community – Page 11 – Southwest Conference Blog

Sharing Our Stories

guest post by Andy Zawadski, First Congregational UCC, Albuquerque

It was a Sunday in April 1998. I was not looking for a church. I was quite content belonging to the second-largest Christian denomination in the world, former Roman Catholic (non-practicing) for almost 30 years. My wife Lisa and mother-in-law Marcia had started bringing our children Eva, then 7 and David, then 5 to First Congregational a few weeks before. Marcia had been an active member of this church in the early 1950s. In fact, my wife Lisa was baptized here in 1953.

I was sitting at the dining room table having breakfast and reading the newspaper as Lisa and kids stopped to say goodbye before heading off to church. Then, one of the kids, and I can’t remember who it was asked, “Hey, why doesn’t Dad have to go to church?” What’s that saying? Out of the mouth of babes…

And I thought, “O.K., I’m not going to be a hypocrite and make my kids do something I wouldn’t do myself.” So I came to church.

I was somewhat familiar with First Congregational as my kids had attended Preschool here. But I had only set foot as far as the classrooms and the parlor for parent-teacher meetings. Every time I entered the building I felt like I was stepping back into the 1950s. “Interesting,” I thought. “This place could use some sprucing up.”

As I entered the sanctuary for the first time, I immediately looked for hassocks or “kneelers”. There were none. Good sign. I had enough of that growing up in the Catholic church for 18 years. First Congregational had two services on Sundays in those days. One at 8:30 for the youth and one at 11:00. Reverend Frances Rath was in the pulpit that day. During the sermon, he proceeded to do a few magic tricks for the kids. “Interesting,” I thought. “Never saw that in the Catholic church.”

I don’t remember much else about the service but do remember being greeted warmly by Daisy Jewell and Meth Norris — and several others I can’t recall. “Interesting”, I thought. “Who are these people? Why are they being so nice to me?” (In hindsight, my first encounter with an extravagant welcome.)

Over the next few weeks, I learned that First Congregational had merged with other protestant denominations in 1957 to become the United Church of Christ. Never heard of it. So I did some more research on Congregationalist and the UCC.

I learned that 13 of the 56 signers of the constitution were Congregationalists. That within the UCC’s DNA were the first mainline church to take a stand against slavery (1700), the first to ordain an African American person (1785), the first to ordain a woman (1853), the first in foreign missions (1810), and the first to ordain openly [LGBTQ] persons (1985). I learned that this denomination values education for all people and it’s an important part of their tradition. Congregationalists founded Harvard and Yale, as well as several historically black colleges. “Interesting,” I thought. “This isn’t some fly by night denomination. These accomplishments are impressive and certainly things to be proud of.”

That first Sunday I attended church in 1998 was one of the last in Reverend Frances Rath’s 27 years with First Congregational Church. So, I asked who his replacement would be? I thought maybe the equivalent of a bishop further up in the UCC church hierarchy would send down a new pastor to the church. “Oh no,” someone told me, “the local congregation hires its own pastor — and fires them too if need be.” “Interesting,” I thought. “Never saw that in the Catholic Church.”

I learned that the congregation would hire an interim minister to help with the transition to a new minister. The interim minister would stay about 18 months and couldn’t be hired as the permanent pastor no matter how much the congregation liked the person. It was to be a time of reflection and discernment. How did the congregation see itself right now? What were its strengths and weaknesses? What did it want to be in the future?

I could see how much the congregation loved their pastor of 27 years and literally grieved his retirement. Some people decided to leave. Others dug in for the journey ahead. Observing this from the sidelines, I wasn’t quite sure the congregation would survive the transition. “An interesting exercise of one’s faith,” I thought. “I think I’ll stick around to see how the whole thing plays out.”

That was over 21 years ago. The whole thing is still playing out.

So, that’s the story of how I got here. And why do I stay?

Well, I’m hopelessly addicted to mid-20th-century church buildings in need of constant repair and maintenance.
I’m fascinated by the rich history of the Congregational Church, the United Church of Christ and the 139-year history of this local church – and proud to be associated with it.
Although my personal theology may be different from others, I know it will be accepted here. In fact, it is celebrated.
I stay because our church welcomes and accepts everyone into the life of the church.
And I stay because of the sense of community and purpose I experience being here with all of you. It’s the place I come to give my spirit a workout.

I guess you can sum it my shared story about First Congregational United Church of Christ this way: “He came for the magic tricks. He stayed for the still speaking God.

Thanks for listening…

Cocoon

by Davin Franklin-Hicks

I was hurt really badly some time ago. It was the kind of hurt that you carry in every cell. It was the kind of hurt that wakes you up and refuses to let you sleep. The pain was excruciating at times and settled into an intense ache the times in between. The ache was physical. The ache was emotional. The ache was spiritual. It felt unending. It redefined the word “harm” for me and those closest to me. I didn’t know I could hurt so much day after day after day after day and still not die. I know that now, though.

