Thinking Outside the Box

“All Around the Mulberry Bush, the monkey chased the weasel… Pop goes the weasel!” Remember having one of these when you were a kid?  Or maybe giving one of these to a kid?  Out comes the Jack in the box and it always seemed surprising even though we knew what would happen. 

The big draw of this toy was that surprise of the jack in the box jumping out and looking bigger than the box it jumped out of.  How did such a tall clown come out of such a small box? 

The scriptures today talk about God and Jesus as being bigger than we could imagine.  The reading from Job is a classic Jack in the box story, and also reminds me of the cliched advice, “Be careful what you ask for, you might get it!”  Job has been building up a case against God; Job felt like God was a business partner to be bargained with, and his friends didn’t help much.  They believed firmly in karma, that if you do something wrong, you would reap the consequences and if a disaster falls on you, it must be your own fault.

That’s still a common belief in today’s world too.  It’s a nasty form of blaming the victim, and it’s meant to comfort ourselves.  “That won’t happen to me because I do things properly” which can mean anything from vitamins to crystals.  Job was written to challenge that assumption.  It is the original “Why bad things happen to Good People” story, designed to wrestle with that hard question.  Job put together a legal argument as if he was a well-trained lawyer.  God had treated him with injustice by letting Job experience some heart-breaking disasters, a business failure and lastly a devastating physical illness.  And Job set out his case that he did not deserve any of it.  If this was karma, karma got the wrong guy and he could prove it!

He turned the crank on his complaints to God until pop!  Unexpectedly, God came to give Job an answer.  Not a particularly comforting answer, mind you.  God says, “Are you as big as me? As powerful as me?  As creative as me? As smart as me?  Nope!” Not much of an answer, and certainly not a comfort either.

Except that it is a reminder to Job that however Job imagined God, God was bigger than that imagination.  God could not be stuffed into a box until Job turned the crank. 

James and John also thought they had Jesus pegged.  They thought they had figured out what box he belonged in.  The box of political leader and reformer who would start a revolution to depose the Herods and the Pilates of their world. Except that Jesus wouldn’t stay in that box either.  He wasn’t going to become a stereotypical rebel who takes down the local tyrant, only to become the next tyrant.

That’s a real pattern in history.  It happened in France when Louis 16 was deposed and four years later, Napoleon Bonapart was the head of France, living like a King.  The many Roman emperors that killed their predecessor then were assassinated by the next.  Russia was the same, and anyone who read Animal Farm in school will remember that. Even Israel at the time of Jesus would have remembered Herod the Great becoming king by attacking the current king with the help of the Roman army.  Leaders rose and fell, and politics was a dangerous game.  James and John figured that Jesus was going to end up with power and influence, maybe even a throne.  But Jesus wanted something bigger.

Not political leadership but moral, ethical, spiritual and religious leadership.  Leadership that inspires and encourages us to think bigger.  Leadership that thinks outside the box about the big picture, not our big pictures, but God’s big picture.  Leadership that inspires, empowers and includes us in God’s picture.

We humans like to feel we are in control of our small little universes.  Or if we aren’t in control, there’s something wrong and we turn to blame.  We blame ourselves, we blame others, we blame God.  We label others and ourselves as a way of feeling like we control the world, we know how things should be going.  And when, like Job, bad news comes, or someone refuses to stay in their box, we don’t know how to respond. We ask Jesus to be seated in a power position next to him.  We ask God for certainty and control.  We get instead, a command to serve one another and a vision of the universe as vast and diverse.  A command to think outside the box. A command to think beyond our small universes into a vision of community.

Jesus wanted his disciples to be community, not hierarchy.  To be servants to each other.  One of the Moderator’s books we read says, “We thank God for giving us community who live by God’s call, by God’s forgiveness and God’s promise.  We do not complain of what God does not give us, but thank God for God has given us enough, a community of flawed Christians journeying through struggles and need and disillusionement together.”[1]  Like Job, James and John, we struggle in life.  Unlike Job and like James and John, we have community.  And unlike James and John, we know the commitment Jesus made to this new way of thinking about God and community that was so amazingly outside the box.  Together as servants of one another, and supported by God’s amazing power and grace, we can build a vision of community that is heaven on earth, that is outside the box and that keeps surprising us in amazing ways.  God’s vision of our community, our church, is far bigger than we can imagine, so let us be open to the surprise of seeing that vision pop out in unexpected ways.  May it be so. Amen. Vintage Matty Mattel Clown Jack in the Box -1950's - Working! - YouTube

“All Around the Mulberry Bush, the monkey chased the weasel… Pop goes the weasel!” Remember having one of these when you were a kid?  Or maybe giving one of these to a kid?  Out comes the Jack in the box and it always seemed surprising even though we knew what would happen. 

The big draw of this toy was that surprise of the jack in the box jumping out and looking bigger than the box it jumped out of.  How did such a tall clown come out of such a small box? 

The scriptures today talk about God and Jesus as being bigger than we could imagine.  The reading from Job is a classic Jack in the box story, and also reminds me of the cliched advice, “Be careful what you ask for, you might get it!”  Job has been building up a case against God; Job felt like God was a business partner to be bargained with, and his friends didn’t help much.  They believed firmly in karma, that if you do something wrong, you would reap the consequences and if a disaster falls on you, it must be your own fault.

That’s still a common belief in today’s world too.  It’s a nasty form of blaming the victim, and it’s meant to comfort ourselves.  “That won’t happen to me because I do things properly” which can mean anything from vitamins to crystals.  Job was written to challenge that assumption.  It is the original “Why bad things happen to Good People” story, designed to wrestle with that hard question.  Job put together a legal argument as if he was a well-trained lawyer.  God had treated him with injustice by letting Job experience some heart-breaking disasters, a business failure and lastly a devastating physical illness.  And Job set out his case that he did not deserve any of it.  If this was karma, karma got the wrong guy and he could prove it!

He turned the crank on his complaints to God until pop!  Unexpectedly, God came to give Job an answer.  Not a particularly comforting answer, mind you.  God says, “Are you as big as me? As powerful as me?  As creative as me? As smart as me?  Nope!” Not much of an answer, and certainly not a comfort either.

Except that it is a reminder to Job that however Job imagined God, God was bigger than that imagination.  God could not be stuffed into a box until Job turned the crank. 

