Hello Beloved!
It has been said that the definition of a saint is someone who lives with a martyr. Or is it the other way around?
Sunday is All Saints’ Day, the church’s answer to Halloween. Instead of fearing death, or mocking it, we acknowledge its power gravely, but not absolutely. We know that death has separated us from those we love, but we believe in reunion, even if we have no idea of what the terms of that reunion will be.
This Sunday in worship, we’ll have a basic Day of the Dead altar set up–on November 1 & 2 in Mexico, people build elaborate altars for the people they love who have died–they put fruit, flowers, pictures and favorite food, art and ‘papel picado’ on them. We’ll do the same. Bring a framed photograph of someone you love who has died to church this Sunday if you wish–ideally one that will stand up by itself on a table. Bring their favorite food, too. They can all go on the altar before worship, or during the passing of the peace. We will commune with them, and with one another.
I’ll be preaching: beginning a new 4-part sermon series on Extraordinary Relationships. There are so many relationships in our lives that are trapped in amber–not just people who have died, but those people with whom we are so at odds, so distant, conflicted, cut-off or fused, that it feels like death. I’ll start there: what are we to do with these Difficult People in our lives? We’ll take Ruth and Naomi as an example of just one oddball family in the Bible, working on it working through it, just as we are.
Emily D is our newbie liturgist! Pray for her peace and courage! Marc and Bonnie offer the Stewardship Message. Laura Ruth will pray and celebrate communion. Choir sings!
After worship, fair trade coffee, friends and good eats. Then, Rooftop People meets in the Parlor, Bell Choir inaugurates in the Chapel–would you like to join us?
Christlove (it’s a good place to start, thinking of what our families can be like…)
Molly
Beloved,
So, Laura Ruth and I have finished our 5-part sermon series on the Bible. All done! Next 47 sermons will be Bible-free!
Really, how strange it feels to say we’re “done” with a sermon series on the Bible. I feel far from done! I hope you do, too.
You may have found the courage to pick up the Bible last week, to Start Reading It, as our children invited you to, Every Day. You may have fallen off the wagon this week. You may need encouragement- -yes! you can do it! It’s not easy, but it is SO worth it! It will bear so much fruit in your life if you add in 15 minutes a day, comfy chair, prayerful reading! It will be one of the best things you can do for your spiritual path, your inner peace, your outer energy for world-changing, game-changing orientation.
We’ve given you some tools and instructions already. Here’s a last word: try picking one of the Gospels (I love Matthew and Luke), and read it through in one sitting. You will not explode. I promise. It will only take about an hour-fifteen or so. Then, every day, go back to the beginning of that gospel and read a little bit, maybe 10-20 verses of it, till you’re done (this will take slightly longer–maybe a couple of months). Your heart and mind will decide how much to take in each day.
Talk to me, Laura Ruth, your friends at church, about how it’s going. Ask us to hold you accountable. Let’s do this together.
Christlove,
Molly
Elke Jahns, excellent flutist will play our prelude, offeratory, and postlude in Sunday Morning Services. Elke’s playing is divine. We hope you can come hear her play.
Our choir, let by Thom Whittemore and accompanied by Joe Turbessi, will sing Cecil Frances Alexander’s setting of “All Creatures Great and Small.”
Here are the musical notes for this Sunday’s service music:
“We are blessed to have flautist Elke Jahns with us today.
The prelude and postlude today are from La Flute de Pan, sonatas for flute and orchestra by Jules Mouquet (1867-1946). Like many other French composers at the turn of the century, Mouquet favored subjects from Greek mythology, as a sort of neoclassical reaction against the fervent treatments of Norse legend in Wagner’s operas. In Greek mythology, Pan is the god of shepherds and flocks, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music. He is recognized as the god of fields, groves, and wooded glens; because of this, Pan is connected to fertility and the season of spring.
The Native Americans believe that their flutes, being made of wood, have a spirit, and with their breath they are breathing life into that spirit.
The ocarina, or vessel flute, is one of the oldest known musical instruments. It has been dated back to 3000 BC, and found in cultures around the world, including the Mayans, Egyptians, Chinese, Italians, Sub-Saharan Africans, Javanese, and Pakistani. It has been played in Buddhist ceremonies, rain forest hunting rituals, and Ocarina Orchestras. It comes in many shapes and sizes, but it is always made of clay – its sound literally the music of the earth.
“I Greet You, Sure Redeemer” is a well-known Reformation Hymn often attributed to John Calvin, a major player in the Protestant Reformation. The original French text, “Je te salue, mon certain Redempteur”, was published in the 1545 Strasbourg Psalter during Calvin’s ministry in Strasbourg, France. Though Calvin edited the psalter, his authorship of the hymn is not likely.
Today’s anthem is a setting of the familiar hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful” by Cecil Frances Alexander. The hymn was first published in Alexander’s Hymns for Little Children in 1848. The modern arrangement sung by the choir today is by noted English composer and conductor John Rutter.”