When I was harmed I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what had happened to me because there was no way I could have anticipated it. My life was solid. I had an amazing family, a job I adored, and friendships that were brilliant and full of life. I had dreams that I was pursuing. I had love at the ready. I had lost a lot of weight. I was exercising. I felt great. I was fully alive to myself and my world more than I had ever been in my 37 years of life up to that point. And then everything changed to such a degree that the life I knew before seemed like it was someone else’s. My lived experience of harm negated all the previous lived experiences of safety. That’s what trauma does to you, locks you in.

Even though I had been safe in this world more often than not, this one event of harm was rewriting me, it seemed. Like a virus that takes over your electronics, it just invaded the depths of my soul and started laying down new patterns of thinking that were the worst, fear-based stuff I had ever known. I thrashed and railed against this reality. I was crawling my way forward and collapsed more than I moved.

I would have stayed there. Laid there. Died there. I would have.

But I didn’t.

And that wasn’t because of me.
It was because of them.
Those people.
Over there.
Coming here.
Holding me.
Loving me.
Reminding me. This isn’t forever. This will change. This will pass. It always does. We are here.

Broken and beaten things need time to heal. A battered soul is the same. We need rest. We need nourishment.

What happens then if the thing you need to have to get better is the very thing you cannot access? I needed to sleep so my body and brain could heal. I couldn’t sleep though because my body and my brain were broken.

I needed to eat so my body and my brain could rebuild. I was unable to eat. I couldn’t swallow water without intense revolting nausea, let alone any food. I couldn’t take anything in as I was desperate to keep all the bad stuff out.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t heal.
Yet I was healing.
Slowly.
Ever so slowly.

You see, I was eating. I was sleeping. It just didn’t look like what it did before. I wanted my life back. I wanted to be able to live and move in this world in the same way I had moments before the harm. I wanted to feel hunger. I wanted to feel rested. I wanted to feel ease. When I thought about eating and sleeping during the worst times of post-traumatic stress, I was comparing it to what I used to be able to do. I was longing for a time that was so different than my own. Of course I was. How could I not?

The bit by bit bites and the minute by minute sleep that I was able to have access to slowly changed the healing process in my body, mind, and spirit. It was slow going, but it was going.

I was not alone. That was what changed it for me. That’s why I didn’t die on the floor of grief and unimaginable sorrow.

When you are that broken and that beaten in some way, you can’t begin to think the next thought of what you should do, let alone act on the next thought. Action was not possible for me. I was needing to be in an idle state, tucked away with comfort, medicine, kindness, compassion, and grace. Where does someone go to get that on Amazon? There is no kit to be purchased. Trust me. I looked.

What I described for you is something that happens from people just being. Those people over there that came over here to hold me, comfort me and love me just sat with me, listened to me and reminded me of who I am. They encouraged me to eat. They encouraged me to sleep. They encouraged me to keep trying. Sometimes I was helped by them mightily, other times I was too far within to hear them. Yet they remained.

You know how you never know what to say when someone tells you bad news? It’s because you don’t need to say anything.
You don’t.
There’s nothing that will fix it.
Nothing.

We hate that feeling, don’t we? We want to have some type of control over the world around us and it is so very strong when we see someone we love hurting. We want to alleviate pain when we see it. We want to skip to the end or hit rewind even though that doesn’t exist. It’s our first reaction, though.

We can’t remove pain. It has a function. It is there for a reason. The focus then is not on removing the pain, but in tending to the harm until the pain subsides as it does with healing.

Your presence is a balm, especially when it is a steady, dependable presence.
Your words, when found from places of love will be far more meaningful than when they come from a place of fear that just wants the pain to stop.

Gradually, there were words shared with me that helped me. That could only have come after being together for awhile. They only were fitting because of the tending that had come before.

Some of the things said to me in the tending that I was able to make use of were really vital because of the love that existed. I believed the sender of the message more because of the care they held for me.

I said, “I feel so much hatred. I don’t want to be a hateful person”
They said, “You are an inhospitable environment for hate. It won’t stick. It can’t. There’s too much love there.”

I said, “I don’t want to relapse because of this. I am so scared to relapse.”
They said, “We’ll sit with you until that passes. We are here to help you not use again. This trauma will not take your recovery.”

I said, “I can’t eat anything, I can’t even swallow water, I can’t do this.”
They said, “How about for today, you eat just a tiny bit more and I will eat a tiny bit less because it hurts me too.”

I was not alone. That was what changed it for me. That’s why I didn’t die on the floor of grief and unimaginable sorrow.

Your love, when expressed through presence or communication, is a magical thing.

Those people over there that came over here to hold me, comfort me and love me wanted my pain to stop. They tried things too. We all did. It just wasn’t effective so we stopped trying to stop pain and redirected our efforts toward living in the moment we were in, with the people we were with, and with the capacity we had. That was enough. That was more than enough.