James and John also thought they had Jesus pegged.  They thought they had figured out what box he belonged in.  The box of political leader and reformer who would start a revolution to depose the Herods and the Pilates of their world. Except that Jesus wouldn’t stay in that box either.  He wasn’t going to become a stereotypical rebel who takes down the local tyrant, only to become the next tyrant.

That’s a real pattern in history.  It happened in France when Louis 16 was deposed and four years later, Napoleon Bonapart was the head of France, living like a King.  The many Roman emperors that killed their predecessor then were assassinated by the next.  Russia was the same, and anyone who read Animal Farm in school will remember that. Even Israel at the time of Jesus would have remembered Herod the Great becoming king by attacking the current king with the help of the Roman army.  Leaders rose and fell, and politics was a dangerous game.  James and John figured that Jesus was going to end up with power and influence, maybe even a throne.  But Jesus wanted something bigger.

Not political leadership but moral, ethical, spiritual and religious leadership.  Leadership that inspires and encourages us to think bigger.  Leadership that thinks outside the box about the big picture, not our big pictures, but God’s big picture.  Leadership that inspires, empowers and includes us in God’s picture.

We humans like to feel we are in control of our small little universes.  Or if we aren’t in control, there’s something wrong and we turn to blame.  We blame ourselves, we blame others, we blame God.  We label others and ourselves as a way of feeling like we control the world, we know how things should be going.  And when, like Job, bad news comes, or someone refuses to stay in their box, we don’t know how to respond. We ask Jesus to be seated in a power position next to him.  We ask God for certainty and control.  We get instead, a command to serve one another and a vision of the universe as vast and diverse.  A command to think outside the box. A command to think beyond our small universes into a vision of community.

Jesus wanted his disciples to be community, not hierarchy.  To be servants to each other.  One of the Moderator’s books we read says, “We thank God for giving us community who live by God’s call, by God’s forgiveness and God’s promise.  We do not complain of what God does not give us, but thank God for God has given us enough, a community of flawed Christians journeying through struggles and need and disillusionment together.”[1]  Like Job, James and John, we struggle in life.  Unlike Job and like James and John, we have community.  And unlike James and John, we know the commitment Jesus made to this new way of thinking about God and community that was so amazingly outside the box.  Together as servants of one another, and supported by God’s amazing power and grace, we can build a vision of community that is heaven on earth, that is outside the box and that keeps surprising us in amazing ways.  God’s vision of our community, our church, is far bigger than we can imagine, so let us be open to the surprise of seeing that vision pop out in unexpected ways.  May it be so. Amen.

---

[1] Paraphrase from p 28, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Life Together: the Classic Exploration of Christian Community Harper & Row, 1954

Asking Questions

One of the hardest things a woman can do is ask questions when she doesn’t like the answers she’s hearing.  It’s even harder if she is from a different ethnic background than who she is talking too.  If she’s poor or desperate, or not fashionable or not pretty, it’s even worse.  Women are not supposed to be uppity, they are not supposed to be loud, and they are definitely not supposed to be demanding or insistent on their rights. 

The Syrophoenician woman was everything she was not supposed to be.  Wrong race, wrong gender.  Brazenly talking to a man without her husband present, which meant that she probably didn’t have one.  Advocating for a child who also was female.  Bold enough to not take Jesus’ refusal personally, and to keep asking for what she wanted. 

This is a hard scripture, and it is one that many people struggle with.  Why did Jesus sound so sexist and racist?  We don’t need that in our fragmented world.  We don’t need women’s voices being shut down, we don’t need women’s opinions being treated with disrespect, we don’t need women’s requests for health care being dismissed or disregarded.

Right now, in this world, women who are working in politics or who are environmental scientists, or who are elite athletes that don’t look stereotypically female are getting attacked through comments, social media posts, and even murdered as seen in the case of the doctor in India, the Olympic marathoner in Uganda or the Turkish-American woman shot by Israeli soldiers. Indigenous women are still disappearing in Canada. Teenagers are at risk of losing their access to sex education in Alberta while cases of sexually transmitted diseases are growing, not to mention what might happen if Covenant Health takes over all hospitals.

We could go on and on with examples, but where is the Good News for us in this scripture?  It does not appear to be supportive of a woman’s right to ask for help without getting push back.  Except that the Syrophoenician did, and she got results.  She challenged the status quo and got what she needed for herself and her daughter.  She got the attention that made for real change. 

Her story was unusual and no wonder it was recorded.  And maybe just maybe she knew Jesus’ story.  Somehow, despite not having an instagram account or a snap chat or facebook or tictoc, she knew about Jesus and even though he was hiding out in a city outside his home country, she reacted the same as some folks here might react if they found out Taylor Swift was visiting next door.  She barged in without permission.  Not to get an autograph, but to get a healing.  Maybe she knew the same scriptures that Jesus did.  His bible had many stories of the importance of taking care of widows and orphans and even foreign women.  Maybe she knew the stories about Elijah healing a foreign widow’s child, or Elisha who saved a widow’s children from being sold into slavery because of debts.  Maybe she had read the teachings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi and others about how the God of Israel taught that children and widows were to be protected and treated with respect and hospitality.

Jesus pushed back.  Why, we don’t know.  Was Jesus grumpy?  Was he tired and here was someone interrupting him on his holiday? Was he racist?  We don’t know his thinking.  Or maybe this was an opportunity to show his disciples how to go beyond racism.  This event became a lesson of radical inclusion that stuck, and the disciples changed and got over their stereotypical assumptions and chauvinist attitudes.  God was not just for the Jewish people, and God certainly was not just for men or priests or scholars.  God was for everyone!  Everyone deserved to hear the good news that God was ready to change the world for the better.

Our bible states right in the first book that God created all humankind, male and female both in God’s own image.  All humans are.  And there is a thread of women empowered by God to make a difference.  Eve chose knowledge over ignorance, Miriam lead worship with her brother Moses, Deborah was a Judge of the Israelites before there were kings.  There’s Ruth and Ester and Mary who were leaders that spoke out against the status quo.  Women have been speaking out ever since.

Who are the voices we are not hearing from?  Who are the people wanting to be included in God’s community?  There are many who feel isolated or depressed.  News articles abound about the epidemic of mental illness.  One of the prescriptions given is to find a community, but people are reluctant to look for one.  One woman said, “I’d come to church if I knew there was a church that wouldn’t mind me asking questions.  Another person said they didn’t dare come to a church because they knew they would be judged.  Someone else said they were badly hurt by a congregation’s power struggle, or a priest’s cruel remark.  They expect a church will judge them because they have had that experience in the past.  They have been hurt badly.

