From the Pastor’s Desk . . .

 

   Each Monday, a devoted group of individuals has met with John or me to look over the Scripture passage for the following Sunday — often offering insights that were very new and very helpful for us!  We also offered two different Bible studies after TOW this year about women in the Bible as well as different titles for Jesus.     The adult Sunday school classes continued to provide a variety of opportunities to fit spiritual needs through book studies, formal Bible studies, and discussions on current events and social justice issues.   Even our unofficial class, the “Saints and Sinners” group, met each week, checking in with one another and spending time in Christian fellowship.    Every third Friday of the month, children from 2nd through 8th grade ran through the halls of our church, playing games, participating in service projects, and studying the Bible.  They ended each evening by weaving their prayers through our prayer loom, watching as the loom grew more full each and every month as their prayers increased. In March, our children led us in worship in one of the most meaningful services I have ever attended.  Watching the seriousness with which the Sunday school classes took their tasks of leading worship is a joy I will not soon forget!                                                                                                                                                                                                                  The great cartoonist Charles Schulz once said, “Try not to have a good time…this is supposed to be educational.” At Covenant, we seem to do a great job of blending the two. It was a rare Sunday that I didn’t see children and adults laughing and sharing the love of Christ with one another.  

   Names are important. But learning names can be very difficult. I have been here almost a year and I still struggle to place some names with faces on Sunday mornings. Even though I see you each week and I know so much about you, I still sometimes struggle. In the past month, we have welcomed several new members to our Covenant family and they now have the task of learning all of our names, too. Our church family is a very warm and welcoming one, but one of the ways that we could be more welcoming can be by helping each other learn names.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       This summer, with John on sabbatical and many new faces in our pulpit, we will be trying something new — name tags! Each week when you get to Covenant, stop by the name tag table and make a name tag for yourself. If you come to the 8:30 am service, stick around afterwards at our Happy Half Hour in July and August and get to know the folks who attend the later service and vice versa.  If you see one of our new members, introduce yourself and learn their names. If you see people without name tags, encourage them to wear one! 

   As I write this on the eve of Holy Week it dawns on me that Jesus was roughly the age of our son Daniel at the time of his crucifixion and resurrection. That seems awfully young – young to suffer so, young to die, young to have such an impact on history and upon our lives! We sometimes think of Jesus as timeless – a man of indeterminate age who spoke with the wisdom of an ancient sage while garnering the love, respect, and hate of people of all ages long ago in a land far away. But the reality is that Jesus was born, lived, and died within our time and space. He walked the dusty roads of Palestine for only 33 years. He celebrated birthdays, stopped to eat lunch, and laid down his head to rest at night. He stubbed his toes on stones, mourned the death of friends, and got the flu. His incarnation affirms that Jesus fully experienced what it is to be human and so understands what our lives are like day to day. But it also affirms that in his betrayal and gruesome death he understands human suffering – suffering on a scale that we hope never to experience!    It has been said that Christians emphasize Jesus’ humanity too much at his birth and his divinity too much at his resurrection. The two are entwined on those days and across all the days in between. So, before you rush from Palm Sunday’s hosannas to Easter’s alleluias, from the man riding on the donkey to the savior rising from the tomb, take time to reflect on the reality of the events of this week. Remember the crucifixion and Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”

   A sabbatical is a time for rest and renewal, a time to step back, breathe deeply, and look more intently or broadly at aspects of life and ministry. Some of you may be familiar with sabbaticals in the world of academia, but pastors too take periodic sabbaticals. All terms of call for ministers in Shenandoah Presbytery require provision for a sabbatical every seventh year as a way of encouraging longer, healthier ministries. (Sarah’s first sabbatical will be in 2025 and my next one will not be until 2026!) This summer I will take my second sabbatical since arriving at Covenant in 1995. My last Sunday before sabbatical will be Easter Sunday, April 21, and I will return on Monday, August 12. During that time I will be doing some reading, writing, visioning, traveling, and resting. I will be exploring what others are doing in ministry that might translate well to our Covenant setting and will have opportunity to talk with colleagues about their view of ministry and to listen to sermons instead of writing them. We will spend a few weeks in Scotland (our home away from home) visiting and traveling with good friends, but most of the time we will be popping in and out of Staunton.

 

When morning gilds the skies, my heart awakening cries: “May Jesus Christ be praised!”

    How do your mornings begin? When the alarm goes off, and you rub the sleep from your eyes, do you rise with a groan or first scroll through your phone? Are you unsuitable for company or conversation until you’ve had your morning cup of coffee – or your 2^nd or your 3rd? Do you jump out of bed eager for the day, or dive under the covers hoping it is just a bad dream, or linger there awhile to gather yourself or force yourself to get up and get going? An old friend in Richmond told me that he started each day by saying out loud as he rose from his bed, “Good morning, Lord!” It was a reminder that God had been with him through the night and was right there by his side as he rose for the day. Do you have such an awareness of God’s presence with you each morning? I used to run three miles or so every morning at sunrise, and more times than I can count the brilliance of the sky over the Blue Ridge would move me to murmur (not sing out loud out of respect for the dogs in the neighborhood), “Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty! Early in the morning, our song shall rise to thee!” Does    a song or prayer escape your lips with gratitude for the gift of another day? Do devotions orient your day at daybreak, or do you hit the ground running through your mental to-do list? Do you get up on the “right side of the bed” or the “wrong side”? How do your mornings begin?