We created space for healing even though it was so inconvenient and not at all what we wished we would be doing.

We created it still.

I read a joke on some social media platform at some point in the last year at some random time of night and it stuck with me, as random things so often do.

The joke was, “Do you think a caterpillar knows what it’s doing when it’s building its cocoon or is it like, ‘What am I doing’ the entire time?”

It stuck with me because it’s clever and I enjoy humor that wonders about the world around us rather than judges the world around us. I think of that joke on occasion, especially when I see a butterfly (pssttt… spoiler alert, that’s what comes out of the cocoon).

Today, I thought of this joke while brushing my teeth, no butterflies in sight. Something clicked.

I didn’t know I was building a cocoon.
Then the next thought.
I wasn’t.
They were.
I let them.
I had to.

I was a broken and beaten being and they wrapped me up. They waited. They stayed.

None of them knew how to do it and neither did I. We were clueless.
The thread was in the visits, in the expressions of love, in the sharing about their own lives as it reminded me that the world is still happening and that helped me reconnect to it. I cried. They cried. That was some strong, vibrant thread that we had at the ready and didn’t even know.

Our capacity to love is endless and boundless when it meets with others’ capacity to love.

A five-minute phone call is enough if that is what you have to give.
A meal together is enough if that is what you have to give.
A text message is enough if that is what you have to give.
It is not the amount of time of the offering, its the offerer.
It’s you.
That’s the balm.

The hurdle to all of this is our own doubt and fear. We think if we get too close to pain it will hurt too much when it is the exact opposite. Pain hurts less when tended. My goodness, though, isn’t it hard to know that when you are thrashing and railing and afraid? Isn’t it hard to know that when someone you love is the one thrashing and railing and afraid?

I am still cocooned in a lot of ways, but that is changing as I have been emerging more and more.
I laugh far more than I cry these days.
I listen to others far more than I need to be listened to.
I see the transformation more and more. It’s reminiscent of my life before. It’s not the same. It never can be the same because the past doesn’t exist in the present. It is a beautiful, full, vibrant life, though.

I have cocooned others recently, without even knowing it. Just from being and responding I have been able to hold others well too.

That innate thing that prompts a caterpillar to begin the next step for life to be nurtured and continued is the very thing within each of us that prompts us in our living.

We want to emerge. We want to be better, stronger, alive. We think we don’t know how to do that, but we do. It’s within you. It’s within me.

It starts with a prompt, that feeling inside, that nudge to reach out and connect. That is the thread of life, the thread of love reminding you of its presence. It is at the ready, waiting to be woven into sanctuary for one another. It will amaze you as you weave it and will dazzle you when it’s done.

For All the Saints

by Abigail Conley

Today, I remember the saint who listened carefully as I recited the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer and the books of the Bible. An ornament from that Sunday school teacher still hangs on my Christmas tree every year. My ten-year-old self was enamored with the decorated ball that I chose from the box she offered us.

Today, I remember the saint who shows up every Sunday to make coffee. Every Sunday. Like, as often as I do, and I’m paid to be there.

Today, I remember the saint who paid for a rental car so I could come and sleep and be fed in a friend’s home when my first call was so difficult.

Today, I remember the saint who offered his arm to the wobbly elderly woman, too proud for a cane, and made sure she reached her seat, received communion, and made it back to her car safely.

Today, I remember the saint who gave every kid in the church a half dollar every Sunday.

Today, I remember the saint who came and preached about his work as a missionary. I’m willing to bet the small box of natural cotton he brought with him to talk about his work is somewhere at my parents’ house. He was the first person of color I ever met there in the most unlikely of places.

Today, I remember the saint who listens intently to three-year-olds, not just nodding along like most adults, but discerning every word.

It is the season of remembering the saints who came before us. Dia de los Muertos celebrations begin this weekend and All Saints’ Day is not too far away either. Those who have gone before us were beloved and, presumably, gave us some things to emulate. In my congregation, we don’t worry too much about canonical saints. We’re much more likely to remember all our dead on All Saints’ Day.

In the midst of several memorial services in my congregation, I am increasingly aware of the profound process of becoming a saint. Most of us will never perform the miracles that grant official sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church or any other body. Instead, we will live faithful lives with beautiful, rich moments. People will have good things to say at our funerals, woven from the stories like the ones I remember about others.

I am most thankful for the saints who are close, who choose to be present day in and day out, and who show their love of neighbor and love of God in a thousand tiny ways. It is those people who taught me what becoming a saint looks like. Today, I remember all the gifts in becoming of the saints, too.