Our job, like Jesus with the Syrophoenician woman, is to listen and encourage.  When we understand where people are coming from, we can be an agent of healing for them.  It makes a difference.  It made a difference for the Syrophoenician woman.  Tyre developed a congregation that was strong and proud to associate with Paul and the other disciples, and in Acts was mentioned as one of the earliest churches founded by Jesus.

When we, like Jesus, listen with curiosity and let go of our prejudices, amazing acts of healing occur.  God is still healing the ones that are hurting, God is still loving those who are full of despair and God is still speaking to those who are questioning.  Thanks be for a God who loves questioners! Amen.

Being invisible

There’s a picture book about a kid who feels invisible.   Every day Brian goes to school, and no one notices him.  He draws pictures that nobody sees, and he eats lunches all by himself and no one picks him to play on their team in gym class.  Even the teacher doesn’t see him, and he feels safe that way.  Then a new kid moves to town and gets laughed at for bringing his favorite lunch to school.  Brian thinks it’s worse to be laughed at than to be invisible, so Brian draws a picture with an encouraging note and leaves it where the new kids will find it.  That’s the day things start to change.  The new kid starts to see Brian and treats him with the same kindness Brian showed in his note.

There are days when we may feel invisible.  And there are days when we feel like we are living under the spotlight.  The election has spotlighted a whole bunch of people who we may never have heard about before they ran for power.  There are people in our world who are terrified of being invisible, of not having their votes and their opinions count.  There are a couple of fundamentalist churches in Canada who are quietly working to make our country more restrictive, with a racist and homophobic agenda to elect politicians and influence both educational and judicial systems, according to a CBC research report.  They want to work invisibly to have their political views imposed on all.  There are others who desperately want to be in the spotlight, they crave the attention they get when they make controversial statements and end up in the media.

I wish I knew what the answer was in our argumentative world where we are all struggling to breathe, never mind argue over who is better than whom.  When the smoke from our forest fires reaches all the way to New York, surely we should all be working together to save our environment?  But no, let’s get upset at how an oppressed and generally invisible minority uses paint in public so they can feel seen as is what is happening in Westlock this week.

Maybe that was the same feeling the Pharisees had when they saw Jesus talking to the tax collectors. People like Matthew would have been seen as irredeemable by the religious scholars of the day, a lost cause, and worthy of being treated as if they were invisible.  And no one asked the question of why they chose such a career that made them invisible in the first place?  Why were tax collectors so shunned?

When we think of traitors, World War 2 comes to mind, especially after the June 6 commemoration we observed this week.  Did you know that for months after the troops landed on Normandy beaches on D-Day, some 20,000 women in France were forcibly attacked by men, often French men, and had their hair shaved off?  This was done so everyone knew that they were collaborators with the Germans.  The shaving was not part of a legal investigation, or a Truth and Reconciliation hearing, but a vigilante action by men wanting to prove their loyalty to France.  Like the medieval witch hunts centuries before, the women who were targeted were often single, widowed or with husbands away in a prisoner of war camp.  Invisible women that no one would protect. No one asked them if they had collaborated or why they had collaborated.  Sometimes they were punished or even killed simply because someone said they saw the woman talking to a German soldier in public.  It’s an ugly and invisible part of the aftermath of the liberation that happened across Europe.  As one novelist pointed out, many of these women had no choice.  The Germans would invade a town, pick out the nicest houses and force the inhabitants to serve them unquestioningly day and night.  If the woman had children, the officers would threaten the children to ensure obedience. 

Going back to Matthew the Tax collector, why was he seen with such disdain? We don’t think of Canada Revenue Agency workers in the same class as collaborators and traitors, though we may like to grumble at bloated government departments and overpaid federal employees; maybe we even make sweeping generalizations about invisible people we may never meet in person.  The tax collectors in the time of Jesus were seen as traitors working with the Roman occupiers.  Not worthy to be seen by Jesus.  Nor were women who had hemorrhages.  They were not to be seen during their monthly menstrual times.  They certainly weren’t supposed to be sneaking out in public to grab the fringe of Jesus’ cloak!  And a little girl who was dead was also seen as unclean, something a good rabbi should never touch.  If Jesus had been a proper religious expert, he would have ignored all three of these kinds of people.  He would have treated them as invisible.

But Jesus didn’t just see Matthew and his co-workers, or the sick woman, he called them to join his new community!  Just as God didn’t just see Abraham in his crowded city, God called Abraham out of safety to start a new society.  Abraham was invisible to his father’s culture as a second-born child who would inherit nothing and would have had nothing to lose by venturing out into the wilderness.  Abraham brought invisible people with him, a wife that had little say in where he would go next and brought who knows how many unnamed slaves.  The country he moved to had invisible people already living in it.  Even though the land was occupied, God chose that Abraham’s family would inherit it, not the indigenous people.  Suddenly this is not a comfortable scripture, but one to be wrestled with.

Still, the tension of who is seen and who isn’t is important to reflect on.  Who do we choose to see?  Who do we wish were more invisible?  Do we feel invisible like Matthew, but are we truly invisible? Do we ask ourselves who God calls us to see? Do we crave the spotlight or crave invisibility?  Do we have the courage to hear God’s call to us, regardless of who we are, to see others as Christ sees us?  Is our church invisible or seen by all? Are we ready to risk being a bold visible community that welcomes all? And how do we do that? 

Through deep spirituality first and foremost.  Spiritual practices, prayer, humbleness, intentional times to think about our faith and our call will build the deep empathy and resilience that we need.  Then we can practice bold discipleship where we take courageous steps to welcome the invisible and bring healing good news to those who are hurting. And lastly, we can choose to heed the call to step into the spotlight that daring justice needs, in order to heal God’s beloved creation. Like Abraham, we are called to go into an unknown world which needs so much healing.  Like Matthew, we are called to new communities of faith, like Jesus we are called to help the invisible be seen.  May God bless us and keep us on this journey we are called to be on.  Amen.

We’re Still Standing!

Did you know that the most frequently written about event in the Bible is not crossing the Red Sea or getting the 10 Commandments or the Christmas story?  We only have two stories of Christmas, and they are different from each other in many ways.  But guess how many resurrection accounts there are in the New Testament?

There are the four accounts in each of the four Gospels, and another three sermons in Acts, 1 Corinthians, and 1 Peter.  There are over 50 other references sprinkled throughout the Gospels and the letters.  Something very significant happened to folks that first Easter morning.