   Lent begins with Ash Wednesday this week;  it is a late start to our 40 day pilgrimage to Easter! Because Easter falls so late in the year this year, Lent will compete for our attention with the ACC and NCAA basketball tournaments, tax time, the beginning of baseball season, spring soccer, high school proms, and the lure of warm spring days. How then will you observe a holy Lent through this bright and busy time of the year?    The mark of ashes on our foreheads is a start; the ashes remind us that we are creatures of the dust and to dust we will return. In the creation story in Genesis the writer uses a Hebrew wordplay to declare our humble origins: the adam is created from the adamah – literally the earthling is created from the earth. God alone is the divine creator; we are the creations, like the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, all made of the same substance and shaped by a divine hand for God’s good purposes. The mark of ashes is also an acknowledgment that we have not lived up to our created purpose. It is a sign of penitence as we acknowledge our sins, our need to do better, and our total dependence upon the grace and mercy of God. Lent is a time for self-examination and reflection, a time to consider the ways in which you are being faithful and unfaithful, a time to repent (literally turn) and return to God’s ways. The ashes are a visible reminder of the invisible sin that stains our souls, and so we begin this journey toward the cross and empty tomb by acknowledging that we need to be cleansed, redeemed, renewed.

   Events in Richmond over the past few weeks offer stark reminders that racism continues to plague our public and private lives – from the past and into the present – and we have difficulty knowing just how to talk about it. Just a year and a half removed from the violence in Charlottesville, we find ourselves still wrestling with the sins of our past (e.g. lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and yearbooks portraying students in blackface) and the sins of the present (e.g. violent hate crimes, racially gerrymandered voting districts, and tacit prejudice). Racism is not a relic of our distant past that we can dismiss as the problem of another generation and suggest that we have left it behind; it is a present reality among us in personal, institutional, rhetorical, and systemic forms that must be addressed, confessed, and remedied if we are to find healing for our nation, our church, and our souls.

   One of our Session goals for 2019 relates  to increased participation from all of you in the life and ministry of the church. Each of us is blessed with particular gifts to be used in God’s service; not all the gifts are the same which is a good thing because there are diverse needs to be met. Denying your gifts – the talents God has given you – is a rejection of God’s call to you as a disciple of Jesus! In the words of one of my seminary professors: Confess your weaknesses but profess your strengths. Acknowledge the talents God has given you and offer them in God’s service, for what seems eminently doable to you may seem impossible for someone else.

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Each January the Session gathers for a one-day retreat to review where we’ve been over the past year, where we are, and where we are called to go in the year to come. We review progress on our long-range plan, assess how we did in meeting last year’s goals, and establish priorities for the year to come. Following discussion at our retreat on January 12, the Session adopted the following priorities to guide our work in 2019: ¨ Develop cross—congregational engagement in our ongoing societal need initiative ¨ Prepare for John’s sabbatical and support the staff and congregation through it ¨ Develop and implement a plan for revitalized and re-branded “lay leadership” to increase volunteer participation ¨ Be better environmental stewards In coming weeks there will be more information and commentary on each of these priorities, but for now, perhaps a brief overview of each is appropriate. ¨ We continue to explore opportunities to address the societal need that we identified two years ago: the impact of poverty on children. This spring we are working with the Boys and Girls Club and continue to look for new possibilities to involve more folks in the congregation. This is an important societal need for all of us to address!

¨With Sarah on board and some additional part-time assistance to provide for pastoral needs, you will be in good hands in my absence! ¨ We need more folks to be involved in ministry. We need Sunday School teachers, kitchen help, Godly Play workers, ushers for worship, and a host of others to share their gifts in ministry together. WE are the church, and the WE is US! ¨ God has called us to be good stewards of God’s gifts. We note that we have not been especially good stewards of our environment – from our use of paper products and plastic to our management of heating, cooling, and lighting. This year we commit to being better stewards of the environment across the life of the church. 

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    It is a new year and with a new year come a host of New Year’s resolutions. If your list is anything like mine over these last years, the resolutions tend to look a lot alike with a tweak here or there, but nothing startlingly new. Might we need a new approach to those resolutions? This year, our daughter Emily suggested setting some goals for the year, rather than yet another list of things to resolve to do. The means toward meeting the goals might ebb, flow, and change over the year, based on experience or circumstance, but the goals would remain the same. Assessment and reassessment would provide opportunity for course corrections and fresh starts. There is thus a little more grace in living into those goals along the way this way.

 

A BIRTH FOR THE EARTH

The word just came in that a savior is born

In a stable at night in the cold before morn

And the one who delivered her child before day

Gently laid down the babe in the warmth of the hay

For the inn had no room; they had no place to stay.

 

But that is the way that the world tends to be

So concerned with the problems of me and of me

That the needs of a child who is born as a stranger

Are pushed to the side, to the edge of the manger

Where children are born to the poor and in danger.

 

That’s the way of the world – way back then and today

After two thousand years you would think that we’d say,

“That’s enough! All these children deserve so much more

We will care for them, love them, no matter how poor

And we’ll find a safe place for them, that is for sure!”

 

But we don’t! And so refugee kids are still born

In cold stables or worse in the night and the morn

And the Christ who to us came with hope in his birth

Shakes a head that is heavy and lacking in mirth

For the lessons not learned – of his birth for the earth.