Category Archives: sermon

all saints

Posted on by
2

dad paver

Every year the church pauses to name the saints who are no longer physically with us.

This year we will be shepherded into and out of worship by bagpipes. The blast of sound will serve as a musical rupture of the thin veil separating the living from the dead.

The service is so very alive. We name church members who have died in the previous year and project their faces onto our screen as we savor the ways they have blessed and changed us.

This year our church has been changed by 20 deaths. While the grief around their passing is so very real so too is the pleasure of saying their names and remembering their being.

The seminary that I attended offered an opportunity to memorialize beloveds through buying a paver for a newly finished chapel courtyard. Since my father was for a time adjunct faculty at UTS and since my heart longs for places and times where his name can be in the hearts of the now, it felt so good to create a reminder that once he was, even as he still is in the hearts of many.

And of course during this thin veil time, I wonder about my own death and the day when it will be my face on the screen, my name on the lips, my being bookended with birth and death dates.

Poet Mary Oliver asks : “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Tomorrow we name those who answered that question every day they were given.

And so it comes to us.

How is it we plan to enter fully the wild and precious gift that is life?

Mindfully or no, we live our answer.

waves

Posted on by
3

I thought I was done, except in a bittersweet way.

Preparing for a sermon this past Sunday, I was thinking a lot about heritage and the presence of the unseen guests at all of our Thanks Giving tables.  The text had to do with a faith forewoman so it gave great opportunity to consider witness and how it sounds through the ages.

I had my sermon set to go and had the perfect ending for it.  Some thirty years ago, my dad was interviewed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  It was a column about Thanksgiving and in it he reflected upon being a pastor and the gratitude he felt about being able to love and be loved wrapped in community.

The long ago article ended with a Thanksgiving prayer.  It hangs on my refrigerator at the cabin.  I knew that Leah was there and could relay it to me.  Except that she didn’t have her phone on.  As the night dwindled and there was no word, I knew that I was not going to be able to speak words written by a heart I so miss.

And then the grief swooped.  The ache in my heart over my dad’s death was so raw.  It has been sixteen years ago but I so wanted to “hear” his voice and share it with a people I get to be in ministry with.

And the empty place of his friendship and his not knowing of my beloved and and and all those things fell into my heart and I missed my dad and mourned the huge space left by his death.  All the little and large sharing of life we don’t get to share; it hurts.

It hurts.  And, it humbles.  I barrel along my days and sometimes I am brought up short and reminded that life and love are tender precious fierce things and I am blessed to live them, I am.

So may I share his prayer with you?

Dear God it’s me.  Remember?

And it is Thanksgiving time and turkeys and football games and family gatherings and all sorts of special things are here and so am I and so are you.

I know that we must be an abomination to you.  Our existence is a continuing, helpless pollution of your world.  

We are terribly concerned with messy affluence, the insane rains of our bombs keep falling.  It’s easy to mask who we are.

We clatter with heavy shoes over the lives, the sensitivities, the joys and heartaches, the realness of our brothers and sisters.

Appearances, of color, of dress, even of hair have a strange importance to us.

We talk of love and forget to do it.

But it is Thanksgiving time.

And I would like to thank you for everything I have and everyone I know.

For family and home in now and past, for friends.  For those who touch my life with love.

For letting me love others,

For a world of maybes,

For smells and touches and eyes that meet.

For my job, my car, the little things I take for granted.

And they are all from you, and thank you God.

Can I ask a little favor?

My thanks are so special, so big, so real –

Will you arrange it so I won’t have to say a table grace right out loud?

That would be so predictable, so polite.

I would far rather babble and shout.

Rev. George Macaulay

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

sermon interruptus

Posted on by
2

At Richfield UMC we offer three distinct worship services.

One is a “traditional” blended service held in the sanctuary.  We have a magnificent organ and lush music program.  We sing songs mostly out of the hymnals.

One of our services is held in that same space on Sunday morning and it is led in Vietnamese.  They too sing mostly out of the hymnal – traditional tunes with Vietnamese lyrics.

Our other service is called “Living Waters”.  We set out to create a worship service for the many who have been “painfully churched”.  So very often people have encountered boredom in church; a sense that they are to be passive consumers of someone else’s thoughts and convictions.

We didn’t want that.  So we set up the room with round tables and we meet in the Fellowship Hall with coffee cups and we welcome dogs and any other warm body seeking community and mind and heart stretch.

Our shared music is eclectic.  We use hymnal tunes, and we also use current and past secular music that brings the message of the day into our hearts.  We have a superb music leader, Victor Zupanc.  Victor is the Music Director at the Children’s Theatre.  He brings to our worship life a delight in working with different musicians, and a theologically questing spirit.  The man is poetry on the keys, and his spirit infuses our shared song.

One of the things that makes the service so fine is the people who gather.  We know each other, we like to play and question, and the work of the Spirit isn’t just about right answers, it is about finding our own answers to holy and vital soul questions.

Sharing a “sermon” in this context is not a one-way experience.  We share it.  Yesterday was an excellent reminder to me about why I love this service.  Twice during our sermon-slated time together, different members of the gathered asked a great question.  What this does is take us into the place where meaning is made.  Things get real fast when they are taken from one heart into many hearts.

In offering different sorts of worship, our church is seeking to live into transformation.  A great pulpit preach in a sanctuary where the gathered are active participants in the unfolding of the Word is pure gift.  I get to share that every Sunday.

And, I get to share the Word in a setting where collaborative unpacking of the Word is practiced.

So many gifts.  Blessed among women am I.