So significant that it felt like an earthquake that shook them up like nothing before.  It turned their understanding of the world on its head.  They found the courage and the enthusiasm to go out into the same world that had killed their leader and preach exactly the same message that got him killed in the first place!

Now folks like Richard Dawkins think they conspired to lie or else they were stupid idiots.  But the lie theory doesn’t hold water to me.  To put it in a modern context, while I might promote the lies of someone whom I look up to, especially if he is a rich billionaire and ex-president of a democratic country, I won’t promote it if it means risking myself getting involved in a lawsuit.  And Jesus was neither a rich billionaire nor a former president.  Jesus was a peasant rabbi, a faithful Jew.  Who on earth would want to die for such a poor homeless person?  The lying theory doesn’t hold water for me.

What about the ‘stupid idiots’ theory?  That Jesus came up with an elaborate scam that made David Copperfield or Chriss Angel look like amateurs, and pulled the wool over his followers?  But Peter and the rest sound like down to earth, no-nonsense people.  The one truth they all agreed on was that Jesus taught them to build a community based on sayings like “The Truth will Set you Free”, and “Don’t be like the lying hypocrites”.  That is not a conspiracy scam.  These were rough and ready, cynical men who were more interested in fame and power than humbleness.  Yet, after Easter they left their homes and families, gave up fame and fortune, and turned from self-serving students to passionate witnesses willing to risk their lives.  Wow!

The earthquake that was the death of their beloved teacher should have dropped them in their tracks.  They should have, as Matthew colorfully put it, “fell down as though they were dead.”  That’s exactly what the Roman officials expected.  They were old hands at disrupting political opponents.  They knew the best way to diffuse rebellions was to take the leader out.  It worked like a charm repeatedly over and over.  Lop off the head and the followers slink off into oblivion. It was one of the main reasons why the Roman empire lasted for 300 years.  Public executions kept the local peasants afraid and obedient.  Until one day it didn’t.

That one day was Easter.  Three days after his friends and family had experienced the devastating and humiliating execution of their beloved teacher, suddenly they experienced the message to not be afraid in a courageous new way.  Suddenly the earthquakes of life had no power over them.  Suddenly they had strength and endurance and passion for the boldest message they had ever heard.  Love is unstoppable.  Bullies will not win.  Power has no power.  Empire is no God.  Death is not the end.

We are living in earthquake times.  We have endured our world being turned upside down.  We have seen the deliberate preaching of intolerance.  We are seeing the fragility of banks, world peace, and our environment.  We hear of more gun violence, the rise of mental illness, the undermining of democracy and good governance.  We feel the challenge of inflation, and rising crime rates. These earthquakes are real.

Or are they?  While on one hand we have lots of bad news stories, we also are called as Christians to look for God working in the world in unexpected ways.  Look at the statistics of crime from our government: 

The violent crime index went up because of domestic violence during Covid lockdowns, but everything else is dropping!  Our local RCMP are cracking down on drugs and guns, with lots of stories in the paper about their latest seizures. Solar panel businesses are on the rise as are solar panels on Canadian rooftops.  EV car sales are increasing too.  Hybrid heat pumps that use less natural gas are being sold faster than expected.  All good news for the environment.  The number of people hospitalized for Covid in Alberta is down to 450 now, and that is also good news.

God’s good news has been working for centuries.  Don’t be afraid!  Jesus is still with you!  Death is not the final answer, the final defeat.  This good news destroyed the corrupt Roman Empire and stopped the large-scale slaughter of innocent people.  This good news led to ordinary followers like you and me establishing schools for all children, and hospitals for anyone in need.  This good news led folks like us building hospices a thousand years ago for Muslim, Jew, Christian and pagan alike so they could die in dignity.  This good news continues to end the power of elites to do whatever they want and avoid justice.  Even now, research done by reputable universities are finding that being involved in a healthy faith community can improve our happiness, our health, our longevity and our emotional resilience!  Gathering together on Sunday mornings, doing crazy things like collecting coins and supplies for Ukraine or socks for the homeless, combats loneliness and meaninglessness.  It gives us the strength and courage to withstand the earthquakes in our lives and helps us boldly proclaim that in life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us, we are not alone, Thanks be to God, halleluiah!

Puzzling predicaments

Have you ever done a jigsaw puzzle?  Remember the wooden ones or cardboard ones where a circle went in the circle hole or the cow in the cow silhouette?  We graduated to 10-piece puzzles and then 50 pieces.  Some folks got so into it that they do 500- or 1000-piece puzzles.

Life has felt like a jigsaw puzzle where we only have some of the pieces and there’s no picture on the box.  For some of us, this has led to a sense of anxiety, anger or apathy.

On this the third anniversary of going into shut-down, how do we put the puzzle back into a coherent picture?  How do we see what the picture is, feel like we are shaping it rather than falling into despair?  Especially when we are dealing with a massive deficit as a congregation?  It would be easy to panic or to give up.  But as followers of Jesus, we are reminded that Jesus points to a different way of seeing, a different way of acting in the world.

The story of the man born blind is worthy of a movie or epic novel.  What must it be like to have grown up without sight, only to have some interfering busybody come along. Did he sign a consent form?  Did Jesus explain the possible side effects such as being pulled into an interrogation by the religious authorities?  Did the man want to see?  Or was he happy with his life?

And who really couldn’t see in this story?  The disciples were struggling with the age-old question of why do bad things happen and assuming that it must be punishment for something the man did or his family did.  As if God sent blindness to punish the individual!  We still often think that when we hear about tragedies, asking what the person did to deserve the situation they find themselves in.  Why did Dad get cancer?  Why did Grandma have a heart attack?  Why were two police officers gunned down in Edmonton? Why are libraries in Winnipeg installing metal detectors in all the entrances? Why? 

I don’t particularly like Jesus’ answer.  So that God can be seen in action in their life, so that God’s healing love can be witnessed.  Not great.  What about the 20 or 30 years the man lived with a difficult disability, the ostracization he and his parents faced?

I don’t believe a God of Love would deliberately inflict suffering on anyone for the sake of winning a debate.  I do believe that Jesus was intentionally and publicly including people that didn’t fit.  He wanted people to have an indisputable and unforgettable experience of God’s presence in the world.  He wanted to shake people’s expectations and assumptions of who God was, what God’s community looks like, and who is worthy of God’s grace.

