Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ » Pastoral Columns

Ken’s Pennings

ORUCC — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:42:06 +0000

The Both-And of Life

I’ve been reflecting on the “both-and” of life. We all have both good days and bad days, both joys and concerns, both gains and losses. It’s normal and healthy to experience the good that comes into our lives with laughter and the bad that comes into our lives with tears. It’s normal and healthy for ORUCC to celebrate the baptism of seven children and adults last Sunday, the large number of people, both young and old, in our Sunday 9 o’clock classes, and an annual meeting that couldn’t have given a brighter picture of our life together as a congregation, in the community, and in the world. And, it’s normal and healthy for ORUCC to lament for the members of our congregation who are burdened with health issues, struggling with depression and anxiety, wrestling with conflict in relationships, and grieving the loss of loved ones. While some of us are smiling on the outside, we may be frowning on the inside. While others of us are frowning on the outside, we may be smiling on the inside. And so we check in with one another every time we see one another, “How are you?” And we acknowledge that things probably aren’t as good or as bad as we might think they are. We sing the familiar Negro Spiritual, “Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down. Oh yes, Lord.”

“Come what may, yes, Lord.”

Enter the Experience by Tammy Martens

ORUCC — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:26:25 +0000

On Sunday, January 8 at 9:00 a.m. we invite you to “Enter the Experience” of our second and third graders and participate with them in their Sunday School world. You and the children will be guided through one of the sessions from The Way of the Child curriculum and experience six different reflection stations after a gathering time. The stations include: Gazing, Reading, Journaling, Art, Sand, and World.

In Finding Our Way Home, Killian Noe shares: “It always amazes me to think that even the tiniest acorn holds everything in it needed to develop into the grandest oak tree. However, the acorn will never become all that it was created to become if it lands on some cold, concrete sidewalk where it is crushed under someone’s boot. It must be planted in the kind of soil which will provide the nutrients essential to its becoming.”

The Way of the Child provides good soil, nutrients, paths, and experiences for a child to grow spiritually and it is our desire to share this with the larger ORUCC community. We will begin at 9:00 in Friendship Hall with a gathering time that introduces the theme for the day and then we will travel to different reflection stations in Friendship Hall and the Ruby Bridges Sunday School Room. We offer this time on January 8^th not to simply be an observer but to be a full participant in The Way of the Child. We hope you can “enter the experience.”

Ken’s Pennings

ORUCC — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:12:16 +0000

Is it just me, or are many of us a bit under the weather these days in Wisconsin? After four cloudy gray days, I found myself begging the universe for just a glimpse of sunlight today. I’m thinking I’m not alone in my longing for light. Earlier this morning, my daughter informed me that she and her boyfriend are so frustrated with the cold cloudy weather in Milwaukee that they are talking about a move to Southern California (I reminded her about the smog in southern cal, and how much happier I think she’ll be living closer to her family).

Last night, a church friend told me that she has decorated her office at work with Christmas lights. This helps to brighten her spirits on these dark dreary days.

This past weekend, when I shared with some other church friends my struggle with Seasonal Affective Disorder (with the very appropriate acronym, SAD), they recommended I order a light box and start the discipline of light therapy, that is, staring into the box for thirty minutes a day.

Last week, another church friend shared how difficult it is for her to leave for work in the morning in the darkness and return home in the evening in the darkness. She copes with this by meditating on the sacredness of darkness, by remembering that darkness is a gift, as well as the light. She also uses her crock pot a lot more than other times in the year, so that when she enters her dark home each evening, she is greeted by the warm aroma of dinner cooking.

As I reflect on these recent conversations, I guess one of the ways I cope with light deprivation is to talk about it a lot with friends and family members, perhaps in the hope that if I name it out loud it will lose its power over me.

Yes, here in Wisconsin, the days are shorter, the nights are longer. At ORUCC, we pay attention to this by lighting candles of hope, by singing Bernadette Farrell’s beautiful hymn “Christ, be our Light” (lyrics below), and by holding a “Longest Night Service” at the church at 7 p.m. (6 p.m. – labyrinth walk), on Thursday, Dec. 22nd. Winton describes the service this way: “This is a service for those of us living through dark times for any reason. We’ll note the longest night of the year and our hope for emerging light with prayers, readings, silence, and the music of Taize.”

And if the sun ever peeks out from behind the clouds, holler for me! I don’t want to miss it!

Christ, be our Light – Bernadette Farrell

Verse 1: Longing for light, we wait in darkness. Longing for truth, we turn to you. Make us your own, your holy people, light for the world to see.