Global Ministries Partners Making Huge Impact for Migrant Communities

by Randy J. Mayer, The Good Shepherd UCC

In the last five or ten years, the world has stepped into a sweeping global immigration epidemic where one in every seven people are being pushed by war, violence, climate change, or poverty out of their home countries and pulled into countries that are often resisting their arrival. In many ways, it is an exodus of biblical proportion from the global south to the north. The UCC and Disciples adopted parallel resolutions at General Synod and General Assembly this summer on the state of Global Forced Migration, which can be found by clicking these links:

UCC link
Disciples link

The United States started to experience the impact of this exodus as early as 1993 even before the NAFTA free trade agreement was signed. For more than 25 years there has been a steady flow of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers traveling through the Sonoran Desert. In 2000 the Good Shepherd UCC in Sahuarita, Arizona had no choice but to get involved in the humanitarian movement. What else can a faith community do when desperate people are knocking at your door asking for water and help? What else can a faith community do when dead bodies are found in your neighborhood in alarming numbers? You start asking questions, developing programs to help the people knocking at your doors, you start going up the river to see why so many dead bodies are appearing in your neighborhood. Never would we have dreamed that 20 years later we would still have knocks on our doors and dead bodies in our neighborhoods.

Being on the front-lines of the immigration struggle along the US/Mexico border has created natural connections with our global partners around the world that are now finding themselves in the midst of the flow of immigration into their communities. Recently, my wife Norma and I were able to visit our denominational partners in Italy and Greece and observe first hand their faithful hospitality to the stranger.

Our relationship with the Waldensian Church in Italy began six years ago when we received a call from Global Ministries requesting that we host a group coming from Italy that was just beginning to get involved in the growing immigration situation in the Mediterranean Sea. We hosted them and began to make a powerful connection that the call to care for the stranger was the same in the Mediterranean Sea as the Sonoran Desert. Now, years later we have had multiple visits and exchanges. Gaining perspective from another part of the world has given us both a different angle to glimpse the struggle and gain valuable insight on how to do faithful ministry, as the global politics moves toward building walls and abandoning the principles of inclusion and welcome of the stranger. Today the Waldensian Church is a leading voice in Europe as they put their faith on the line to finance and work on the rescue boats named, “Sea Watch” and “Open Arms.” They are performing dramatic rescues of desperate people, abandoned by their smugglers in the Mediterranean Sea. They also have developed a project called, “humanitarian corridors” that is an agreement with their government that allows the church to legally and safely bring a set number of asylum seekers into Italy each year and resettle them in their communities. While we were attending the Waldensian Synod in Torre Pellice the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte in a speech to the Italian Lower House, called for concrete initiatives “such as the setting up of European humanitarian corridors” to enable the European Union to “leave behind emergency management” of the migration crisis. A powerful example of how people of faith can inject themselves into the political discourse and human tragedy to create healthy models that address the immigration struggle.

From Italy we traveled to Katerini, Greece to visit the Evangelical Church of Greece, an historic church with a long tradition of putting justice into action. We spent five days with them learning about their incredible immigration and refugee program called Perichoresis. It began in 2015 as a simple act of Christian hospitality as they responded to the arrival of thousands upon thousands of Middle Eastern refugees to camps near the border of Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. They went to the camps to offer support and supplies, which led to welcoming the asylum seekers into their homes, which led to the development of large scale programs to receive and care for the asylum seekers. Today, Perichoresis has fifty staff members giving medical care, legal and psychological support, and housing managers that have created living facilities that are safe and stable. Perichoresis now rents 126 apartments to temporarily house 600 vulnerable asylum seekers escaping the horrors of war and exploitation. They have rented an additional 10 apartments to integrate and permanently settle families in their community. Their resettlement and integration program is so well established that the United Nations Human Rights Council Union has lifted up the work of Perichoresis as the premier resettlement program that should be implemented throughout Europe to successfully settle and integrate asylum seekers and migrants into Europe.

Small bands of believers making a huge difference and showing the rest of us how to be faithful and welcome the stranger. Small protestant churches sprinkled like leaven and salt, barely visible to the dominant church and culture in their countries, but they are doing big things in the eyes of God and the building of the Kin-dom on earth as it is in heaven. Thank God for our UCC and Disciples global partners, may they continue to inspire and lead us in the ways of faithful living.

Finding Happiness

by Abigail Conley

In the Spring 2018 semester, Yale launched their most popular course ever, “Psychology and the Good Life.” It was a course on happiness, and enrollment skyrocketed. A quarter of Yale students enrolled in the class, and the institution struggled to meet the demands from such a large enrollment. Dr. Laurie Santos developed the course to help address rising rates of depression, anxiety and stress among students. The course was so popular, it was soon launched on the online learning platform Coursera as “The Art of Happiness.”

I signed up for the class out of curiosity. It’s free unless you want the certificate of completion. Of course I wanted the certificate of completion, so I paid an extra $49 to get a piece of paper at the end. (Hey—maybe it counts for CEUs!) I should mention that I wasn’t particularly unhappy going in. Taking a class on happiness seems to imply that the student must be unhappy. I’m more of a taking-a-class-inherently-makes-me-happy person.