Dear Beloved,
This week we finish up our sermon series on the Bible.
This is what I’m preaching – when we pick up our Bibles and read them, we often find ourselves connecting with the most poignant, powerful, basic, golden, loving, divine movement. This movement, whose name is “I Am,” a verb, is so compelling that we will do whatever we can to remove all that dis-connects us from this power source. This connection propels us into action, for example, climate change action.
This weekend, across the globe, we are being called into action, to connect with the earth. Our scripture for Sunday from Romans says that God’s eternal power and divine nature is invisible, but can be understood and seen through the things that God has made. Connecting with creation, connects us with God. We are also called by scripture to care for the least of these, and so we can act on behalf of those who bear the brunt and pollution of our desires and even entitlement to cheap oil resources, precious metals, and inexpensive labor.
Tomorrow, you can participate in the International Day of Climate Action. With Somerville Climate Change Action, an group with whom Andrea has been working, you can join the underwater activities at Christopher Columbus Park, http://groups.google.com/group/somervilleclimateaction/browse_thread/thread/f52b8d6fd99e0e32/0ef117a153f0af0d?lnk=raot&pli=1.
On Sunday night, with Massachusetts Power Shift, you can join the Sleep Out, www.masspowershift.org/events/boston-common-sleep-out, a move to catch our Senator John Kerry’s attention as he prepares to negotiate at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December, http://en.cop15.dk/.
You can join Somerville’s Transition Town, http://group.google.com/group/transitionsomerville. Our own Althea, who is a part of Transition Town, is working specifically on how to make the Climate Change movement work across race and class.
Our connection to God often happens in nature, when we are alone, this is true. But our Christian practice also calls us to community. Come, let’s be community to each other this Sunday morning. Oh, and also come for a musical surprise.
Jason, our newest Ph.D., is our liturgist. Molly will read our scripture and lead our prayers. Our Stewardship season begins as well.
And come for BRUNCH and bid in the Goods and Services auction – to fund our missionary action in Mexico, just after services.
Love,
Laura Ruth
–
Rev. Laura Ruth Jarrett
Minister of Outreach
First Congregational Church of Somerville, UCC
An Open and Affirming Congregation
W. 12-9, Th. 2-8, Su. 8:30-2
Dear Beloved,
Rain tomorrow, rain Sunday. ‘Snow joke!
What’s a New Englander to do when winter comes in October? To paraphrase Barbara Brown Taylor, most of us are rushing about trying to find two sticks to rub together. Or in my case, remember where I put the mittens, hats and winter coats of our entire family.
But God has kindled a fire within us, that will keep us warm no matter what is happening outside of our skin.
Do you want in, where it’s warm?
Come Sunday. In the morning: It’s Jubilee Sunday, and the children ages 3 and up will grace our sanctuary. I’m preaching, the fourth in our series on the Bible: on reading the Bible as a daily, personal and revolutionary act. Tim, fresh home from Munich, brings insight as our liturgist. Laura Ruth will pray our hearts open. The children will sing! and have been practicing at home all week in anticipation.
In the evening: re/New, at 7p, our new monthly evening worship to evoke the senses, answers our longing for intimacy with God and one another, our eager desire do church in ancient/modern ways. This month’s theme: Spiritual Practices. The music is absolutely fabulous, the bread fresh, the honey sweet. Do come.
In between morning and evening: Choir retreats! filling the church with the sounds of Advent come early. And Nominating Committee gathers to discern leaders for the work of Jesus within our church. Nominating Committee members will be moving through coffee hour after worship to offer you a brief questionnaire, the Spiritual Gifts Inventory. If you haven’t yet done one (you may have done it last year), it would help us identify where your deep gladness meets the church’s deep need, so we don’t ask you to arrange flowers if what you really like to do is shovel snow, or write liturgy, or hold the warm, dry hands of our elderly folk, or cook for the poor.
Go slow today. There’s no rush. You carry a fire with you wherever you go. Stop and let someone else warm their hands at it, if you will.
Christlove
Molly
Hello Beloved,
There is a strange, lovely, pre-three-day-weekend energy to the day. A blur of finishing, with the promise of rest and play thereafter.
We’ll have our share. HONK! invades Davis Square with its joyful noises this weekend. We won’t, after all, be marching this year–our church lady hats on hiatus–but we can wander down as a posse after coffee hour for the parade on Sunday.
But before that, our own joyful noises in the Sanctuary: I’m preaching, the third in a series on the Bible. This week: Texts of Terror. How are we to read those parts of the Bible that seem to contradict our conception of a good, loving and just God? If we are not to be cafeteria Christians, just what do we do with the near-sacrifice of Isaac, say, or the misogyny in the catfight between Sarah and Hagar, among many other wrongs done to women?
Gianna is our able liturgist. Laura Ruth will pray with us, and teach our young ones during the time for children. Renae, our new, loving, experienced, permanent paid nursery caregiver begins in the Nursery! A cast of thousands supports our worship so that it is worshipful.
