Friday, December 24, 2021
Sunday, December 19, 2021
Sunday, December 12, 2021
Monday, December 6, 2021
Sunday, November 28, 2021
Sunday, November 21, 2021
Sunday, November 14, 2021
Monday, November 1, 2021
Monday, September 13, 2021
We Belong Together
I don't have to tell you
that we live in a fractured society.
We live in a time when
people can make up whatever they want.
It doesn't matter if it
is true.
It doesn't matter if is
right.
We can create any
reality we want.
This is especially true
with religion, and it is especially true with Christianity.
I will admit that this
has always been part of the American experience.
We have created all
sorts of new religions in America.
Mormonism and Scientology just to name the most obvious ones.
But within Christianity
there is an alarming trend of individuals who just make up stuff.
They don't have to check
it against history or tradition.
They don't have to check
it with a congregation of other believers.
They just make it up.
For example, I was reading an article about
the role that Christianity played in the insurrection of January 6th.
What I found is that
many of the people that stormed the capital that day had invented the religious
beliefs that allowed them to do what they did.
Consider "Q'annon
Shammon".
He is not a Christian,
but someone who believes in a numbers of religious beliefs that he has mushed
together.
He is the founder of founder of
something called the Star Seed charges.
It has something to do with a new age philosophy, but he also
has a commitment to parts of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
And he is not alone.
Most of the supposed Christians who were there that day where
not part of any denomination or Christian community.
As the Washington post reported, "Many forces contributed
to the attack on the Capitol...But part of the mix, say experts
on American religion, is the fact that the country is in a period when
institutional religion is breaking apart, becoming more individualized and more
disconnected from denominations, theological credentials and oversight."
The same is true with vaccines.
According to an article in the New York Times, the people who
are claiming a religious exemption are doing it based on an individual faith,
and not as part of a denomination.
This is important, because in our Gospel this morning Jesus asks
Peter, "Who do you say that I am."
And it seems like Peter is making a personal profession of faith
in Jesus as a the Messiah.
But we don't have a word for the second-person plural noun in
English.
Well they do down south, it is "Y'all".
And that is the correct word in Greek.
Jesus doesn't just as Peter who he thinks Jesus is, he asks all
the disciples, and Peter answers for the group.
This to me is important.
Because Christianity is never about me and Jesus.
It is always about us and Jesus.
The faith that I have was not handed down from on high to me.
It was not something I came up with while praying alone in my
room.
It was something that I was given.
It was given to me by my parents.
My parents who showed me what it meant to live in faith.
It was taught to me by Sunday School teachers and pastors.
It was formed in me with friends from Calumet around campfires,
and talks deep into the night on the shores of Lake Ossipee.
It was something that was also given down through the ages.
Through scholars and church leaders.
Through Julian of Norwich, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King
Jr, Oscar Romero.
Through the saints who have gone before me.
It is something that I continue to learn about through this
community of faith.
It is not about me, it is about "Y'all".
And I say that on this morning most of all.
Because for a long period of time we were not able to be
together.
I missed you.
I hope you missed each other, I hope you missed me.
I saw some of you.
I saw you in drips and draps.
Some of you I talked to on the phone, or saw you on Zoom.
We adjusted and made the most out of things.
But I missed our community.
I missed the energy that we get from one another.
I miss when we serve together.
I miss when we work together, and solve problems together.
I wish I could tell you that it was better, because we did new
things.
I know many pastors who think that.
I never did.
I know things are not going back to the way they were before the
pandemic.
However, Christianity is at its best when it is about us all
together.
We are at our best when it is us together.
Because together we are the body of Christ.
We are the people who want to follow Jesus.
We are the people who want to leave ourselves behind and love
our neighbors.
We are the people who are sent to carry the cross.
To lift up the broken hearted.
To give our lives for the sake of each other and the world.
We are the people that are called to do that in this world.
But we can't do any of that by ourselves.
The problems are too big.
The solutions are too few.
We need each other, so that together we know who Jesus is for
us.
I need y'all to help me to know who Jesus is.
I can't do it without you.
I was thinking about 9/11 this week.
As you know my first congregation was in New York.
I was there only two years after 9/11.
I ran into many people who lost people in the towers that day,
including parishioners of mine.
It was a tough time for our country.
I visited the sight of the towers on a couple of occasions.
There was a Church right across the street from ground zero,
amazingly it suffered no damage from the towers coming down.
It was a place that welcomed in the rescue workers while they
dug through the pile.
Every day at noon they would hold a prayer service for those
whose lives were lost.
I was there one day for the prayer service, two years after the
attack.