Within about 2 weeks of starting the class, I had one major take-away not named in the class: being part of a church will make you happier. It will make you happier according to science, not just some pastor. It will make you happier even though being the Church is hard right now. It’s hard as institutions struggle through the time before resurrection. It’s hard as we face what seem like insurmountable social justice issues. And yet, time and again, polls also report that people who are part of a faith community are happier and live longer than those who are not part of a faith community. Now there’s easily accessible data to name why.

Here are some of the things I learned will actually make you happier in a way that transforms your life:

Stop worrying about stuff.
Practice gratitude.
Meditate.
Be socially connected.
Keep a regular sleep schedule.

Most any of us who show up to church occasionally realize that church helps us cultivate all of those things. If you can walk or bike to church, you will manage to hit every single thing that will make you happier, clinically speaking.

I preach often about the gifts of the church, the Christian community gathered. I love the story of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit becomes a normal, expected presence with the gathered church. That presence is a break from the occasional and extraordinary presence with the prophets, when a word from the Lord might be rare.

And yet, it is a little shocking to be reminded that the church has a profound gift to offer just by existing like most of our churches do. We pass an offering plate each week and say, “You have enough to give away. Trust us.” We take time to name what is good and what is difficult and hold it in a space with other people. We do it on a day traditionally known as Sabbath, and keep saying that holding space for rest matters. And even when we gather with people who are so very different from us, we find people who will check in on us and love us and show up in wonderfully unexpected places.

In this class, we were also challenged to take on one of these habits. For success, we were even asked to tell someone else our goal. It was for a finite period, with a clinical measure of success before and after. Part of the point is that it’s so difficult to make a significant change like the things named. We don’t naturally choose what is good for us. Again, not really a surprise to church people.

I am reminded that one of the most profound gifts of all is that the Church, with all its imperfections, keeps going along, reminding us to worry less about our stuff, to be grateful, to pray, to honor Sabbath, to show up—even if it’s just to be together. In our case, it is not an art that one person cultivates, but a faith we continue to hold onto for the promise of something better for our world. Happiness is only the tip of the iceberg.

Performance

by Karen Richter

I love reading Slate’s advice columns. Recently, I read advice from teachers to parents at the start of the school year. The first response involved a teacher asking parents to think through their request for extra information about their child’s school experience. Specifically, the teacher said that parents often tell her, “Share with me everything always.” And of course, this is not really feasible or even beneficial for most families or most teachers.

But it got me thinking: why would a parent even say that? Is Parent X really expecting a daily stream-of-consciousness report from their progeny’s teacher? Probably not.

Here is my suspicion: We say things that we assume others are expecting to hear, and we say things that give others a certain impression of who we are. In this specific situation, there is a special kind of anxiety for a parent when meeting with their child’s teacher. Many parents would admit that it’s important that their child’s teacher have a positive impression. We want to be “good parents,” with all the baggage of expectations that label entails. In all kinds of situations (not just parenting at the beginning of the school year), we’re prone to the same behavior: performance. We humans are always asking, “What is expected of me?” The game of managing, meeting, exceeding the expectations of others around us takes a lot of our energy. It’s exhausting, actually. To make matters worse, the more time we spend on The Performance Game the more difficult it becomes to recognize when we’re playing it.

What if we stopped?

What if our churches became places where people practiced NOT performing? A few years ago, a friend from church talked with me about a Sunday morning struggle. There are those weeks, she explained, when you and your partner are fussing and cranky with one another, the children are slow in getting ready, and the counter top is sticky. So you rush through the routine, pile in the car to get to church… and plaster a believable-enough smile on your face and pretend to be happy and normal.

And then we might wonder why our relationships seem to be shallow and why we carry around a vague sense of malaise and ennui all the time. We might wonder why our churches are so often seen as ineffective or even hypocritical.

What’s the cure for The Performance Game?

As usual, the cures are simple but not easy. Here are my top 3 Performance Anxiety Busting Superstars:

friendship

Have friends and let them really see you. Friendship magic happens when we stop cleaning up before friends arrive to our home. This is also one of the greatest blessings of rough times: when it is obvious (so so obvious!) that our lives are not perfect, we can stop pretending that they are and let our real selves show up. I am writing today all the things I need to practice the most, and this is a big one. Slowly but surely, I’m starting to recognize and appreciate what Real Me sounds like and how she’s different from Performing Me.

I take comfort in the friends of Jesus… how they were continually bumbling and misunderstanding, jockeying for power and getting it 100% wrong. Yet Jesus trusted them with All. The. Things.

2. nature

Get yourself out-of-doors! Let the lovely imperfections of creation teach you.

3. meditation

Don’t be tempted by a special edition of The Performance Game: The Spirituality Expansion box. I’m writing again to myself. The pull of performance and the desire to have others see us as ‘spiritual’ is strong in me.

So I remind us both: Just sit and breathe. Your mind will wander and distract you with thoughts because that is what minds do. Just keep sitting and breathing.