He wanted people to shake up the puzzle pieces.  To rethink about who fits in and who is out.  To reimagine community and reimagine where God is in the world.

What are the puzzle pieces that we have that aren’t fitting together the way they used to?  First piece is that we have gone through the valley of the shadow of death as a whole world these last few years.  Three years ago, I went to a St. Patrick’s Day birthday party.  It was usually a crowded, happy, raunchy event but that night there was barely a dozen adults in the room, and we were all wondering if it was even safe to be together.  A few days later, we were in lock down.  I was half-planning my funeral because I have asthma and allergies and didn’t think I would survive the virus.  We changed on a dime because we had to.  We learned how to work from home, how to stay away from our neighbors, how to do everything from church to banking online.  Sales of jigsaw puzzles went through the roof when people weren’t hording toilet paper or making sourdough bread or trying to keep their sanity and their marriages and families together.  It was hard.

Many community clubs like Toastmasters, WeightWatchers and Tops closed, churches too of all kinds of denominations.  Girl guides and brownies haven’t come back, schools opened and shut faster than a fridge door, with devastating impacts on children’s mental health and education.  Senior’s homes weren’t much better. People got angry and targeted each other, the health profession, the politicians that listened to scientists.  Dr. Henshaw’s appearance on television saw a surge in dress sales for her outfits and yet also a surge in death threats. And people died.  We were in the valley of more than just a shadow of death.  This has been world-shaking.

But. But.  Even though we are in the valley of the shadow of death, even though we have been blind since birth, even though we have come through many dangers, toils, and snares, the grace of Jesus has brought us safe so far, and that grace will lead us home.

Our book study this Lent had a story of a refugee living in a homeless shelter.  His name was Saleh and as a paraplegic, Saleh had crossed both desert and ocean to get to Canada.  He wanted to raise money for gift cards for his shelter friends. The goal was to raise $5,000 in 36 hours and get the cards to people before Christmas Eve. Impossible? No! He said “In Arabic we have a saying: ‘it is God who guides the hand.’ People told me I couldn’t cross the desert in a wheelchair. With God, I knew I could.” They did indeed meet their goal. Imagine the faith that helped him cross the desert in a wheelchair! We need that faith now!

It takes Saleh’s deep, courageous spirituality to meet challenges like what we have faced these last three years.  It will take deep courage, daring conversations and bold testimony to our neighbors to get through these next years.  But I have no doubt in my mind that whatever jigsaw pieces we have, God’s big picture will come together when we work as a team to puzzle it out together.  In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us, we are not alone.  Thanks be to God!

Walls and Horizons

 Last week we had a fun time with music, and I mentioned how much I liked a variety of musicians as I was growing up.  One in particular was a fellow named John Denver.  His song “Country Roads, Take me Home” is one that a lot of people can relate to.  “Almost Heaven West Virginia” is one I want to change to “Almost Heaven Athabasca” with the hills and the river.  Every time I drive down the east hill, that view of the river grabs my heart with its beauty.  Gorgeous!  I’m sure many of you have a river valley you love to see, or a hill you live next to that puts a lump in your throat, a piece of wilderness that just seems special every time you see it.

The ancient writer of our psalm, one of the oldest psalms in the bible, reminded us to give credit for the beauty of nature to God.  Recognize God in those moments of wonder.  Honor God in those moments of awe.  See God in those country roads, those shining waters, those mountains and hills, but don’t get messed up thinking that the hills and mountains are God.  They are fragile and changeable, not as permanent as we’d like to imagine.  God can disrupt and change that which we mere mortals see as unchangeable.  Which is a good thing from time to time.

We need disruptions to keep our attention on the right things.  It’s important not to get stuck in ruts, assume we have all the answers, that we’ve come to an end point in our thinking or understanding.  And God seems to shake things up just when we least expect it, sometimes in powerful ways, sometimes in gentle whispers.

Baptism and confirmation are when we take a moment to recognize the disruptions that have brought us to a new stage in our lives.  A new baby, a new family, a new understanding of our faith come together in the waters we use to symbolize a change has taken place, something new is in our lives.  It can be something we can’t quite put into words and bring a lump into our throats just like a beautiful sky or a glimpse of river.  Something we wish we could sing about if only we could find the right tune.

Baptism and confirmation are not the end point.  And they are not some kind of magical spell or ritual we cast to prevent bad things happening, the storms of life from hurting us.  Jesus was baptized and it didn’t keep him safe, he got crucified.  He wasn’t baptized to give himself a ‘get out of hell free’ card like we’re playing some kind of cosmic Monopoly game.  These kinds of ideas were what people thought baptism was but not for John and Jesus.  Confirmation too used to be a sign of who was in and who was out.  When I was growing up, confirmation was the ticket we needed to have communion, or teach Sunday School.  It became a wall that kept ‘them’ in and us kids out.  It was something that excluded.  And just as our faith grows and our ideas about how to worship change from one decade to the next, so our understanding of baptism and confirmation also change. 

Not every church is comfortable with change.  There are churches that still forbid organs and pianos as sinful.  There are churches who have women and children sitting on the left and men on the right and never the twain shall meet.  There’s one United Church in Halifax that has gates on their pews and the ‘free’ pews in the back were where people sat if they couldn’t afford to pay for a box.  Even today no one sits in the front box for that is reserved for the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia.  I don’t know if it’s ever used.

Jesus and John were not interested in putting walls up or boxing people in.  They were interested in getting people to look up, past the walls that hemmed them in to look at far horizons, and to take courageous steps on our journey towards God.  They were interested in rituals with simple everyday things like water, bread, wine, and fish that would break down walls between people.  Even then, they were working together to bring hope and inspiration to ordinary people like you and me.  They were working together to stir things up, to get folks thinking, to inspire new ideas and new ways of being in community.  Just like country roads with the radio reminding us of our home far away, baptism and confirmation are the voice of Jesus calling to us today to move beyond our walls to far horizons together with this congregation of courageous travelers.  May we hear that voice and heed the call and find blessings and fellowship this day and ever more. Amen.

Shouting Stones - Luke 19:28–40 Jesus enters Jerusalem to cheering crowds

 What an image Jesus paints.  There is so much excitement and so much momentum that there is no containing the call for change.  That even killing him will not control the people hungry for hope.  Hungry for new ways of being in community.  Hungry for peace and freedom from fear and anxiety, tragedy and trauma.  That hunger was so strong they threw their coats down on the road and cheered a simple peasant riding a small untrained animal in public.  And so there was so much momentum that, like a snowball rolling downhill, picking up speed and size as it accumulates more snow, that it can ultimately flatten everything in its path, the crowd grew and cheered louder and louder.