After church, the children will sing with Thom and Melissa, preparing music for next week’s Jubilee Sunday. At coffee hour, you will have a chance to start bidding on the many delicious items in the silent auction portion of the Goods and Services Auction to support our mission trip to the Casa San Jose orphanage (with an online component so you can keep your bid live throughout the week!).
Christlove,
Molly
Beloved,
The other day I preached, among other things, about a woman in a church I used to serve. I once preached a sermon describing the nativity story as a fiction, and she was incensed. She kept her anger to herself for over a year before she found the courage to tell me about it; and then, she chose a very indirect and inappropriate way to communicate that anger. I was flummoxed.
There was laughter when I told that story, though I hadn’t meant it to be funny. Scary, maybe. Unsettling. Why? To think that a grown woman would so much need that story to be true. That it would so much form the core of her theology, her way of making sense of the world and the way things are, that to take it away from her would be profoundly disorienting and distressing.
I remember being depressed my first semester in divinity school. It could have been a lot of things–workload, being alone again in a new place–but at least some of my depression was related to having my carefully constructed, safe faith dismantled by the gods of text criticism, historical criticism, feminist biblical criticism. It was all swept away, and it was a while yet before something new and better, sturdier, would take its place. In the meantime, it was a lonely time, like God Herself had gone away, and not just the thoughts and ideas I had substituted for God.
Marcus Borg, who wrote Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, talks about post-critical naivete as a sought-after way of understanding the Bible. He also calls it, a la Paul Ricoeur, the Second Naivete. Ironically, he has assiduously cultivated this Second Naivete as a biblical scholar and one of the leading minds on the Jesus Seminar, which took the four gospels, and rather than leaving all of Jesus’ words in red letters, through careful observation and study put the words attributed to Jesus into four categories: red, pink, gray and black, in order of declining authenticity.
Borg writes, “My journey from the childhood state of precritical naivete through the critical thinking of adolescence and adulthood now led to hearing [the Gospel of] John (and the Bible as a whole) in a state of postcritical naivete–a state in which one can hear these stories as ‘true stories’ even while knowing they are not literally true.” A slightly dry, scholarly account of his ecstatic experience of the Living God. And yet very much in earnest.
How about you? Are you there yet? Are you angry, distressed, bereft, bored, your childhood faith snatched away by critical faculties, with nothing sturdy yet to replace it? Or do you dive into the Bible each day, enthusiastic, ready and able to experience through your critical faculties and out the other side, the living Christ? Jesus is writ small in the Good Book; He is writ large everywhere you go.
I’ll be starting office hours at the Diesel tomorrow with a little scripture reading. Join me? 8-10a. I’ll keep the booth warm.
Christlove,
Molly
Beloved,
This Sunday in worship, we’ll look at three short verses from the Gospel of Luke as a gateway into the other 31,100 mysterious bits of our sacred text.
In it, a lawyer (read: canon lawyer, scholar of the Bible), asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him, in turn, what the Bible says, and adds “how do you read it?”
How do we read the Bible? Do we, at all? Or have we left it to others to interpret for us, to our great loss? Have we given it up to the lunatics and the literalists? Do we wait patiently for our preachers to digest it for us, and hand over all that authority?
Jesus ultimately tells the lawyer the story of the Good Samaritan, as an answer to his question. He tells this intellectual that it’s time to go do something about what he knows of God’s law. In the very next chapter, he tells a woman, Martha, the opposite–to stop doing–to sit, like her sister Mary is, and listen. My preacher-hero, Fred Craddock, says we should take a hint from this–if Jesus writes a new prescription every time rather than offering up the same spoonful of patent medicine, so should we, too, follow Jesus in ways that fit each occasion.
And so we do, or are trying to. This weekend, there is going and doing, like the lawyer; and there is also sitting and listening, like Martha and Mary. Tomorrow: the Somerville Homeless Coalition 5k! Come and hang at the First Church table near the T stop, where we’re handing out apples and information about our church. If you’re not running, you can support our runners with a donation: last year we were the highest-giving group, as befits the kind of people Jesus told to feed and shelter the poor.
Sunday morning, we’ll sit and listen: it’s World Communion Sunday, complete with hymns and organ and choral pieces from all the continents of Creation. We’ll take communion from many loaves, mindful of the unity of Christians across the globe, some who still suffer for following this faith. I’ll be preaching, our second in a sermon series on the Bible, on just how we read it. Bring your own Bibles! Take control of your biblical destiny! Heather E. is our newly-minted liturgist: say prayers for her, sit and listen to her wisdom and testimony and faith in the still-speaking God!
After worship: New Old Fashioned Bible Study closes out a 4-part series on the intriguing, exasperating letter to the Romans, with Althea in the Parlor. It’s not to late to join in the discussion. And Rooftop People regathers after hiatus, in the Chapel, to welcome newcomers and catch up after the summer.
Happy Sabbath. Whether you are going and doing, sitting and listening, bless you on your way~
Molly