Prayer for Today:

Spirit of Life, You are Reality Itself. I so want to be real too. Remind me of the realness in my faith tradition: the women who sang victory, the boy who shared lunch, the friends who stayed close, the dreamers and the pray-ers and the poets. Thank you for the gifts of friendship, simplicity, creation, and breath. Amen.

Empire Stories

by Abigail Conley

Here is a story of the Empire I trust in, hope for, pray with:

We’re renting a bouncy castle. It’s a princess 5-in-1 combo sure to delight the five-year-old for whom it is intended. She’s getting adopted, officially a forever family. Rumor is there will be TWO cakes for this Very Big Party.

And so more than seventy people got together and funded a bouncy castle, along with plenty more to buy all sorts of books for that same five-year-old. I recommended We Don’t Eat Our Classmates, a very reign of God sort of book that doesn’t look like it all.

It’s this beautiful celebration across many miles for a little girl and her mom. Those of us who won’t be able to go to the Very Big Party still join in this way. We are anxious to see pictures of this little girl who we’ve come to love from a distance, still in foster care for a few more days.

The whole thing is a beautiful, joyful experience of being able to do something to make a little kid’s Very Big Party on her Very Big Day that much more full of love.

It is one of the few times I can remember where it was so easy to give a kid something that would bring a great deal of joy. The other that comes to mind was when I had a youth group on an outing around Christmas and paid for a carriage ride around the outside mall. The driver gave me a good deal because she could see the excitement in the kids’ eyes. The kids couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks. Beautiful abundance in simple things always strikes me as more fully the Reign of God than most anything else.

Here is a story of the Empire I trust God and those working toward God’s Reign are overthrowing:

We’re buying teddy bears and shoelaces. Some of those same people who got together and funded a bouncy castle Venmoed me money or sent a check in the mail because I was able to fulfill requests locally for people being released from detention. I bought up all the shoelaces in store because stores don’t seem to stock many of those. I found teddy bears that would fit small hands and arms. That one day, those kids and their families had more of what they needed. I don’t know if they had a single thing they wanted. I don’t know what to do with the reality of shoelaces being the thing that brought a smile that day. I keep telling that story over and over, but with kids still in detention, it seems that I probably should keep telling it.

And I wish I had a single story.

But I remember sitting with a church leader, planning out gifts for the family we were sponsoring for Christmas. “Can I just buy them socks and underwear?” she asked. “If they’re asking for socks and underwear, they should get socks and underwear.” So we agreed on behalf of the church that we would exceed the number limit placed on gifts so that kids would get socks and underwear for Christmas, along with things they wanted.

Those some people funding the bounce house also explained children’s clothing sizes to me one day. There was no clear conversion for chubby children’s sizes to underwear. I needed to buy clothes for a child in my church whose mom could not manage it. Finances were part of the problem, but so was mental illness. Those things that parents of children seem to magically know eluded her, and so I was filling in the gaps as best I could, despite having no children of my own.

Those are the children’s stories that come to mind. But most days, I see a crowdfunding page for a funeral or medical needs or housing. I am reminded of the jars by cash registers so common in the small town where I grew up. They were the precursor to crowdfunding pages, a town working to pay the medical expenses of someone with no insurance. Flyers dotted the bulletin boards of those same places, asking people to attend a benefit auction or concert.

These are the stories of our empire. And these are not the stories I want to tell. I want to tell stories of a community choosing to give a little extra money to fund things that feed the soul, like bouncy castles and books. I don’t think it takes much Spirit to realize that this is the better thing, to get to offer joy and delight rather than fulfilling the most basic of needs.

Hear the words of the Good Shepherd, whose Empire has no end: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” John 10:10

What’s Up With the Dog?

guest post by Carol Reynolds, pastor at Scottsdale Congregational UCC

If you’ve been to church recently, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a new…um…tail in town. And perhaps you’ve also wondered aloud or to yourself, “What’s up with that? What’s up with the dog?” After all, the annual animal blessing is still another couple of months off. Typically that’s the only time we see animals inside the church. Well, the dog’s name is Brandi, and she is a special pooch. I know, I know, all of our pets are special. But, as Zach, a few other people, and I discovered several weeks ago, Brandi possesses spiritual gifts.

Brandi was originally Robert’s dog. He and partner Zach adopted her together 6 years ago, when she was 5-6 years old. She was a stray they found at the PetSmart adoption center. For 6 years, as Robert navigated life in a wheelchair, with a trach, and many, many health complications, Brandi was his faithful companion. She didn’t get bored. She was perfectly happy to be by his side and love on him and whomever else happened to be in the house. She’d bark a lot when you first arrived, but soon she’d be curled up on your lap like a teddy bear, her bark way worse than her bite.