No wonder some of the officials tried to silence the crowd.  His challenge to all in power was on full display.  And to be fair to the Pharisees who challenged him, they feared that this rally would degenerate into open rebellion and the Romans would slaughter everyone indiscriminately.  They were right to be afraid, as 30 years after Palm Sunday, the first Jewish-Roman war destroyed Israel as an independent nation until 1948.

They were right to attempt to dial down the rhetoric and the passion.  But Jesus was right to say that nothing would silence the people.

This is one of those stories that makes me wonder how one ordinary human being could be so clear on their purpose, so brave, and so determined to go through with what he felt called to do.  We are in awe of the sheer determination of the Ukrainian people right now to do what needs to be done for their country.  It’s like that, but I think it’s more.  Jesus had no hope that he would survive Good Friday.  His people didn’t understand that.  Even when Jesus bluntly told his disciples again and again, they denied it, scolded him, or tried to make him think in more positive terms.  They thought he was heading towards Jerusalem to replace Pilot and Herod, to create a political solution to their problems.

They were caught up in their small hungers, the hunger for power, the hunger for significance, the hunger for personal freedom.  Jesus was thinking of the larger hungers, of peace and healthy relationships, of accountability and authenticity and community.  Jesus had a sense of the historic, seeing that this was a time to push for radical change. 

Just as Moses saw his people enslaved in Egypt, being treated as tools to build pyramids and temples to stone Gods, or Jeremiah facing down the politics that had brought the Babylonians to the walls of Jerusalem, or Ezekiel having a vision of dead dry bones that needed to be preached at, or Isaiah guiding the exiles back to a devastated and destroyed city, Jesus saw that the situation was dire and people needed something fundamentally different.

Not unlike the times we are living in today.  At our Lenten Book chat on Wednesday, we talked about ethical dilemmas, and how many we face.  Even something as simple as which grocery store we walk into and whether we wear a mask when we go in, who do we sit next to, do we go for coffee, these many decisions become weighted with possibility and risk and challenge.

It’s exhausting to have so many decisions.  Sometimes it is downright depressing.  Some of us search for good news about Ukraine, some of us debate about who to vote for in the upcoming UCP leadership conference, some of us struggle to decide how to cast our ballots for our union recommendations, some of us celebrate the new union at Amazon, some of us lament the power of unions, some of us wonder about how to live more intentionally into the understanding that we are all treaty people.  And some of us wonder how we will get our kids to do their homework or how we will survive their brand-new school recorders.  And just like the ancient Hebrew people in Egypt, the exiles in Babylon, beleaguered Jerusalem, it’s too much; we need some hope.

So we call out “Hosanna” like the people watching Jesus on his colt.  Hosanna means help us or save us.  While it’s not mentioned in Luke, who was a Greek and wouldn’t necessarily know the Hebrew language, it is in all three of the other gospels.  Save us.  Help us.  And Jesus told the authorities that the need for help was so great that even the stones would cry out.

Not unlike now for many people around the world.  Afghanistan women crying out, first nations people, our young people who may never be able to afford their own homes, Koreans tired of war, Syrians struggling to get out of their country which is no longer in the media spotlight, people of color dealing with racism in Europe, and so on.  We call out for help even when it seems most helpless.

And while I would like to promise that all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well, we do need to call out for help in times like these.

Our faith story is full of communities asking for help.  The answer comes in unexpected ways.  Moses, a convicted murderer, leads the people on a forty-year hiking trip, Jeremiah starts a real estate company in the middle of a war, Isaiah inspires the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of the exile to return home and rebuild. Unexpected help still appears today.  I stumbled across a poem written in Cologne Germany in a basement during the Second World War.  It was scratched in the wall by refugees hiding from Nazis. It goes “I believe in the sun, though it be dark; I believe in God, though He be silent; I believe in neighborly love, though it be unable to reveal itself.”  When we are calling for help, it is a reminder that we all can still call for help, and help comes.

When amazon workers ask each other for help, unions start to form.  When people in war-torn countries ask for help, dictators get kicked off the UN Human Rights Council, and when friends of Lee and Kelsey Thunder ask for help so that their graves will not continue to be unmarked, it is answered with stunning speed and generosity!

Jesus encourages us to call for help to build a world of peace for everyone regardless of the language they speak, the God they follow, the temple they worship in, the dream that have for the future.  Let us cry out Hosanna and be ready for God’s surprising answers us in this time of need. May it be so for us all!

Taking the Plunge

One of the joys of living in Athabasca is being able to walk along flowing water.  Being so close to the river and the creek is just wonderful, at least when it’s not -30.  We see all kinds of wildlife like the beaver in this photo, and while I’m glad not to have had a close encounter with a bear or a moose on the trails, Tim has.  I’ll stick to beaver spotting at a respectful distance.

I was surprised to learn that the Jordan River is not a grand wide river like the Athabasca.  At the place where John the Baptist was supposed to have set up shop, it’s slower and shallower than that, more like the Tawatina where it goes under the bridge during the spring.  Slow and steady.  Waist deep.  Muddy brown and probably quite refreshing on a hot day.  And a place of great significance even back then.   It wasn’t the size that mattered, it was the sense that this was the boundary between the land of outcasts and wanderers and the Promised Land.  The boundary between poverty and prosperity, between nomadic uncertainty and settled roots, between disconnection and identity, between chaos and purpose.  For the people of the Holy Land, it defined who was ‘us’ and who were ‘they’.  It was a natural border that became the difference between away and home.

A place to wash off foreign influences and prepare to enter the Holy Land, set apart by God for the people of Israel.  A place to prepare to go to the Holy of Holies, the Temple of Jerusalem, a few days' walk away.  A place to start new initiatives, new projects, new lives. 

No wonder John set up there, and that Jesus met him there.  It was full of scriptural importance for the people as well as symbolic importance, and a great place to make great commitments. We pick a time for new resolutions, but they had a place.  A humble, muddy river with a deep history for a frequently embattled community.  A place of hope, new beginnings and new possibilities.

How does that understanding of baptism in the Jordan affect the story of the Samarian baptisms?

