9 March 2024

Lessons from Sabbatical - Week 5

If I had to pick a word for this week, it would probably be “spaciousness.” It feels like this was the first week when I really found the spaciousness that I had hoped to find in this Sabbatical. I had time to get everything done that needed to get done and that I wanted to do without feeling rushed or pressed for time – picking up my new car, exercising every day, getting enough sleep each night, cooking, music practice.

 

One of my explicit Sabbatical goals was around resuming old spiritual practices or exploring new practices. Confession time: in March 2020, when the pandemic turned the whole world upside down, one of the casualties was my usual spiritual practices. Even though I knew that I needed them more than ever, I couldn’t quiet my mind and spirit to be able to sit with them. And then as the initial chaos lessened, I was out of the routine. This was the week when I was able to resume them. (Though I have always had a cat on my lap during my morning prayer time – first Lily and then Paka. Nuru is in the room with me, but she prefers to watch me from the cat tree or windowsill rather than sitting on my lap.)

 

My challenge is going to be figuring out how to carry this spaciousness with me when I return to my church duties. I know that the things that I’m finding in this spaciousness – prayer, sleep, exercise – make me healthier overall, and I don’t want to lose them.

 

 

Nuru, supervising morning prayer

from her perch on the cat tree

2 March 2024

Lessons from Sabbatical - Week 4

Grief, upon grief, upon grief.

 

Paka
April 1, 2007 – March 1, 2024

 

I adopted Paka from the Thunder Bay District Humane Society the summer after moving back to Canada from Tanzania. Lily (8 years old at the time) did better with another cat around, and since Ambrose had died while I was overseas, Paka joined our household once Lily had had a chance to make it her own.

 

Paka was the little grey kitten in a cage full of grey kittens who wouldn’t let me put her back into the cage.

 

She is probably the smartest cat I’ve ever been owned by. She taught me how to play fetch with her pompoms, but she never fell for the red dot of the laser pointer as she figured out right away that it was coming from the thing in my hand. She could open closet doors from the inside or the outside. Treats are reserved for an after-claw-trimming reward - usually by the time I finished trimming Nuru's claws, Paka would be sitting by the treat cupboard and I would trim her claws right there. In the pandemic, she discovered the joy of Zoom calls and livestreaming - I swear that she could hear when I pressed "go live" or "join call" on my phone or computer, and people on the other end learned to recognize her tail sticking straight up in the air as she jumped up on my lap.

 

 

She wasn’t a lap cat for the first half of her life, but sometime around her 8th birthday she figured out that laps were a good place to be, and then she would jump up on my lap as soon as I sat down. In the last year, she has moved further up my body, and her favourite place became tucked right under my chin.

 

 

My cats generally don’t eat people-food, but I occasionally snuck her bits of salmon which she enjoyed. Nuru also taught her, in the past couple of years, that yoghurt is a good thing. Her bizarre human food preferences were for unsweetened grapefruit and porridge. It’s going to be hard to make myself my usual Sunday morning porridge tomorrow without her by my chair begging to lick out the bowl.


 

Paka lived in more provinces than most Canadians. She was born in Thunder Bay (ON), moved with me to Kenora (ON) for 8 months when I relocated temporarily for work. She moved half-way across the country with me to Dartmouth (NS) when I went back to school in 2014. She moved all the way across the country with me to Chetwynd (BC) for my internship, and then she moved all the way back across the country with me when I accepted my call here in Nerepis (NB).

 

 

She had been failing over the past year and a half or so, and her vet and I were on the same page with respect to no invasive tests or interventions for my old-lady cat.

 

Right from when she was a kitten, Paka liked to sleep under the covers with me, curled up behind my knees. On the hottest nights of summer, she still needed to be on the bed with me, but fortunately not under the covers – just reaching out to make sure she was touching me with one paw. As she got more frail, she found it harder to move around under the covers, but she still wanted to be near me (and unfortunately gave me some bad scratches in the past few months, crawling over my head in the middle of the night, which usually resulted in her being banished from the bedroom for the remainder of the night). In the past couple of months, she would only try to get up on the bed once a week or so.

 

Last week, the night before I flew to Ontario for the week, was one of those nights. She crawled up on the bed in the middle of the night, and eventually settled down in front of the other pillow, and we had a good cuddle even though I had to get up early the next morning to catch my flight.