The pews in that church are all nicked and beaten up from the
rescue workers equipment.
They would sleep on those pews and the spikes from their boots
would nick up the pews.
I was told that the congregation decided not to fix the pews,
but keep them as a reminder of the scars from 9/11.
That is our job church.
That is what Jesus tells us this morning.
To lose our lives for the sake of other, for the sake of the
Gospel, for the sake of our faith in Jesus Christ.
That is who Jesus is for y'all, for us.
Jesus is the one who shows us the way, and the way is always
through the cross.
It is never through some glorious way, always through service
and sacrifice, through community, through love, with one another.
I am so happy to see you today, I am so happy for those who are
joining online.
Because today we are together, learning and growing in faith.
And y'all that is only way it happens.
Amen
Tuesday, September 7, 2021
Mom's Eulogy
What Jen, Bethany, and I talked about while mom was dying and since is, "We don't know what we will do without our mother."
(I mean who will clean our houses?)
It seems like a weird thing to say.
All three of us are now grown.
We all are successful, well-adjusted
people.
We have careers, spouses, kids of our
own.
It wouldn't seem like we would need a
mother anymore.
But our mother is everything to us.
Every good thing that we are is
because of who she was to us.
Our mother even now is our confidant,
our wise adviser, the person who gives us unconditional love.
Let me tell you some of the things
that she was to us.
We have to start by talking about our
mother's faith.
As Jen has said on numerous
occasions, "No one loves Jesus more than mom."
Our mother had a strong faith, and it
is the thing that defined her above all else.
She trusted in God enough to let
things run their course.
As we were growing up our mother
always told us that our choices were ours to make.
Of course, she gave advice or a shove
in certain directions.
But for some reason she trusted us to
make our own way in the world, even when we didn't deserve that trust.
When we failed she was always there
to help us out.
She paid for our overdue credit card
expenses, our court fees when we got caught shoplifting.
She was always a steady presence.
She was always more interested in why
we did things, instead of what we did.
She encouraged us to search our
feelings, to name those feelings out loud.
She wanted us to explore our inner
selves.
As a parent I am not always so calm,
and I think her ability to be even keel, to trust us, was because of her faith
in God.
This faith served her well as she did
face her share of difficulties.
Divorce from Gene, battling cancer
twice, and Dad’s death, all of which she handled with positivity and grace.
My mother's faith also came out in
her dedication to the Church.
When I first moved back to New
Hampshire Knute said to me, “Now your mother will be able to worship at
Concordia on some Sundays."
I will tell you that rarely happened.
Not because she didn't want to come
to see me preach, but because she was so busy in her own church.
She was running coffee hour, planning
the community meal, singing in the choir, going to help people in their homes, volunteering
at the homeless resource center, or just being here to make people feel
welcomed and cared for.
She was in charge of the fellowship
when she resigned from that duty she found four people to do the work that she
did.
This was how it was all of our lives.
Church came first.
My dad would tell the story of how
when they were first married it was a Sunday.
Mom came in and woke him up because
it was time for church.
My Dad said, "We just went last
Sunday."
To which mom said, "Yeah, we
will be going every Sunday."
And we did, it was not a discussion
just something that she expected our family to do.
I marvel now how she would get the
three of us up and out of the house.
Because I know I wasn't the easiest
to get up for Church.
We were usually one of the last
people to leave, as mom had to clean the coffee pot.
I didn't appreciate at the time how
much this would mean for our lives.
My mother's closest friends came from
Church.
We would often spend the afternoon at
someone's house playing, eating, and drinking.
We would go to the Fields, Arndts,
Lerzes, Rouches, or Meles.
It feels like every Sunday we would
be with those people for a long time.
To this day we are all still family.
Mom’s family was important to her.
She cherished her relationships with her
siblings Paula and David.
She made sure to call and write when
they were away, and she loved having them at our house growing up with Gigi and
grandpa.
She had two other sisters in Gay and
Suzanne.
They had known each other long before
they were family.
She also made sure that she
cultivated those two important relationships.
We had such great times at the beach,
Disney, playing scrapple, Aunt Gay’s yearly February visit, and sitting around
the table sipping coffee and talking.
Mom loved having her family around.
She was a supportive mother in law.
Always wanting to hear about their
careers, projects, and family.
Mom loved her grandkids.
She loved having them at her house
for a week, she loved going to their various sporting events, concerts, plays,
and recitals, she loved hearing about their lives or teasing them about people
they might be dating, she would always say “yes” to babysit them.
When our kids were little she came to
watch them for us once a week.
She took the greatest delight in
watching them give us a hard time.