When Robert entered hospice this summer, it seemed like the right time to bring Brandi on a pastoral visit. In my experience, our companion animals know us so intimately and can thus provide comfort and healing in a very powerful way. So I proposed the idea to Zach, and he readily agreed. We’d head up to Peoria after worship and Diving Deeper. Sure enough, when we got there, Brandi was immediately on Robert’s bed, then curled up on his chest. It was clear to us that she knew he wasn’t doing very well. Her care for him and the love-sadness that emanated from her were at once profoundly beautiful and tragic to observe. I honestly wouldn’t have expected anything less from their farewell.

What I hadn’t anticipated was that Brandi would come to fellowship to wait for me and that she’d minister to people there as well. When I walked out of the conference room into Bond Hall, not only was Brandi there, but she was joyfully prancing around everyone there, delighting in each and every person she encountered. Michele recounted to me how earlier Brandi had even more exuberantly leapt from lap to lap to lap. Not one person there wasn’t beaming at the sight and stories of her.

Very quickly I made the connection between Brandi and a poodle I’d known in Massachusetts. “She’s a ministry dog!” I exclaimed, remembering my friend Debbie had acquired Jeannie for this very purpose after she hadn’t quite met the mark in service dog school. (Jeannie had skills, but apparently she didn’t want to work quite that hard and, given how smart poodles are, she’d managed to figure out a way around it.) Jeannie would come to meetings with Debbie and, by her very presence, lower the blood pressures of everyone in the room. All on her own, she’d seek out the one autistic boy in worship and sit by his side for the whole service. Those were the kind of ministry tasks she performed. Brandi has none of the training, but apparently has a natural gift. And it seems that Zach really took my exclamation about her to heart: Every Sunday since then he has brought Brandi with him to worship and fellowship. Not only that, but they arrive early so that they can greet people as they enter the church.

Rev. Carol Reynolds with Brandi, ministry dog — Brandi enjoying a snuggle with Pastor Carol during worship.

Brandi loves people of all ages and sizes. It’s obvious from the way her tail goes a mile a minute whenever she encounters a new person, as well as how she rubs up against them, and gives them little kisses, and even hints that she’d like to be picked up. Recently she met a little boy who was new to the church and afraid of dogs. Zach didn’t find this out about the boy until after he’d had a lovely encounter with Brandi. Apparently, since that meeting, his phobia has been drastically reduced, if not eliminated altogether. In worship Brandi has made a point of sitting with people who were crying, and leads the congregation to the communion table with warm, enthusiastic greetings along the way, reminding us that this is, after all, a feast of joy, anticipation of the kin-dom of God’s love and justice we hope to one day be a part of. Come to think of it, Brandi’s unconditionally loving presence is a bit like God’s…

Brandi’s timing couldn’t be more perfect. With as much division and tension as there is in the world these days, she gives us permission to laugh and smile and exchange knowing glances about just how unbearably sweet and cute she is. She unites us in a very positive way on our ways to the communion table. Beyond this, she provides a concrete way for Robert’s spirit to live on among us. While we in turn provide her with a ton of love and attention and a brand-new sense of purpose. Perhaps we minister to her as much as she does to us. Whatever it is that’s transpiring between Brandi and the congregation, it’s a beautiful thing to behold, and I rejoice in it.

Lazarus Must Be Rolling Over in Her Grave!

by John Indermark

In case you were wondering: the title is not mistaken in its gender pronoun usage. I do not have in mind the Lazarus, beloved brother of Mary and Martha, who already experienced rolling out of his grave according to John’s gospel. No, the Lazarus I have in mind is Emma, beloved daughter of Moses and Esther – and the poet who penned the words engraved on a bronze plaque that now (at least for the time being) stands displayed in the museum at the Statue of Liberty. Its closing words, taken from a longer poem of hers, would once have been the stuff of Fourth of July picnics and elementary school recitations and civics classes.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”

I say “once would have been” because some Very Important People in Very High Places have definite ideas about who should be let in and particularly who should be kept out of our nation these days, ideas that seem to take a sand blaster to Lazarus’ inscription. The most recent rule put forth by the Trump administration regarding immigration reinterprets provisions of “public charge” in Draconian ways – or, given its likely architect, Millerian ways. Mind you, the rule aims not at illegal immigrants, but LEGAL immigrants. If you need most any form of public assistance to help get your feet on the ground, fugetaboutit. All such objections go away, of course, according to the fine print of the rule, if you can show your income is 250% or more of the federal poverty line. If it is, c’mon in! If it’s not, maybe the deportation venues will at least have the honesty to play Ray Charles (“Hit the Road, Jack, and don’t you come back . . .”). And perhaps the National Park Service will be directed by Mr. Miller to update Emma’s plaque:

Give me your hired, your secure,

Your globe-trotting investors yearning to be regulation-free,

The targeted folk of north European shores,

Send these, the classy, upper-crust to me.

As I said, Lazarus must be rolling over in her grave, and not just because of the words of her poem with which we are most familiar. Did you know the title she gives to the Statue in the poem is not Lady Liberty, but Mother of Exiles? What would she say to those who seek asylum today, driven by violence and despair literally into exiles – only to be met with pejoratives of “murderers” and “rapists?” I believe Emma’s answer can be discerned in the phrase she used in the poem: “From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome.”