Chorus: Christ, be our light! Shine in our hearts. Shine through the darkness. Christ, be our light! Shine in your church gathered today.

Verse 2: Longing for peace, our world is troubled. Longing for hope, many despair. Your word alone has power to save us. Make us your living voice.

Verse 3: Longing for food, many are hungry. Longing for water, many still thirst. Make us your bread, broken for others, shared until all are fed.

Verse 4: Longing for shelter, many are homeless. Longing for warmth, many are cold. Make us your building, sheltering others, walls made of living stone.

Verse 5: Many the gifts, many the people, many the hearts that yearn to belong. Let us be servants to one another, making your kingdom come.

A Boydseye View: Christmas talk by Winton Boyd

ORUCC — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:30:05 +0000

I write this on the day after Halloween, weeks before Thanksgiving. It goes against my instincts, but it is time to talk about Christmas. It is time because many of the pressures and stresses we feel in relation to this season begin long before December. Most of us are at least thinking about gifts, and a few of us are probably done shopping. As pastors, we have come to believe that the time has come to be more explicit and forthright together about what it means to celebrate Christmas as people of faith in a consumerist culture gone overboard. What does it mean to celebrate faithfully in times of economic challenge, and how do long held family patterns help or hinder our appreciation of God’s light coming into the darkness? How do we prioritize our time, our money, and our expectations?

Our approach is not to be ‘anti- Christmas’ but rather to invite us all to ‘ENTER THE STORY’ more fully, together. We have designed an Advent and Christmas season schedule that seeks to draw on our best strengths as a congregation – our care for each other, thoughtful conversation, simple action, and a commitment to justice and mercy for all. In this newsletter, you’ll see an outline of the season with some hints of where our journey will take us.

Worship fully, Spend Less, Give More, Love All, Pray Earnestly.

Simple ideas that can be difficult to live into. For that reason, we will have some additional ways to support one another in our own homes and with one another.

Every Sunday beginning on November 27 (at 9:00 a.m.) we’ll have Circle Discussions related to the themes. We’ll provide simple prompting questions that will guide informal sharing and insight, allowing us to learn from one another and generate ideas together.

Each week we’ll provide At Home Ideas – ways we might take concrete action to keep our hearts and lives focused on a path that is life-giving and uplifting.

As always the season will be rich with music, opportunities to share our resources with others, and opportunities to give of our time.

We hope that together, we can enter the story in a real, practical, faith-lifting, inspiring way.

What the Church can learn from those who are ‘spiritual but not religious’ by Winton Boyd

ORUCC — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:58:15 +0000

Increasingly, surveys of religious life in America highlight the growing number of people outside of organized religion who classify themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Within organized religious circles, there are many different responses and reactions to this growing trend. I’ve been fascinated by this increasingly common way people identify themselves and want to share some of what I think it offers us in the church today. I write this with the entire progressive church movement in mind– which I experience as socially liberal, theologically open and liturgically flexible.

I begin with the recognition that a good majority of regular members of progressive churches would fall into the ‘spiritual but not religious’ category as well; sometimes uninterested or and quite often uneducated about their own tradition and its rich history of faith. There are many reasons for this, but one of them their individual churches have been unable or unwilling to pass on their wisdom. Afraid of appearing ‘too religious,’ the progressive church has frequently morphed into a gathering of well meaning, service oriented people who shy away from spiritual vulnerability and spiritual encounter, favoring instead a well meaning form of ‘do-goodism’ that sustains soup kitchens and thrift stores, but changes few lives.

Those of us in the progressive church know that it is an endangered species, struggling to maintain members, finances, and relevance in the life of the wider community. While this isn’t the case everywhere, we’d be foolish to pretend we are not vulnerable to the same forces that are affecting churches across the religious spectrum. Since this is the case, I wonder if we don’t have something to learn from paying attention to the ‘spiritual but not religious’ mindset.

Here a few ideas. I welcome your thoughts as well.

Sunset over Morro Bay, CA in mid-September

Sunsets are God talk. A common shortcut answer to why people don’t participate in organized religion is that they find “God in the sunset, or other aspects of nature.” The truth of these experiences raises a good question for us in the church. Could it be that our God does speak more profoundly through sunsets than much of our worship?

My recent experience of awe and transcendence while hiking in the desert Southwestern USA is not unique. Many of us find an amazing connection in such places that far exceeds what we feel in church.