If we were having a difficult
parenting moment she would laugh and say, “I love watching this.” (Probably a
little payback for all the hard times we put her through,)
Mom was an extreme extrovert.
I know that people always think of our
Dad that way, and he was very outgoing.
But he needed time alone, our mother
rarely did.
If she spent a day or two alone it
wasn't pretty.
She loved being around people.
She loved being at the beach, having
people over her house, doing things at Church.
She loved to sit and talk to people.
She loved to sit and drink coffee and
just have a chat about life.
She always asked people about
themselves, and she talked about herself but never too much.
She never tried to make people into
anything they were not, she accepted them for who they were.
That is true of us kids too.
She always just accepted us for who
we are, in all of our imperfections, she loved us as that person.
It has been amazing to read the cards
and online messages of other people reflecting that truth about her.
It was here at Calumet that mom’s
faith was constantly revitalized and lived out.
She loved this place.
It meant so much to her.
It was where her and dad met and fell
in love.
It was where she went on vacations.
It was here that her and our Dad went
on their honeymoon.
She was the one who convinced our Dad
to sell their home in Derry and move up here to be closer to Camp. (Even though
he thought it was his idea.)
For the last 26 years she spent her
summers on the shores of Lake Ossipee talking with people and swimming.
At the start of summer she would say,
“All the people come now. I love it!”
So many people have told us how much
the liked to talk to mom on the beach here, or how she made them feel at home.
That is how she lived out her faith
welcoming new people, and constantly fostering old relationships.
I don't think we can talk about our
mother without talking about how clean she was.
Mom was an obsessive cleaner.
In our house growing up we had
garbage cans, but there was never garbage in them.
When I tell people that they ask me
what where did it go.
I don’t' know.
I just know that she loved to throw
things out.
The dump was one of her favorite
places in the world.
When we lived in Derry I have found
memories of going to the dump with mom.
She did the same thing in Freedom.
Always had something in her car to
throw out.
When we went to Disney and she found
out that they didn’t recycle she took home her recycling in her luggage!
I liked to joke with people that mom
caught the dust before it settled anywhere in the house.
This was not always the easiest thing
to live with.
My mom rarely got that mad about
things.
Except when company was coming over
and she was preparing.
We were exiled from the house during
this process.
And if we moved or messed anything up
it would be the rare time she would raise her voice at us.
Our mom did it all.
She cleaned, cooked, did the laundry,
drove us around to our various events, attend those events.
I always remember her being at everything
we did.
Sports, theater, cheerleading.
And on top of all that she worked
full time as a geriatric nurse, volunteered at church, and hosted these
different events for family and friends.
She was super human.
She did everything, and she did it
for Jen, Bethany, and I.
She gave us everything a mother could
give and more.
She was our mother and our friend and
confidant.
So like I said at the beginning I
don't know what we are going to do without her.
Today I am just really thankful that
she was our mom.
She asked to me to say today that “She
hopes she will be remembered as someone who made this world a little cleaner
and left it better."
We can say with confidence that she
did that and then some.
Amen
Sunday, September 5, 2021
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Sunday, August 8, 2021
Sunday, July 18, 2021
Sunday, July 11, 2021
Sunday, July 4, 2021
Monday, June 28, 2021
Monday, June 21, 2021
Sunday, June 13, 2021
Sunday, June 6, 2021
Sunday, May 30, 2021
Sunday, May 23, 2021
Sunday, May 16, 2021
Sunday, May 9, 2021
Sunday, May 2, 2021
Sunday, April 18, 2021
Sunday, April 11, 2021
Sunday, April 4, 2021
Friday, April 2, 2021
Sunday, March 28, 2021
Sunday, March 21, 2021
Sunday, March 7, 2021
Saturday, March 6, 2021
Thoughts on Turning 48
There are many signs that I am getting older. My hair is more grey, I have to wear glasses when I read, my hearing is not great (too many rock concerts), I can't stay up too late, I can't recover like I used to. One of the biggest for me is that I have been listening to Bob Seeger and liking it. My kids bought me a an old fashion boom box a couple of years ago. I keep it in the kitchen and listen to tapes while I cook (I have made a vow only to buy a couple of tapes for this purpose). I bought a used copy of Bob Seeger's tape "Like a Rock" (released in 1986). When I was 13 I would have never listened to this album. I knew Bob Seeger only from "old time Rock and Roll" that they played at Jr. High dances, and the Chevy truck commercials with the song "like a Rock". Bob Seeger was old person music. It was not cool or hip. It was no Aerosmith, Motley Crue, or AC/DC.
