Thanking Give

      This is the week when we as families and a nation take a moment to pause and express our thankfulness for what we have.  Even people who don’t necessarily come from a religious background who thank the divine for their well-being celebrate the Pilgrim’s 1621 celebration of harvest.  Many may not believe their blessings flow from God, but they certainly will appreciate that they have them.  Whether as a fall harvest festival or as gratitude to the Almighty, many feel thankful for what they have.

Of course, not everyone is in a good place from which to be thankful.  Many people have had hard years, with troubles and difficulties.  Many are economically beaten up.  Their celebrations are modest, sometimes helped by others.

This year’s huge holiday irony is the Ohio Walmart having a food drive for its own workers who cannot afford Thanksgiving meals.  Low wage employees are being asked to help low wage employees while six members of the Walton family collectively are worth $144 billion, more than the bottom 42% of US families combined.  There is something not right in our national social contract when both the stock market and the numbers of people hungry and homeless and un- or under-employed are at all-time highs.  

So it seems to me a bit facile for many of us in good places of thankfulness to simply thank God for our blessings.  “Giving thanks” may not be enough when our neighbors are stressed.  So my challenge to us this thanksgiving week is to go further and give and give thankfully.  Take the recognition that (as the psalmist says) the lines have fallen pleasantly for us, be thankful, and express your gratitude for God’s goodness by doing for the least of our neighbors (remember Matthew 25:31-46?).  And do at least one thing seriously, more than the usual token donation to the myriad of causes clamoring for our dollars between now and Christmas.  Do one thing (yes, “do,” not just write a check.  Do something.).  And give something substantial, something over and above, something that you will notice.

To get you thinking of ways you might respond thankfully, I’ll remind you of the various causes available, beginning with the gifts of conscience and compassion and justice like through the Church World Service or Heifer gift catalogs.  Other things are happening denominationally.  Help with Philippines Relief; the UCC is supporting early response and recovery efforts of partners in the ACT Alliance and the United Church of Christ in the Philippines.  To see how you can help or make a donation, go to http://www.ucc.org/disaster/philippines_typhoon_appeal.html or write a check to our church and indicate that it is for Typhoon Haiyan, and we will send it to the conference.  Feed My Starving Children Philippines relief effort: To read about the efforts being made by FMSC and to donate toward additional meals in the Philippines, visit https://www.fmsc.org/Philippines. There are simple things really close to home.  Christmas Shoeboxes for Catholic Charities of Tompkins County should be returned to the church by Sunday, December 8 for the youth to gift wrap the boxes.  Thanksgiving Meal Basket Project: Children’s Ministries is collecting food items to create six Thanksgiving Meal baskets to be distributed to local families through Family and Children’s service of Ithaca.  Heifer International fund raiser: The youth will be selling organic and fairly traded chocolates, coffees, teas, dried fruit and nuts from Equal Exchange during Advent. Please support sustainability and make a difference in the lives of small farmers and artisans across the globe.  Look for their display in the Narthex starting Sunday, Nov. 24.  Heifer gift cards will also be available for sale. Our Warm Wooly Tree is up earlier than usual this year because we want to get warm items to the folks who need them before cold weather hits.  Bring in new hats, mittens, gloves, scarves and socks for kids and adults to decorate our tree. At the end of the month, the items will be donated to community members in need through the Salvation Army.  There are individuals you may know who could use a bit more money, or some time with you being a friend, or a ride somewhere or some few minutes or hours of your time.  Something will nudge at you this week or month; respond in thankfulness.  Stretch yourself a bit this season.  Do and give to others because God has been good to you.  God has made a difference in your life; make a difference in someone’s life.

                   It’s more than thanksgiving.  It’s thankfully giving!

                                                                          In Christ,
                                                                          
                                                                                    David

Texts For Sunday Worship:        

From the Hebrew Bible          Jeremiah 23:1-6
From the Epistles                  Colossians 1:11-20
From the Gospels                  Luke 23:33-45

When I Survey the Wondrous…

            I admit that I am not a big fan of all the telephone or online surveys that pop up in front of my face.  For most, I tend to hang up or click the window closed with no twinge of guilt!  Some seem worthy, and I will do them.  I was selected one year as a pastor respondent to the Presbyterian Panel, for which questions ranged from “what statement best matches your theological perspective,” to how often you exercise and do you have pets.  If a company I do business with asks, or certain organizations ask and really make a good case that my input matters, I will make an effort.  And, honestly, if filling out a customer survey on a register receipt might get me a gift certificate or enter me into a drawing for a free iPad, I’ll do those, too.

            The U.S. Congregational Life survey we will take this Sunday during worship falls into my well-worth-doing category.  It is a clear, relatively short, well-normed, broadly-based instrument which will give us not only useful demographic data but a very useful thumbnail sketch of our congregation, our composition, and our thoughts about our faith community.  What sets it apart from most other processes is that it shows us where we are on the spectrum for several key factors.  We see where we fit among other congregations and denominations in the U.S.  I find it one of the clearest, sharpest mirrors in which to see ourselves and our expectations.  As I have said often, the Ithaca community is rather unlike most other communities(!), and this survey gives us a national baseline to measure ourselves against as we prepare to undertake a national search for a pastor.