While we can’t equate such natural experiences with community worship, they remind us that when we do celebrate worship, we all are looking for something deeply authentic and sacred? The “spiritual but not religious” sentiment has pushed the church to think and act in new ways, demanding both creativity and openness to new ways of experiencing the divine. Could it be that by demanding high quality experiences, folks in this group are asking us to take more seriously this spiritual enterprise called faith?

Who is God anyway? This desire for authenticity extends beyond worship to the very nature of the Holy. On the one hand, we see this in a hesitancy to commit to a name or manner of speaking of the Divine. Words like Energy, Compassion, All Loving Being speak of a presence that is larger and more encompassing that many church liturgies will allow. Arguments about inclusive language are minor compared to a recognition that the God we seek is far beyond our knowing. On the other hand, there is a deepened desire to explore traditional understandings of God in new ways. Jesus is very popular, but those outside the church often demand that we strip away unnecessary and burdensome ‘baggage’ in order to understand the true nature of the man and his mission.

At this church, we’ve seen numerous ways that seeing Jesus through a new lens offers hope, energy and vitality to a previously listless faith.Could it be this movement is appropriately pushing us beyond familiar frontiers? Could it be that our ministry is not to make people name God as we do, but to offer a context and setting to explore their own understanding and the understandings of those who’ve gone before? Could it be that they (and we) are seeking companions who take seriously the largeness, and incomprehensibility, of both Jesus and the Holy One he called “Abba”? Could it be that they are asking us to base our lives and our faith on such a reality, limiting our need to tell the world exactly what God thinks, wants, and expects from us?

Lived Community. Many would say that the greatest gift the church has is the power of community; especially a community that will support one another through the obvious challenges and journeys of life. It is easy to minimize the reality that community – deeply spiritual and committed community – comes in more forms that we can imagine. While I would point to the power of an all-age community experienced in the church, it would be dismissive to suggest that people don’t seek community wherever they are. It would be dismissive to suggest that small bands of friendship – forged over life’s trials such as divorce, troublesome children, health issues, broken promises and shattered dreams, grief and loss – are not sustaining, life giving and ultimately empowering to millions who never set foot in a church. Even more, many of these small networked trust circles display a diversity that is often missing in the church – different ages, religious backgrounds and religious practice. The truth is that many stay away from the church because they want true community and have been burned, or bored, by the church in the past.

While we in the church believe ‘our church’ is different, we also realize that a sizeable number of people attending our churches have no significant relationships in the church. While there are many reasons for this, one of them is that true community is hard to find, takes years to develop, and feels out of the reach of many, many people.

What we in the church have to offer is not an exclusive ownership of community formation, but intentionality and a structure that can work for many people. What we have to learn is that as the dynamics of society evolve and flux, so too does the manner in which people gather and the fears they bring to such gathering. It could be that the “I’ve been burned” or “I’ve been bored” segments of the world are asking us to take seriously the challenge of community, the need for real safety and shared vulnerability.

Practice Matters. In the end, it seems that what matters for us all is not whether or not we are in the church. What matters is that we grow into a functioning spiritual practice that builds compassion, understanding, and endurance for ourselves and those around us. It is time, once and for all, for Christian church to let go of the hard and soft versions of exclusivism, to recognize that there are many orthodox and unorthodox practices of faith that help people embody and live compassion in the world.

What really matters is that not enough people are in touch with that journey in any way; that for all its sins and cruelties, authentic religion and spirituality have helped the world keep from destroying itself much more than secularity has. What matters is that we learn and grow from one another, recognize that all of us are fumbling and stumbling our way through the life of faith, and embracing any path that brings us or someone else into a deeper compassion for the world.

What is ironic is that I write this piece while on retreat at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, which may have a market on the “God is in the sunset” spirituality, given its location overlooking the Pacific Ocean near Big Sur, CA. It is run by a group of 30 Camaldolese Benedictine monks whose ministry is to solitude for prayer and meditation; communal prayer and work; and the promotion of contemplative spirituality in the world. They attempt this by providing quiet, private retreat space, prayers four times a day, an inclusive book store with articles on Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and New Age prayer, and a welcoming spirit. Upon finishing this, I’ll be taking a hike around the mountain property here, choosing to bypass the ancient Catholic Eucharist celebration they observe every day. I’m not sure of reasons others are here, but I see people who appear to be of Asian, Indian, Latino and Caucasian descent. I see old monks, as well as young children with their parents entering worship. I have no doubt that while the monks welcome all to worship, they don’t expect all to find solace in the tradition they have committed their lives too. Their focus is less on who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out,’ and more on supporting the spiritual practice of all who come here. In that welcome, they are living the gospel the best they know how, and they seem to trust that that will be enough.