What I didn’t know is that the album
is really about nostalgia. In fact, I have found out this is one of Bob Seeger
favorite things to write about. The song, "Like a Rock" is not about
trucks at all it is about wanting to be young. "I was eighteen/Didn't have a care/Working for peanuts/Not a
dime to spare/But I was lean and Solid everywhere/Like a rock." The whole album
is filled with song contemplating getting old and longing for easier more
innocent times.
I
have spent some time thinking about why this album is speaking to me as I turn
48. I have always worked hard at not being nostalgic for times gone by. I don't
like it when people say that we grew up in a better time. That the music was
better, the television was better, or the movies were better. I don't believe
that. There is great music being made today, great movies, television. Even
worse when people insinuate that the people were better, or that we are better
people because we grew up when we did. I
didn't grow up in some idyllic time. I grew up when I did. It had its own good
and bad, just like today. People were not more valiant or more moral. We had
racism, bigotry, homophobia, and hatred. There is still greed and selfishness. We
still are fighting against those things. So what is it that is making me attracted
to this album about nostalgia?
I
remember being in college senior year. I had this conversation with a friend
about what will happen next. They were telling me how exciting it is that the
world is open to us. That we could choice from an infinite amount of
possibilities. I think it is that as I have gotten older the choices that I
have made (both good and bad) are making life more set in place. There is less
a sense that the future has limitless possibilities. There are more
responsibilities. My life is not my own. I have to think how my choices will
impact my family, the church I serve, the community I live in.
When
you are young there is just more spontaneity. Gone are the days when Kevin
Arndt would call and say he had an extra ticket to REM could I get from
Pennsylvania to Keene NH, and I would drive all night to get there. Gone are
the days when Knute Ogren would say, "I think I am going to move to San Francisco."
And I would say, "That sounds like fun I will go with you." Gone are
the days when Jim Doyle and I would stay up all night drinking and talking
about the mysteries of the universe. Gone are the days when Dave Dalzell and I
would spend six hours browsing in a used record store, and then go home drink
wine and listen to what we found.
One
of my favorite memories from college is when people from camp came to visit. We
had a great weekend partying and doing things that young people do. On Sunday
it was time for everyone to go home. However, the UCONN women's basketball team
was about to win their first national championship. Everyone decided to stay. The
game ended and everyone decided to stay longer. They left way later that night.
We could do that then. There was nothing to go home to, no real responsibilities.
The future was endless and not written.
This
is not to say I don't love my life now. I have a life I never thought I would
have. A calling I love. A beautiful, smart, dedicated, and hardworking wife.
Two children who are smart and most important compassionate people that make me
proud every day, and who I love so much sometimes it hurts. I live in a great
city, close to my extended family, close to Camp Calumet. We live in a great
house. I have been blessed beyond measure in my life. I wouldn't want to be 18
or 21 again.
So
why the nostalgia? Why listen to songs with lyrics like, "Sometimes It
goes so fast/I try to make some moment last/I watch it slipping past." As
I thought more about that day at Muhlenberg when people stayed longer than they
were going I think something else was going on. We didn't want it to end. We
knew that moment was precious and fleeting. We wanted to linger as long as
possible in the joy and good times. This is what nostalgia can teach us is to
enjoy every day. Take more time to soak it in. And this is the lesson of
turning 48, to enjoy every day and every moment. Because these times will
someday be the past. Someday I will long for the days of driving two kids to
and from school. I will long for the days of busy family schedules and a set
life. I will look back and wish I had been more thankful and appreciated the
moment. The character Andy Bernard in the office said, "I wish there was a
way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them."
At its best this is what nostalgia can do for us. It can remind us that every
day is a gift. A gift to be lived to its fullest and appreciated for what it
is. Because this day will never come again.
Here is my birthday playlist:
Sometimes Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet
Band
Fast Train Solomon
Burke
Exile (Feat. Bon Iver) Taylor
Swift
Drivers License Olivia
Rodrigo
Coming Home Cinderella
Everything Everything Indigo
Sparke
Five to One The
Doors
Could Have Been Me The
Struts
Sisters of the Moon Fleetwood
Mac
Oh, What a World Kacey
Musgraves
It's a Hard Rain's a-gonna Fall Leon Russell
Morning is Mended Steve
Gunn
It's Still Cool If You Don't Briston
Maroney
Heat Above Greta
Van Fleet
Between the Zero and the One Dawes
3*5 John
Mayer
Somewhere Tonight Bob
Seger and the Silver Bullet Band
Let It Be Matt
Berninger
New Moon Steve
Gunn
Feel Alright Steve
Earle
We All Have (Feat.
Matt Berninger) Julie Stone
Eight Mile High
The Bryds
I remember You Skid
Row
