The Body Beautiful

Dear Saints of First Church Somerville,

It’s Friday afternoon and do you know where my sermon is?  I had it
for a while and then it drifted away, wandered off for more
interesting company no doubt.  I hope it returns well before Sunday.
But not to worry, we will have a beautiful, talent filled, and
Spirit-filled worship service in any case.  Back by popular demand,
our very own Project Soul jazz band will bless us with their gifts.
Shannon Fry is our liturgist for the day, and Christy Zuzelo and Ian
Tosh will conclude their month of service as prayer leader, and town
crier (announcements), respectively and respectfully.

I hope you have been able to participate in a small group this week.
I was part of a great science and religion small group last night, and
we talked about incarnation, and The Word becoming flesh, and
Einstein, and emergent systems, and so many other things.   The time
of fellowship, just getting to know each other, was really great.
The joy of life in community with First Church is richly deepened
through the relationships we form in these kinds of settings, and in
the work projects we do together, or in creative committee work, or in
intimate worship settings like Rest and Bread.

This Sunday, we will be thinking about bodies, your body, my body, our
relationship with our bodies and others, and what God is saying to us
about our wonderful, messy, fleshy, mortal selves in Jesus.  In her
chapter on the practice of living in our skin, Barbara Brown Taylor
suggests that we pray to God standing naked in front of a full length
mirror from time to time!   I’m not sure that I am up for that
(neither is my mirror).  But perhaps it is time for a close encounter
with the reality of our embodied selves through the lens of Jesus.

Many of you have asked about Molly this week.  And, I know that many
more of you follow her daily comings and goings, ins and outs, and ups
and downs by reading her blog (http://revmolly.tumblr.com/), or
connecting with her on Facebook.  Right now, Molly is stable,
enjoying an improved menu, her iPad, and building up her white blood
cell count in the protection (from germs and infections) of the
hospital.  She expects to be there for a few days more.  Please send
prayers her way, but not your beautiful bodies. Limited visitation is
the best medicine.

And finally, don’t forget to add something to our Altar n the World
prayer wall in the sanctuary.

Peace and blessings to all,
—— Ian
Ian Holland
Support Pastor

Blessings

Dear Saints of First Church Somerville,

Sunshine, summer days, children, seaside sand and silly novels have filled my days this past week, along with fun and food, and spending time with my wife’s family.  

It is such a joy to read books that are not part of a class curriculum!   I also continue to enjoy tasting Barbara Brown Taylor’s words from time to time.  A chapter from her book “An Altar in the World” is like one of those delicious smoothies from the Blue Shirt café; soothing, nutritious, and soulfully refreshing.  As I see the power of the seas crash on the shore with forceful waves, as I feel the high heat of the sun, and at the same time notice small children building worlds of sand and imagination, I wonder about God’s creation, about encountering God in nature and each other, and about the mystery of the incarnation.

Have you encountered God in some new way, through some new person or experience, during these summer days?  If so, would you like to share something of your experience with your community?  We have a prayer wall of wood and ribbon on the left of the chancel of the sanctuary that is ready to hold a picture, a memento, or a word that captures something of your experience.  It is our hope that this collage of the Spirit will reflect how we have experienced the many altars in the world beyond the walls of the church.

On Sunday we will be encountering God and each other in a different and exciting way.  Many of us will be joined in worship by our pets, by pictures of our pets, or our favorite and precious stuffed animals, for the annual ‘Blessing of the Animals” service.   I am looking forward to the many gifts of the Spirit that will be revealed during this service!    We will be outside on the front lawn, so bring a folding chair or blanket to sit on.  We will also have some chairs set out on the pathway to the front door.

Emily Deckenback (and perhaps her dog!) will lead us as liturgist on Sunday, and we will continue to be served ably by Ian Tosh and Christy Zuzelo.  Thom will lead us through a program of music filled with fun and engaging hymns that children young, old and very old will all enjoy.

Also, if you are able, please support our ArtBeat team as they reach out to the neighborhood on Saturday.   I am sure they would appreciate one of those Blue Shirt smoothies!

 God’s ongoing work of creation and reconciliation is all around us.  In the love of a pet, the care of a friend, or the cool caress of an ocean breeze, may we all feel her embrace in days ahead.

Peace

Ian

Lost and Found

It’s Friday afternoon …. do you know where your small groups are?