The disciples, no longer able to sit at the foot of their teacher Jesus, are still safely ensconced in Jerusalem, hunkered down, and waiting for Saul of Tarsus to get tired of persecuting them.  They are focused on their own people, and remembering what Jesus taught them.  They start delegating work to others, and so Phillip the Deacon went out into the wider world, doing far more than he had been asked.  He found his way into Samaria, preaching and baptizing as he went, finding great success.  He followed the nudging of the Spirit and found himself far beyond Jerusalem, far beyond the Jordan River. 

He found himself outside his cultural community, with people who talked a little differently, who worshipped a little differently, who had a different cultural identity than him.  All those differences didn’t stop him.  Not even the attention of a shyster snake oil salesman in the town, Simon the Magician, deterred him.

Phillip kept on teaching and preaching.  And that got the 12 hiding safely in Jerusalem so curious that Peter and John left to check it out.  They weren’t there to fix or correct or advise Phillip, just to see if the reports were true and to encourage him.  They only were puzzled by why the Spirit had not been included in the baptism, a bit confusing even by our standards, but whatever they did or said to Phillip, he was emboldened to continue preaching and baptizing.  The next chapter is all about his encounter with the Ethiopian Eunuch and that was a transformative moment full of Spirit in the fledgling church.  Clearly, the message of good news was spreading beyond safe cultures, safe borders, safe languages, and catching fire amongst people that the 12 did not predict.  It surprised them and encouraged them.  It reminded them of their own baptisms, and the times that they had experienced with Jesus because of it.  It emboldened all twelve to eventually leave Jerusalem, ending in places like Rome, Spain, India and Turkey, far from the safety and security of the Jordan River.  Remembering their baptism gave them the courage to go out and live what Jesus taught.

Remembering our baptisms is not something everyone can do.  I was baptized as an infant, so I don’t remember what it was like.  But I remember my brother’s baptism, my children’s baptisms, my husband’s baptism and the baptisms I have done here among you, from seven-year-old Sidney and baby Emilie and  toddler Isla to adults Bev, Heather, Gordon, and Wendy, which I thoroughly enjoyed getting wet!  Every time we gather in community to celebrate and welcome another soul into God’s big family, I get a speck of something in my eye.  Every time we get to bless an individual and their spiritual journey and hear what a difference we have made in their lives, I get a lump in my throat.  I remember OUR baptisms!

Baptism is where we learn that Christianity isn’t just a philosophy, it isn’t just a logical bunch of ideas that stick.  It isn’t just a bunch of mumbo jumbo touchy feelie stuff that anyone can do.  It isn’t for sale, as the magician Simon discovered the hard way.  It’s more than community, although it’s part of community.  It’s more than miracles and signs, which surprisingly I have heard a few here in my time.  Christianity is an experience and a movement that empowers many.  It gives life and purpose to those who are struggling, it gives compassion to those who believe that they have to be tough individuals to be successful.  It challenges the magicians looking for power to rethink their understanding of what it means to be a thriving human being.  It challenges us all to reflect and reorient our lives towards God’s loving community.

Try this experiment the next time you are in the shower, the bath or even washing your hands.  Take a moment to feel the water and say to yourself a few times, “Remember your baptism”.  Reflect on how far your journey has brought you and ask God where you might be called like Phillip, Peter and John, to set out into the unknown with good news for all to hear.  Remember the nurturing, sustaining, and transforming power of God’s love and our grateful response to that gift of God, that amazing grace.  Remember that you are gifted, called and chosen by God to inspire and empower the people around you.  And if you are not baptized, I invite you to prayerfully consider it as a sign of hope and inclusion in this community of faith.  It is the sign of a journey, an adventure that leads us all in surprising new directions with a community that stretches all the way back to Jesus and John standing in a modest river, starting something that became bigger than their wildest dreams.  May our baptisms, past, present and future be part of God’s great plan for a beautiful world.  Amen.

Signs of the Times

Last month we had a new addition to our congregation.  Agnes had been living in a decommissioned United Church in Collinton for several decades. She is currently 109 years old.  She was a wedding gift to Gina Payzant, the movie director who did a documentary on George Riga, author of “The Ecstasy of Rita Joe”. Agnes was gifted to Gina in 1976. The plant was sixty four years old, at that time, which means it was born in 1912.  Wow.  It must be happy here despite the indignity of being moved from its home, because it is already blooming!

Jesus might have appreciated Christmas cacti, although he would never have seen one in his homeland.  But they like to bloom every Christmas and Easter.  How do they know it’s time to get ready to do that?  Like the Fig Tree in the parable Jesus taught, (Luke 21:25–36) they know the signs of the times.  They know when the days get short and the days lengthen again.  They know what time it is.  They get ready.

The disciples were living in uncertain times, where there were no insurance companies to rebuild homes, no armies who could bring in helicopters, no way of distributing feed to livestock stranded in floods, no governments who could step in with emergency funding and infrastructure dollars.  Their time of challenge was a daily lived experience.  So it must have been confusing to hear that when the signs were troubling, nations were in turmoil and when danger was imminent, they were to stand up straight and raise their heads.

Why? Because Jesus would return for them, and return in love amidst the violence, the troubles, the signs.  They could be comforted in the knowledge that they could stand secure.  Unlike their neighbors and friends, they would be able to rise above the worry and the indulgences, staying calm and resourceful, being patient and brave.

How?  By remembering that God was with them.  If someone like Paul, who was flawed and bad-tempered, impulsive and antagonistic, could write so lovingly to the Thessalonians, how much more assured would the disciples have been by what Jesus said?

The signs of our times have been dire.  I feel for the churches in BC preaching on this scripture.  Between fires, floods, heat bubbles, mudslides and Covid, they must feel like the end times are real and are here and now.  People ask me if I think the end of the World is at hand, and if the second coming is near.  But if we read the scriptures carefully, we hear that Jesus taught the end was happening in his follower’s lives.  “This generation will not pass away,” he said, and we see echoes of that immediate expectation in Paul’s writings as well as in the other gospels.  In fact one of the hard things the early church had to wrestle with was that Jesus didn’t appear on schedule and people started dying before the Second Coming.  They had to change and adapt their expectations while they waited.  It’s one thing to sell all your possessions and share what you have with your neighbors when you think there’s only weeks left, but another thing when the weeks turn into months and the months turn into years.  Paul wrote a lot about that, and the transition was hard.  That’s why the gospels were written down, as the first witnesses to Jesus were executed or died.  Our scriptures that we read every Sunday morning are the legacy of that shift in thinking.  The end times did not come when they were expected, but the people changed their focus from waiting for immediate results to waiting with alert readiness.

