word “resurrection,” which is “re-surge.” I try to lift my thimble by reflecting back in my own life to those times when, suddenly and mysteriously, I have felt a resurgence of life when I had thought there was none.

But somehow this year, I’m in a different place.  Maybe it has to do with where I am in my own life as this year’s Holy Week comes around again to confront me.  This year, I feel a yearning for the power of Holy Week to overtake me.  I want Holy Week to come as it will, without my having to reach for this part of it or that.  I want to feel the water thundering over my body, yes, even to drown me.  Because maybe, if I can enter more fully into Jesus’ death, I can enter more fully into His Life as well.

Message for March 2007

“Where the wild things are….”

Dear Friends,

As I write, Lent has just officially begun.  Last night I found myself watching some of the Mardi Gras celebrations on Bourbon Street.  The newscaster commented that the celebration would go on until midnight, at which time Lent would officially begin.  It felt as though the ball would drop on Bourbon Street, just as it does in Times Square each New Year’s.  All those wonderful costumes and masks, all that wildness, now giving way to a somber season.

It’s almost like teaching a class of children – or even adults, for that matter.  When the class is full of energy which may begin to go over the top, a wise teacher might have everyone stand up and do jumping jacks or run around the classroom.  I remember advice I was given for my son when he was in about 3rd grade and had trouble settling down to do his homework.  “As soon as he gets home from school, have him run around the house 5 times.” 

That’s how I’ve tended to think of Mardi Gras.  Get all that energy out of our systems so we can settle down to the real business of this very disciplined season.  I think I should have raised questions on both counts.  If my son had so much energy, why shouldn’t I have been able to pay attention to that energy, see where it led?.  Why did I need to suppress it?

And Lent.  Lent is “where the wild things are,” to quote Maurice Sendak’s wonderful children’s book title.  Mardi Gras is only a shadowy glimpse of things to come, of what Lent might bring us.  Just look at Jesus.  We hear those words, that “Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.”  (Luke 4:1b-2a)  We hear them, but do we really hear them?  Or have they become tame with years of repetition, like a rock worn down by the sand and salt.  I wonder.  Are the jagged edges still there for us?

Lent is a time of encounter.  It’s a time of becoming aware of parts of ourselves that might be lurking in the closet or under the bed.  It’s a time of really trying to look at those parts of our world that we have been blind to or have even consciously avoided.  It’s a time of entering into a more real relationship with God.  And like any relationship, this one will need to involve all of us if it is to be meaningful.  Not just joy or reverence or humility.  But outrageousness, and unrelenting questioning, and raising of our fists in anger.

If we dare, “let the wild rumpus begin!”

Message for February 2007

Where are we going…….?

Hi all. What strikes me as I write this newsletter article is a feeling that I am surrounded by conversations about where we are going.  This comes partly out of my own life.  There has been what feels like a major change in Bob’s and my lives over the past few weeks.  Emily is now living on her own – in a house with a number of roommates – and Bob and I for the first time are beginning to feel like empty nesters.  I know this term can be very short lived:  we are not making any changes to either Geoffrey’s or Emily’s room.  But we’ve been thinking, both consciously and underneath, about what’s next.  Our lives will take on a different form, but what will that look like?

As some of us have discussed, both Christmas and New Year’s bring on these discussions for so many of us.  With Jesus’ birth, what is it that is coming to birth in us?  With the secular turning of the calendar pages to January 1, what changes in our lives do we feel need to be made?  These discussions are not just personal.    There are so many national conversations going on as well.  It feels as though we are at such a critical juncture.  The future of our involvement in Iraq is on everybody’s minds and the State of the Union address is tomorrow night.  We see candidate after candidate declaring themselves as contenders for the 2008 presidential election, each with a differing take on where we need to go.

Such conversations have certainly been happening around the church as well.  The questions have been coming up in a lot of different ways.  But each of them seems to me to be a symptom of a much more basic question.  Where are we at First Parish Church going?  Where should we be going?  There are the financial issues.  There is the upcoming congregational meeting around whether or not we should sell the parsonage.  There is the planning group – a subcommittee of council – which has been gathering for almost two years now, mostly trying to sort out how a planning process in the church might take shape.  Where are we going?  Where should we be going?

We can think of Jesus as knowing exactly where he wanted to go.  He seems to have had such clarity about himself and his life.  It can seem sometimes as if he didn’t really have to struggle with questions of identity, of mission, of purpose.  Somehow, we may find ourselves thinking he was born knowing such things.  We journey with him, year after hear, from his birth, through his baptism and the beginnings of his ministry, through the increasing conflict generated by his life and ministry, to his crucifixion, death and resurrection.  The shape of his life can seem so clear to us sometimes that we can forget what it was like to be inside that life.

Jesus did struggle.  He went from a clarity of identity at his baptism – “you are my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased” – to the depths of struggle, of unknowing, of being beset by powerful forces of all kinds during his years in the wilderness.  Later on, there were times when he found himself changing his mind in response to the world around him.  His was not a certain clarity he could always count on for answers.  Like all of us, he struggled with who he was, who he needed to be, where he was going.
 
Jesus’ struggle was holy.  Can we think of our own struggle as holy too?

Message for January 2007

A Christmas Gift

Last week I received a wonderful letter.  It was from the uncle of one of our middle school youth.  He said that they had wanted to give their niece a check for $100 for Christmas.  But she had requested that, instead, the money be sent to the church for the Santa fund.  I was so touched by this donation.  I spent a good bit of time thinking how I would respond.

Then, yesterday, I received a call.  It was from a woman who lives in Derry who had just received a court-ordered eviction notice.  She needed to be out of her apartment by January 5th.  She makes $9 an hour, has no money saved, and needs to pay medical insurance for herself and her son of $200 a month.  She had talked to the Bedford Housing Authority and Rockingham Community Action and thought she might be able to get a security deposit for a new apartment.  But she said her 7-year-old just wouldn’t get any Christmas and that she herself had no money at all.

I listened to her for a long time.  And I debated with myself.  I knew I could offer her food vouchers or a place to stay through the Derry Clergy Association fund.  But that just felt like a drop in the bucket.  I also knew that I could offer some money through the Pastors’ Discretionary fund.  But usually we like to write checks for a specific purpose and what she clearly needed were some general purpose funds to tide her over.  I wanted to help her but I knew that part of that help was to ask the hard questions.  How was she going to begin to make a real shift in her financial situation?

And then the thought came.  Somehow I knew that the donation from our youth was meant for this woman I had never met except on the other end of a telephone line.  The donation had been given in trust that God would put it to good use.  And God had sent this woman in need.  God had directed her to our church, giving her the courage to call up and ask for help.  Later, in tears, she told me how hard that had been.  When I said we could offer her the $100 to tide her over, it was as if the load she had been carrying was lifted right off her shoulders.  Suddenly the burden was shared.      

Without sharing any names, I told her the story of where the money had come from and that’s when the gift started to seem miraculous to her.  She told me she could imagine the giver.  She could see and feel the teenager who wanted to give of herself to others.    And in that way, the gift took on human shape and form for her.

That’s why God came to us in Jesus, I think.  That’s why God comes to us in Jesus.  To show us what love looks like.  To give love kind eyes, a beating heart, calloused hands that work so hard for others.  To give love the shape of a youth and a woman in need - meeting at Christmas.