It is so exciting to be in ministry with you all. It was wonderful
to celebrate communion last week with many of you, and Molly too, and
I look forward to meeting many more of this beloved community in the
weeks to come. It is just the coolest thing, on a very hot day, to be
in worship and fellowship here. I am also looking forward to learning
and participating in the “July Small Groups” program.

We will be learning about the Good Samaritan this Sunday, and
wondering what it might mean for us to get lost, and then to be found.
We will be blessed by the leadership of Marlin Collingwood as our
liturgist, Christy as our prayer leader, and Ian Tosh as our “town
crier” delivering the news and announcements of the congregation.
Thom will be joined by soloist baritone Mike Rodehorst.

We will have a pot-luck lunch and ice-cream sundae Sunday after the
service to celebrate our ministry together, and to put some pounds on
the new support pastor (me!) in preparation for the coming Fall and
Winter. This Sunday is also a “First at First Church” Sunday. We
won’t have a traditional receiving line, and I will spend some time
with newcomers directly after the service (building up an appetite).

From Sunday afternoon through Sat. 17th, I will be out of town. The
deacons are ready to address any pastoral care needs that may come up.
In particular, Deacon Kim Ardolino will serve as the first point of
contact. She will be supported by the deacons, and the community
ministers. The special Blessing of the Animals service will be on the
18th – so get ready!

Somerville ArtBeat is on Sat. 17th, and the growth team is working
hard to staff our table there. This is a great opportunity to reach
out to the neighborhood, to tell the world that God is still speaking,
and there is a place of love and hospitality for all, just around the
corner, that is listening for her life-giving Word. Please join
them, and bring a new friend to church.

God is good, and God’s people are busy!
See you Sunday

—- Ian
Ian Holland
Support Pastor

Someone new in church

PROUD.

Dearly Beloved (it’s June, wedding season, and I love that sweet old-timey turn of phrase for us),

It’s Friday. Sun is promised today. I get to put together a sermon, my first in four weeks, and maybe my last for a while, feeling grateful for a chance to preach, and also curious to explore what it’ll be like to listen, long, for the next many moon.

I am thinking about Joe, about his amazing gifts, and the way in which we have readied them to share them with another church, and be proud of the part we have played. I am thinking about Josh on the eve of his confirmation as an adult in the Christian faith, and his wonderful parents, Tim and Debbie, about all Josh has brought to us as a young man in our church, his spirit of service, his day in and day out commitment to being a singular teenager in church, to be Jesus for us at donkey walks, to find his spiritual way here when no way, demographically, is carved out for him. 

I am thinking about our church, about how lucky I am to have a place to tell the truth, to lay it down, to be myself, and to see what might yet be. I’m preaching Sunday on: “Are you proud of who you are becoming?” I hope you’ll come find out how you might answer that question. 

Jess D. is our fabulous, newly minted liturgist. Choir will rock a Soweto version of U2 for us. Joe will share one last bit of his everything. Thom is home. Pete offers announcements. Children have one second-to-last sweet time with Teacher Erin. Missy and Renae continue to care for and teach the rest of our children. 

Blessed day, people!

Molly

Pentecost Pride

Beloved,

The world outside is turning from snow-white azaleas to strong green summer maple leaves. This Sunday in church the banners turn over, from white to green, the long growing Season of Pentecost.

But the season of Pentecost begins with the feast of Pentecost, the anniversary of the giving of the Holy Spirit, which is fire-red. It came to heaven from earth and rested on the disciples ‘like tongues of fire,’ and a great rushing of wind. Remember those red marbles we handed out on Annual Meeting Sunday, to all formal members of First Church? We said that you could carry them with you wherever you go, leave them on your dresser to put in your shirt pocket, a corner of your purse, the lid of your suitcase for when you go on a business trip or vacation? You could hold it up to the light and remember to pray for your family of faith, remember that others were praying for you?

Bring your marble this Sunday to church. Every time we say or sing the word ‘Spirit,’ we’ll hold our marbles aloft. If you are not yet a formal member, we’ll give you a loaner for the day (and know that the next opportunity to join the church will be coming this fall!).

The feast of Pentecost kicks of a four-week sermon series on Pride–what is it? Is it a good or a bad thing, in a Christian sense? The sermon will be “Are You Proud to Be a Christian?” and that wacky, inebriated morning when the Holy Spirit first arrived among the disciples of Jesus. Heather is our baptism-by-fire first-time liturgist! And we will baptize (with water!) the busy and beautiful Jakobe Esteban, son to Erik and Carolina, who are new to our community, and dear friends of Adriana and Kirk.