Today, in addressing the new rule, the administration’s Director of Immigration Services was asked how this policy set with the Statue’s invitation to “your tired, your poor, your, huddled masses.” His answer? “I’m certainly not prepared to take anything down off the Statue of Liberty. We have a long history of being one of the most welcoming nations in the world.”

Unfortunately, history is no guarantor of the future, and befogged nostalgia can be the future’s worst enemy. The question is: Are we NOW to be who we advertise ourselves to be? Hypocrisy is not a problem limited to the church. It gnaws away at national identities. If this rule stands, Lazarus’ poem and its “Mother of Exiles” will cease to be our aspiration –and be transformed into our self-inflicted indictment of nativism and greed.

Embracing and Overcoming Horror (Movies)

by Abigail Conley

Horror movies are one of my favorite indulgences. I’m simultaneously a horror movie snob and will see anything labeled a horror movie. Jordan Peele’s version of horror movies wins awards and is mind-boggling and I highly recommend his work. I take issue with the lack of a systematic theology framework in The Conjuring Universe. Should anyone want to spend a few hours comparing and contrasting the theology of The Exorcist movies, I’m game.

And, yeah, I’ll also watch the terribly predictable movie that starts with teenagers making out where all but one person inevitably ends up dead. I’ll roll my eyes more, but I’ll watch it. Discretion is not really one of my gifts when it comes to this.

As a result of my indiscretion when it comes to horror movies, I recently went to see Midsommar. It’s one of those movies that gets great critical review and has the audience scratching their heads. There are major spoilers coming, so stop reading if you’re anticipating this movie.

The plot: a student from Sweden studying in the United States takes his new friends back home to rural Sweden for a festival. They’re aware he grew up in a rural area, somewhat of a commune, and go willingly for a week of celebration, including lots of hallucinogenic drugs. The drugs, at least, are supplies beyond their wildest dreams. It turns out that they’ve landed in the middle of a pagan cult and are sacrifices for this celebration that happens every ninety years.

Again, sometimes my indiscretion bites me in the butt, especially when it comes to horror movies.

The reason I like the horror genre in general is that they often name our deepest fears and worries. The writers of this genre understand humanity in a profound way. I’m not talking slasher movies; I am talking Pet Sematary, and our fear of death, afterlife, and losing loved ones. Horror movies that hit in the gut recognize that there are things far scarier than what goes bump in the night.

And so, in the middle of a slow-moving trippy movie that has left me scratching my head, there was a gem. One friend would survive the ordeal and join the commune. The guy who brought them all there said to her, “When my parents died, this community held me. Do you feel held?”

Full disclosure, I’m pretty the guy’s parents were sacrificed in some other cultic ceremony. (Seriously, skip this movie.) But I keep thinking about that concept. Do you feel held?

Do you feel held?

That question explores our deepest hopes and needs for connection. That question points out our vulnerability. That question causes my stomach to do something a little weird.

All of the stories in the Bible that I immediately think of in response to that question are points of deep vulnerability. In every case, they are the absence of the feeling of being held, supported, cared for. Mary and Martha mourn with Jesus at the death of Lazarus. Jesus goes into the garden to pray and his disciples fall asleep. On the cross, Jesus asks John to care for his mother.

Do you feel held?

The intimacy of church is one of the things that most often freaks out my friends who don’t do church. The comfort of church with aging and death definitely freaked out my friends when we were in our twenties. But not too long ago, I was with one of our church’s beloved saints in the days before his death. His wife was there with him. She asked for specific people from the church to come, and they all showed up as she requested.

On the night he died, I was there, along with people all gathered from the church. We told stories and assured his wife she would be cared for. We chose a funeral home that night, and laughed and cried. The people gathered with her had memories reaching farther back than mine, and so they comforted in a way I could not. I watched her come alive in a way I had not seen before as they talked in the difficult hours. I waited with her that night until his body was taken to the funeral home, asked the nurse to give her something to help her sleep, then went to my home at the end of a long few days.

That night remains a profound experience of Church, and watching the Church hold someone—deeply, tightly, lovingly, enduringly. They had shared the good times, but they stayed through the worst, and would do it again. Held.

One of the deep fears that plays out time and again in horror movies is fear of being alone. That’s the terrifying part of slasher movies and apocalypse movies. Alone. No one else. Loneliness, it turns out, is one of the health crises bubbling to the surface right now. We are a people in need of each other.

But when I remember that scene, that question, “Do you feel held?” I am amazed by how deeply the church holds—with mountains of food and lock-ins and awkward conversations and showing up. The church holds with baptisms and women’s groups that pastors skirt and cleaning out that one closet yet again amidst laughter and stories. The church holds and keeps holding when no one else will.

It turns out, we brave the greatest fears because we choose to hold. Let us cherish this gift.