Our world ends all the time.  My world first ended when I was 10 and my 4-year-old sister died about a month before Christmas.  My world ended when I gave up on church, deciding that God was dead and worship was meaningless.  My world ended when the cute boy told me he was not interested in me as anything more than a friend, and I knew I would never get married or have kids.  My world ended when I got the phone call from the hospital that my dad finally died from cancer.  My world ended when I heard the words, “your son has been in a motorcycle accident.”

But our world begins anew all the time too.  When I was twelve and the day after my birthday, I had a new baby brother to love.  When I heard the words, “welcome to our church, we hope you find God as you worship with us.” When Tim asked me to marry him.  When I twice had a new baby put in my arms and I marvelled at their tiny little toes and fingers.  When I watched them graduate.  When the phone call about the motorcycle accident added, “but he’s okay and is very lucky.”  When I graduated first from Education then from ministry.  When I was welcomed here and told, “we’re happy to have you!”

When our worlds end, we are to stand up straight, lift up our heads and rejoice because our salvation has come.  Remember Gandolf when he faced the monster in the mines of Moria?  He stood up tall, made a  cross with his sword and staff, looked the fiery Balrog in the eye and said, “You Shall Not Pass” with a blaze of light!  

When we see signs around us that we live in troubled times, let us not look for hope, let us be the hope!  Like Agnes here who lived through the War to end all Wars, the Spanish Flu, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Y2K, the Twin Towers and more, yet keeps blooming as a sign of hope and beauty.

Usually the first Sunday of Advent, I tell stories of where to find hope, but not this year.  Together, let us be signs of hope that the world so desperately needs.  Stand tall, look trouble in the eye, and shine your light of Christ so all can see! We can do this because we are blessed with the love that binds us together in one great community of saints that traces back to the disciples and Thessalonians who stood tall for us so we can stand tall for others!  And may God be our blessing and our salvation in these times.  Amen. 

Turning to Love

 

How do we adults hear Jesus calling us to become as little children?  It’s one thing to talk about the command to practice radical hospitality to families, but in these days of Covid, that seems to be a moot point.  But what about the idea he gave us of becoming as children ourselves?

I don’t think he meant that we should go back to wearing diapers or to hitting each other when we are fighting over toys or spending our days in sandboxes making castles.  But I do think he wanted us to look at our attitudes towards life.  Children, especially the preschoolers, aren’t interested in politics, they don’t have lofty ambitions, and for the most part, they are open to new things.  Watching a three-year old at the playground with a parent is like watching a yoyo, they slowly go farther and farther from the adult, and then run back to the safety of the adult.  Maybe for a snack or a hug or just the reassurance that they haven’t disappeared.  Then they move away a little further.  This will happen again and again as they balance their need for independence and their curiosity with the security and safety of a grown-up being nearby.  They can also be very creative.  How many times have we heard the story of a Christmas or birthday party with lots of presents where the best toy is an empty box?  I remember my brother when he was two years old, loving climbing into the pots and pans cupboard, closing the door and then bursting out with a ‘ta dah’!  Surprise!  Mom had to take all the pots and pans out until he got tired of the game.  They can be incredibly courageous too, oblivious to the consequences of their actions.  My daughter at the same age watched her 5-year-old brother navigate to the top of a very tall and rickety slide in a neighbor’s back yard.  I never thought she would try to climb it, as the rungs were quite narrow and slippery.  Turn my back for a moment, and the three-year-old was at the top of the 5-foot ladder! 

Curious, creative, courageous are just some of the gifts of childhood that we may have lost as adults, but they are something we can recapture, for both our own mental and physical health and also the health of our institutions.

Kairos Canada sent us a prayer that reminds us of the power of children:

The Great Spirit gave life in a circle, from childhood to childhood. Our children are there to teach us and for us to teach them. Our children were taken out of our Sacred Hoop and our hoop has been broken.

For decades we mourned the loss of our children. They never completely returned home. 

Even today, children are often missing.  Stats Canada data from 2016 reports that of the children in Alberta in foster care, 76% are indigenous.  The circle is still broken.  How do we support the calls for healing that circle?  Even here we can remember to be curious, creative and courageous in asking questions of our church, our province, our institutions that challenge not just what they do for children but how they do it.  From the new education curriculum which has been condemned by parents, teachers and professors alike for removing residential school history, to the upsurge of cases of infections in children under the age of 12, we need to challenge our politicians, our systems and our institutions .

 Paul wrote that our institutions need to be genuinely loving, and hospitable.  Whatever we do should be looked at through those two lenses.  We are being called to re-envision how our society must own up to the damage done to children today.  The times they are in abusive situations, the times they are neglected, abused and bullied by both individuals and systems.  The times when parents are not able to be there to help their children and the times when parents are part of the problem, not the solution.  The times when parents get angry that the schools are rumored to be forcing children to get vaccinations, the times when parents lose their children to easily preventable diseases like measles because they refused to have their children vaccinated.  The times parents have had to hear their children’s’ surgeries have been postponed, the times parents have had to help their children get educated at home. 

It is time to demand accountability from the systems we have.  When we write letters to support our universities, when we wear orange t-shirts, when we put out shoes to represent the thousands of children that never came home from residential school, when we text our local town and county candidates, we are challenging our institutions to live up to Jesus’ high standards.

Here in Athabasca United Church, we have cared for the children in the community for a long time.  There is an article in the town archives that told about Nancy Applebee and Alice Donahue rolling up their sleeves in this church’s basement to make sandwiches for the children’s school lunches before lunch programs existed.  This very building was used as overflow classroom space when the Brick Schoolhouse had no more room for the children.  We helped start the “Food for Thought” thanks to Cam Dierker, to make sure that high school students never had to learn on an empty stomach.  When Covid is over, we have plans for cooking classes with the CAVE outreach school so that every junior high and senior high student will graduate with basic food literacy and nutrition skills, and our cooking circle program is targeted to low income moms who struggle to stretch their food dollars to feed their little ones.

What more can we do?  Keep texting, keep writing letters, keep hoping and praying for the children in foster care, and keep loving hospitality at the core of everything we do.  When we do that, and keep having courageous, curious and creative conversations with our friends and neighbors, we will inspire, empower and engage our community to truly welcome these little ones into the circle of God’s love.  May it be so for us all!