It is a Jubilee Sunday! The kids are welcome to worship, to be busy and beautiful themselves. We will have jobs for them to do:  holding the red marbles up every time they hear the word Spirit, and marching Jakobe around the room in festal manner with ‘flames’ made for us by Debbie.

We will also inaugurate a NEW TRADITION for newcomers to First Church. We will try this for six months–here it goes:  on the second and fourth Sundays of each month, we will have NO receiving line at the back of the sanctuary when worship ends. Rather, you are invited to proceed directly downstairs for coffee hour (outside, weather permitting!) to catch up with friends, and be on the lookout for wallflowers. During that time, we will have a mini-gathering at the back of the sanctuary that we are calling First Time at First–newcomers will be invited to mingle with the worship leaders and a member or two of the growth team, to have undiluted access. If you’re on coffee hour duty that day, one designee will be asked to bring a tray of coffee and a plate of cookies or fruit upstairs. We’ll spend a quick 10 minutes getting to know each other–hearing stories of newcomers, giving them the 411 about our community. This practice should help circumvent the anxiety boundary around walking into our big, noisy, faraway coffee hour as a newcomer, and hopefully lower one more barrier to joining our beloved community.

Another change in worship is that a lay leader will begin to offer the announcements every week–we have a small team of highly trained special ops Announcers , extroverted people in the know about life at FCS who will breeze through the 2 or 3 announcements most important to new folks in a fun and enthusiastic and succinct way. This offers the benefit of showing more of your beautiful faces during worship, helping new folks to connect with what is going on, on the spirit of democratic leadership among us.

blessed, beautiful day, good people!

And Still We Rise

Beloved,

So many of you, this week, are being liberated into an all-new way of being. You’re not sure you want to be liberated. After graduation: what if no one hires you? After release from the hospital: what if you’re not well enough to care for yourself? As you move on, as relationships come to an end:  what if you’re alone forever, what if you’ll never find another sweetheart/another church/another home like this one?

Lucky for us, our holy scriptures have plenty to say about anxiety, transition, and what the heck with do with ourselves during the bumpy and inevitable gear-shifting (and gear-grinding) of life. Jason will preach for us this week, on our baptisms, and what the swim in the sea of faith, of shared life in Christ, might be able to do for us when we find ourselves drowning in anxiety and change.

And we have an object lesson!  The beautiful baptism of beautiful Caleb, Marc and Bonnie’s second child. We are grateful and honored to share in his baptism.

Andrea  is our liturgist. I’ll be praying. After church:  we inaugurate Big Meeting Brunch, a bacchanalia of four church teams gathered to build the beloved community in specific ways:  Growth Team (outreach and evangelism), Communications Team (publicity and social networking), Personnel Committee and Buildings and Grounds Committee are all open committees, and you are more than welcome to attend any of the meetings to help us with our work.

At 2p, the First Church Team gathers to walk the Save Our Homes walk, raising money to keep Somerville families from becoming homeless!

And in the evening, at 7p, the latest incarnation of re/New, our decadent dessert of a worship service on a Sunday evening–lush, warm, relevant, reverent, will talk and sing and pray about the Holy Spirit, third person of the Trinity, who often goes by She.

bless your sabbath this evening!
Molly

Science and Spirit

Beloved,

Over the years, I’ve heard countless times from many of you how you have at least one friend with whom you are embarrassed to share that you are attending a Christian church. Maybe you just suspect that they would react in a certain way, or maybe you have outed yourself and gotten the reaction:  “how could you? You are such a rational, intelligent, open-minded person! how could you go in for all that bigoted, superstitious hogwash?”

This is a Sunday for you, AND for your friend. Invite them! They have no idea how much they need a community like ours, for the spirit they may be neglecting, for the comfort they crave, living as they do in a gigantic, cold, dark universe in which 95% of all that is, is called Dark Matter, because we don’t know WHAT it is.

We will be addressing the (false) choice between faith and science, between the rigorous inquiry into truth that scientific method offers, and the (sometimes cold) comfort of faith. We’ll talk about the crisis of faith as a necessary element of a mature faith. Preaching will be John, Michael, and myself. Joan is our able liturgist. Sean, Hugh and Steve will aid our scientific approach to religion. Laura Ruth will pray with us.