 

 

When I got home late Thursday night, she was clearly telling me that it was time, and so Friday morning I called the vet’s office. They had an appointment at 11:30 (with my favourite vet in the practice, no less), and the vet affirmed what I already knew. Shortly before noon, with assistance from the vet, Paka fell asleep in my arms, tucked into her favourite spot under my chin.

 

When I was making my sabbatical goals, I didn’t predict that so much of my time would be spent processing grief.

 

I went home from the vet’s on Friday, had lunch, and changed my clothes to go to Catria’s funeral (my next door neighbour who died a couple of weeks ago). I sat in the back row of the local Catholic church and let myself cry.

 

I cried for Catria. I cried for Paka. I cried for Alison (a friend and colleague who died on Ash Wednesday). I cried for all of the people whose funerals I have conducted in the past 5 ½ years (most of them people I cared very deeply for).

 

It was strange but good to be at a funeral with no responsibilities other than to grieve. It was good to have permission to let my sadness out. And there was so much comfort in the funeral liturgy, even though it was from a tradition not my own. The reassurance of resurrection. The call of “come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Fr. David spoke words that my heart needed to hear on Friday afternoon, even though I was a snotty mess through all of it.

 

Nuru knows that something isn’t right. She sometimes wanders through the house meowing, as if she is looking for Paka. But we are both going to be OK. (And when the time is right, there will likely be another feline joining our household.)

 

 

Grief, upon grief, upon grief. And yet there is a time for everything (one of the other readings from Friday afternoon), and so I know that this season won’t last forever. Lent will continue to unfold into Good Friday, and suffering will be replaced by resurrection. But for now, this season seems to be a season of moving through grief.

 


 

17 February 2024

Lessons from Sabbatical - Week 2

Week 2 was about grief. On Wednesday (Ash Wednesday, by some warped coincidence), I learned that a friend and colleague died, and I learned that my next-door neighbour died. And to add insult to injury, my car didn’t die, but it entered the palliative stage of life, which means that I’m also car shopping a year or so earlier than I had hoped. (To be fair, Prezley the Impreza has 290,000km on the odometer so doesn’t owe me anything at this point.)

I did break my church communication sabbath this week, as a couple of colleagues reached out to me to make sure that I had heard about Alison; and then I joined some of them on a video call on Friday night so that we could grieve together.

We, as people who deal professionally with grief, tend not to grieve well ourselves.

 

As Kendall observed, to have a video chat full of ministers and none of us had anything to say, in itself says how profound our grief is.

 

So I don’t know if this post is about “lessons” from sabbatical, but is rather “observations” about grief.

 

I am going to miss Catria. Conversations over the fence. A smile and wave driving past. A knock on my back door saying “I felt like a glass of wine but I didn’t want to drink alone.” And on top of that the most fabulous cat-sitter – Nuru, who usually doesn’t like having anyone other than me in the house used to roll over at her feet and ask for belly rubs.

 

God of Incarnation, hear my prayer; even when I don’t know what my prayer is.

 

 

“From dust you have come,

and to dust you shall return.”

7 February 2024

Lessons from Sabbatical - Week 1

Today was day 7 of a 3-month sabbatical that began on February 1. My primary goal for this time off is rest – it’s been an exhausting almost-4 years of leadership in a pandemic. The first couple of years of the pandemic were marked by a continual demand on creativity as we figured out how to do everything differently; continual vigilance as we monitored the public health situation and the always-changing public health restrictions and regulations; and continually holding any plans loosely as we always had to be prepared to pivot with short notice.

 

Two lessons stand out from this first week of rest:

 

1)   As much as I frequently proclaim that we are “human beings” and not “human doings,” this is easier said than done. Now that my only job is to be, it is really hard to ascribe worth to being rather than to doing. Letting go of the need to be productive is hard.

 

2)   The spaciousness of time. With only minimal demands on my time, I don’t need to be stingy with the minutes and hours of each day. Time is no longer a resource to be hoarded. I can let myself go to bed at a decent hour because I will have more time tomorrow to continue what I am doing tonight. I can give myself permission to do things that are fun and that make me feel good, like singing and exercising every day. My next learning should probably be around figuring out how to carry this spaciousness into post-sabbatical life, but for now I’m just going to enjoy it.

 

 

My supervisors, ensuring that I am resting!

28 January 2024

"The Church Will Be Churching!" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 28, 2024
Scripture Reading:  Deuteronomy 18:15-20


I know that I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but I do love the book of Deuteronomy!  Our regular bible study people are now experts on the book of Deuteronomy, as we’ve been meandering our way through the Old Testament and spent part of last fall in Deuteronomy.

 

To set the scene:  the Ancient Israelite people had been slaves in Egypt until God called to Moses out of the burning bush telling him that he would be the one to lead the people to freedom.  Moses went to Pharoah and demanded, “Let my people go!” After a number of wonders that God worked through Moses, the people were able to escape; Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea so that the people could cross safely to the other side and escape the Egyptians who were hot on their heels; and then the people spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness, learning to trust in God’s presence, learning to trust in God’s guidance, learning to trust in God’s provision.  Along the way, Moses climbed to the top of a mountain in the middle of the Sinai desert where God gave him the Law, beginning with the 10 Commandments.

 

Forty years, and a lot of adventures later, the people are perched on the banks of the Jordan River, about to cross over into the Promised Land – the land that God had promised to them and to their ancestors.  But before they cross, Moses stops the people and reminds them of everything that has happened since they left Egypt, and recites the whole law for them a second time, beginning with the 10 Commandments.

 

The punchline comes towards the end of the book – the part of the book that I especially love.  God, speaking through Moses pleads with the people.  “Look, I’ve showed you the way to life and blessings through following my commandments. Now choose life and abundance by following me – it’s right there in your grasp! Choose life!” 

 

(We’re going to stay in Deuteronomy today, but if you are curious about what happens next, and how long the people were able to do what God was asking of them, you can ask any of our regular bible study group!)

 

Now, with the part of Deuteronomy that we read today, we’re only about half way through Moses’s recitation of the law – we haven’t reached that exhortation to choose life yet. But Moses pauses for a moment to reflect on the current situation.

 

Keep in mind that Moses is 120 years old at this point, and he has been leading the people for more than 40 years.  God has also told him that he isn’t going to live long enough to cross the river into the Promised Land, so now that they are right on the banks of the Jordan River, he knows that his days are limited.  And in this section that we read today, Moses reassures the people that even when he is gone, God is going to raise up a new leader for them – God will raise up a new prophet for them from among their own people.  Not an outsider, but one of their own.  They won’t be left leader-less.

 

The lectionary that we follow gives us four readings for each week – one from the Old Testament, a Psalm, a reading from the Epistles or letters in the New Testament, and a reading from the Gospels.  And when I read through the options for today, and saw this passage for Deuteronomy, I thought to myself that this was the perfect reading for the Sunday before I begin my Sabbatical.

 

Because God is always raising up new leaders from with the people.  As I said in my Mid-Week Message on Wednesday, I am going away for 3 months with full confidence that Two Rivers Pastoral Charge will keep on churching while I’m gone. The church isn’t just about one person and what that one person does, but instead the church is about what all of us do, and about the shared leadership.

 

The church will continue to gather together to worship God. Different Lay Worship Leaders and clergy will lead worship. Our musicians will continue to lead the music.  The quilters will continue to quilt and the UCW will continue to prepare funeral lunches (though hopefully not too many). Ross will continue to encourage the church to share out of our abundance with Mission and Service; and Chris and the rest of Session will continue to pray for the church and nourish the spiritual life.  Bette, Anne, and the rest of the Church in the World Committee will remind the church to leave food in Ida’s Cupboard, and search out new opportunities in the world where we can serve our neighbours.

 

The church will keep on churching, because God is always raising up new leaders.  This is God’s church, and God will always equip us so that we can do the work of churching that God puts before us.

 

And so these words of Moses are a good ego-check for me this week, reminding me that it’s not all about me and re-assuring me that it’s not just OK to step back, but it’s good to step back for a time to rest, knowing that this is God’s church, and God’s got us.

 

And so I step away for three months, knowing that I will likely be a slightly different person when I return, shaped by my sabbath months; but also knowing that Two Rivers will also likely be slightly different then too, because this is a living church, and God is always raising up new leaders from among us to lead us in the new directions where God is calling us to follow.

 

And may we all have the courage to say yes when God is calling!  Amen.