After church, for those of you who want to get deeper into the conversation, a new group, Eggheads, will meet to discuss the creative interplay between religion and science. And free passes to the Cambridge Science Festival interfaith forum on science and religion later that afternoon will be available!

Until then, let’s worship in the usual way, at our altars in creation:  birdsong, bee-buzz, stargazing, sun on face by day, moon by night.

bless you,
Molly

Praying for Vandals, and beyond

Beloved,

I meant, on Sunday, to mention that some vandals tore down our church sign on Saturday night. Judging from the force they used, they were pretty drunk, or pretty angry, or both. A neighbor mentioned that she thought they had worked over another sign further down the street, also a church, she thought, so the anger wasn’t specifically for our church, our version of God, nor maybe for churches at all. But it gives you pause. What does a person have living inside of them, to make them need to do that? I meant to mention it, Sunday, and pray for them, but I forgot.

Would you pray for them, for the thing inside of them that rises up so angry, for all of us who sometimes have that thing that also rises, along with the sap, the hope, the faith, the God-love, the tenderness, the longing to do better?

Thankfully, we’re getting a new sign soon–it was already in the works, and this is just further encouragement. I wonder if we put up the new sign, and that one gets destroyed, will I feel just as compassionate–still want to pray for the aggressor’s peace, and not for ours? I’ll be pondering these and other questions tomorrow at the Diesel, 8:30-10:30a. Carmen will be with me, so I might leave a few minutes early if the booth is empty by then (just a warning not to show up at 10:20 please!). Do hope to see you if you’re free. I’ll be off the next couple of Wednesdays, recovering from surgery. Keep your prayers coming. I can feel them, feel the good they are doing.

A sneak preview of this Sunday: our first-ever, and hopefully annual, Science and Spirituality Sunday. We are part of the much larger 8-day Cambridge Science Festival, and first on the calendar for day 2–check it out!:

http://www.cambridgesciencefestival.org/Home.aspx

At 2p on Sunday afternoon, at the MIT Museum, there will be a Science and Spirituality panel discussion–one of the event organizers will kindly leave us some free passes to the museum–if you want one, they’ll be in the church office on the counter.

But we’ll also have our own deep, thought-provoking encounter between science and spirituality that morning–a lively series of three (brief! we promise) sermons on Science and the Crisis of Faith. Leading worship with me and Laura Ruth will be John O., Michael S., Hugh, Sean B., Joan D. and Steve H. We’ll sing wordy but beautiful homages to the stars and the sun, made by the One. We’ll have a secret science experiment embedded into worship. We’ll completely resolve, to everyone’s satisfaction, the perceived conflict between science and religion. Well, not quite. But we’ll make a start.

bless you this eve,

Molly

Graves to Gardens.

Hello Beloved,

I just stood in the light drizzle/sleet with a new friend, Joel, a local carpenter and Somervillian, and we stared at the gigantic pile of earth on our church lawn, and contemplated what could be done about it. Just how does a grave become a garden? Two by twelves, strong backs, and a little bit of know-how. We’ll be calling on you for some help here, in a couple of weeks, to effect the transformation. Joel will supply the know-how, Home Depot the two by twelves, you the strength. Dear me, I love Somerville, and how it brings idealists together in the most interesting ways.

Speaking of strength–thank you for the outpouring of prayers and offers of casseroles, child care, whatever needs to be done, all since yesterday’s disclosure of my upcoming lung surgery. I’ll let you know, as I know, what we Baskettes need, and you can’t imagine how grateful I am.

Speaking of strength–Easter continues, and still we rise. This weekend I’ll be preaching on near death experiences (not that I plan to have one anytime soon):  what people who have had them can teach those of us who haven’t, about the proper orientation to gratitude in daily living, and trust in what lies beyond the veil. It’s a Jubilee Sunday, and the sermon may also include references to The Princess Bride, and Simon Says. Our children will sing! Jeff B. is our able liturgist. Laura Ruth will be away candidating at Hope Central Church that morning! Our fervent prayers will be with her. We will sing our lungs out, some good old spirituals.

After church: Sacred Conversations on Race committee meets, as well as Mission and Justice Team. You are welcome to attend either, and do this joyful work with us. And the sun will return, so they say.

Just how does a grave become a garden? Strong backs, the right tools, and vision. This is Easter.

Christlove
Molly