 

 

“Butterfly Jigsaw Puzzle Underway”

by Christchurch City Libraries on flickr

Used with Permission

Together, we are even more beautiful than when

we are apart!

"Call and Response" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 21, 2024
Scripture Reading:  Mark 1:14-20


This week I was talking to someone about growing up with my sisters in rural Ontario. We lived at the end of a dead-end road, and there were a lot of families with kids on the road. Even though I was one of the older kids, age didn’t really matter and we tended to run around as a pack, usually with our bicycles. This was in the day long before cell phones, so when it was time for us to come home, either for supper or at bedtime, Dad would stand in front of the house and blow his soccer coaching whistle. When we heard that whistle, we knew that it was time to go home. And because we were generally pretty good kids, when we heard that call, we went.  (In fact, the only time I ever remember our parents ever grounding any of us, it was when my sister didn’t come home when she heard the soccer whistle.)

Dad called, and we responded.

 

Which is a cute story, but it ties in with today’s bible reading where Jesus is calling his disciples. As I read this familiar story this year, I started wondering – which is more important, the call or the response?

 

Usually when I read this story, I think about the act of calling. Jesus called those first disciples to leave their nets behind and follow him.  Usually I think about Jesus coming across Simon and Andrew and James and John as they are fishing in the Sea of Galilee, looking them in the eye, calling them by name, and saying “Follow me.”

 

Usually when I read this story, I think about how God calls all of us, and how we need to have our hearts attuned to God.  Usually I think about the times when I have sensed God calling me to something new, whether that was the first time I sensed God’s presence, telling me that I am their beloved child, or whether it was when I began to sense that I was being called into ministry… which was less like a voice calling softly in the night and more like an annoying itch that wouldn’t go away.

 

But this year when I read this story, I also started wondering about what happens after the calling.  In the story from the bible, we read about how Simon and Andrew and James and John immediately leave their nets, their livelihood, and their families behind and follow after Jesus.  I started wondering if the response to God’s call isn’t at least as important as the calling itself.

 

What would have happened if these first disciples hadn’t left everything to follow Jesus?  They would go on to become Jesus’s inner circle and leaders in the very earliest church after Jesus’s death and resurrection.  These fisherpeople from the backwater of Galilee would go on to preach and to teach and to heal and to proclaim the good news of God’s love made known in Jesus to crowds of thousands.  In fact it is Simon who is later renamed Peter about whom Jesus would say, “Upon this rock that is you, I will build my church.” Would we have a church today if these four hadn’t responded to the call?

 

I also wonder if Jesus ever called people to follow him, and those people refused.  Even these four in today’s story would have every reason to refuse. After all, they are leaving behind not only their families but also their means of providing for their families in order to follow after this itinerant preacher.  How many people heard a similar call and then said no?  But these four, we are told, left everything behind and followed him.

 

I do think that the response is at least as important as the call.  (Just ask my sister who didn’t respond to the call of the whistle!)

 

Which brings us back to our own calling.  Each one of us is called by God. Just by virtue of the fact that you are here today, God has called you.  Maybe that call happened when you were too young to know, maybe it happened in such a gradual way that it crept up on you without you noticing, or maybe you can pinpoint the hour and the day when God called you by name, saying, “follow me.”

 

And I think that what all of us do with that calling is at least as important.  We are called to be the church, as the new creed reminds us.  We are called to be the church – to celebrate God’s presence; to live with respect in creation; to love and serve others; to seek justice and resist evil; to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.

 

Our calling, as disciples of Jesus, usually isn’t to sit back and say, “OK, I’ve been called, that’s all.” Instead, we are called to a living faith. We are called to let the Holy Spirit work in us, transforming us into who God created us to be; and we are called to let the Holy Spirit work through us as we live out the mission that God gives to us.

 

God nurtures us on the journey – nurturing us through the sacraments, nurturing us through being in community with each other, nurturing us through worship, nurturing us through the different spiritual practices.  And then, with bodies and spirits nourished, we leave our literal or metaphorical nets behind to follow Jesus on whatever exciting paths we are called to follow, individually or as a whole church.

 

For the call is just the beginning, but it is the response that opens up new horizons to us – ones that we might never have imagined traveling before!

 

And may God give us the courage to answer the call with a resounding “yes”! Amen.

 

 

“The First Two Disciples”

by JESUS MAFA

Used with Permission


14 January 2024

"Turning Towards God" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 14, 2024 (The Baptism of Jesus)
Scripture:  Mark 1:1-11


I have a confession to make. I have to confess that on Thursday afternoon I wrote a sermon for today, and when it was three quarters written, I said to Elaine that what I had written was boring and I couldn’t figure out how to end it. Baptism itself is endlessly exciting, but talking about it isn’t necessarily. And this got me thinking about baptism, and what is baptism, and I remembered my Worship Foundations class at AST, and how, in the week when we were going to be talking about sacraments, our professor began the class by reading a passage from a novel to us. And so I thought that is what I might do this morning, instead of the boring sermon that I wrote on Thursday.

 

The novel is Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, and it written from the perspective of an elderly retired Congregationalist minister who, nearing his own death, is telling his life’s story to his son. I will also mention that not only is the narrator a minister, but his father was as well. The part that I am going to read to you comes from close to the beginning of the novel, when he is talking about his childhood.

 

“We were very pious children from pious households in a fairly pious town, and this affected our behaviour considerably. Once, we baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures that live their anonymous lives keeping the mice down and have no interest in humans at all, except to avoid them. But the animals all seem to start out sociable, so we were always pleased to find new kittens prowling out of whatever cranny their mother had tried to hide them in, as ready to play as we were. It occurred to one of the girls to swaddle them up in a doll’s dress – there was only one dress, which was just as well since the cats could hardly tolerate a moment in it and would have to have been unswaddled as soon as they were christened in any case. I myself moistened their brows, repeating the full Trinitarian formula.

 

“Their grim old crooked-tailed mother found us baptizing away by the creek and began carrying her babies off by the napes of their necks, one and then another. We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal. So finally I asked my father in the most offhand way imaginable what exactly would happen to a cat if one were to, say, baptize it. He replied that the Sacraments must always be treated and regarded with the greatest respect. That wasn’t really an answer to my question. We did respect the Sacraments, but we thought the whole world of those cats. I got his meaning, though, and I did no more baptizing until I was ordained.

 

“Two or three of that litter were taken home by the girls and made into fairly respectable house cats. Louisa took a yellow one. She still had it when we were married. The others lived out their feral lives, indistinguishable from their kind, whether pagan or Christian no one could ever tell. She called her cat Sparkle, for the white patch on its forehead. It disappeared finally. I suspect it got caught stealing rabbits, a sin to which it was much given, Christian cat that we knew it to be, stiff-jointed as it was by that time. One of the boys said she should have named it Sprinkle. He was a Baptist, a firm believer in total immersion, which those cats should have been grateful I was not. He told us no effect at all could be achieved by our methods, and we could not prove him wrong. Our Soapy mut be a distant relative.

 

“I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time. I don’t wish to be urging the ministry on you, but there are some advantages to it you might not know to take account of if I did not point them out. Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing. You are simply much more likely to find yourself in that position. It’s a thing people expect of you.”[1]

 

I love this passage now, even more than I did the first time I heard it, almost 9 years ago, and not just for the humour in the image of those children by the creek with the kittens and the mama cat desperate to retrieve her babies. I love how it describes baptism as a blessing, baptism as the power of acknowledging the sacredness that is already present.

 

I don’t think that baptism is either a beginning or an ending – instead I see baptism as a pivot-point, or as a moment of turning. One of the biblical scholars I listened to this week talked about how baptism is a turning towards God, who is always turned towards us.[2]  Baptism doesn’t make God love us more – God’s love is always there, but instead, with our baptism, we turn towards and acknowledge that ever-present love.

 

We read about this with Jesus’s baptism. This happens right at the very beginning of his ministry – he is turning towards God and accepting the calling that had always been there.  And the same is true with our baptism – whether you were baptized as a baby or as an adult, at your baptism, promises were made by you or by your parents or guardians, turning your life towards God.

 

If you were with us last week, either in-person or online, we talked about all of the different ways that God communicates with us, and baptism is one of those ways. At each and every baptism, we turn towards God, and God says, just as God said at Jesus’s baptism, “You are my child, my beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

 

May each one of us know in our hearts, that this is true. Amen.

 

 


 



[1] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, Toronto: Harper Collins, 2004, ebook.