            The survey will have great utility for the search committee when we elect one, perhaps more than most surveys.  It will really help our self-study and our search to have the best information possible, and this has a lot of value for our process, so I really encourage you to add your information to our data.  Your input matters.  Really!  The more who participate, the better our results will be.  Yes, it is worth your time.  It will help!  It will give back a lot more to our congregation than a coupon for a beverage from doing a fast-food survey.

            Most people who have taken this survey have found it interesting and somewhat thought-provoking, and it is pretty quick to take.  Quite a few have mentioned, “I hadn’t thought of it that way” about some of the questions.  I was the interim at a church which needed to do a self-study survey, and while we were considering options, we were randomly selected by the U.S. Congregational Life Survey computer to be part of the original norming.  Providence.  After church, several of the members were so impressed by it that they came back on Monday to hand tabulate the questionnaires before the UPS truck came for them on Tuesday.  They didn’t want to wait the extra time for the computer to crunch all the national data!  Since then USCLS have even added powerpoint presentations of results to their excellent reports and charts. I have had very good experience with this and wish to reinforce how useful it is, even to a reluctant survey-taker like me!

            Well, yes, maybe sticking in a “Golden Ticket” in one survey for an Equal Exchange chocolate bar is more for fun than an actual bribe, but I truly encourage you to attend worship Sunday and help all of us view more clearly what and who we are as First Congregational.  We’ll see you then!

                                                                          In Christ,
                                                                          
                                                                                    David


Texts For Sunday Worship:

      From the Hebrew Bible          Isaiah 65:17-25
      From the Epistles                   2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
      From the Gospels                   Luke 21:5-19

Harvest Gratitude

      This is the time of year, leading up to Thanksgiving, when we in the mainstream northeast culture tend to get really nostalgic about our agrarian roots… at least decoratively.  Glorious piles of pumpkins and squashes and vegetables and different colored ears of maize tumbling from cornucopias perch perfectly on straw, perhaps with a few cornstalks in the background.  Makes us feel like the pilgrims at their first harvest celebration.

      Of course, what we really pick up in Tops or Wegmans is more prosaic, wrapped in plastic, generally.  And unless you live around really old-school Mennonites who sometimes do stack shocks of corn after handcutting it on smaller, more uneven patches, most of the corn is sucked up by big green John Deere harvesters and loaded in bulk transport trailers.  Even most of the Mennonites around Dundee use mechanical harvesters; the only difference is that they have steel lug wheels like their big green tractors.  So even agriculture is a lot different from the Thanksgiving season pictures.

      Supporting the work of the church has changed a lot from the images of the favorite thanksgiving and harvest hymns we sing.  The Biblical images of supporting the temple are based on hand- and animal-based agriculture which in the ancient near east was mostly year round, and the faithful brought foodstuffs and offerings to the temple or sent money with which the needs of the temple staff could be purchased in Jerusalem.  People brought a portion off the top to the temple, the “first fruits.”  There were alms taken for the poor, as well.  In the middle ages, and in more northern Europe, churches and abbeys and such owned land which was farmed and the produce stored, as well as monetary offerings, but a significant portion of church income came in late fall at the harvest, when farmers sold their crops or brought bags of grain or whatever to the church warehouses.  For much of church history, in fact, most income (cash or goods) arrived in the fall, and the church used that through the year.

      In the “new” world, without the establishment of church properties but with a by then very well developed currency and banking system, most churches in the American colonies were using offering plates passed during worship for mission and support of the poor and for paying clergy.  Building upkeep was typically paid by pew rentals.  And most congregations got their influx of giving with the first fruits of harvest, less in kind and more in coin, and still mostly in autumn.

      Lots changed with the industrial revolution.  For purposes of a history of church giving, the biggest was that more people were receiving weekly paychecks than getting seasonal farm income.  So instead of getting several hundred dollars in October from the landowners, things shifted to weekly donations from many workers.  Pew rents began to fall out of favor around the U.S. Civil War.  Personally, I think that had to do with central heating in sanctuaries in the northeast that got us away from box pews to the auditorium style seating of churches built since the Second Great Awakening.  Predictable paychecks meant predictable offerings and tithes through the year.

      In the 20th century, churches became more “businesslike” in their operation, and the managerial types wanted to be able to prepare annual budgets, and it helped to get indications from church members about how much they might contribute for the year.  With predictable family income, members could make annual pledges, and “cash flow” in general for most churches evened out, and we ended up with the system now familiar to us.

      So that’s the long way around to why we have a fall stewardship push and pledge cards!

      The thing to remember, however industrialized our giving has become since the Plymouth colony, is that our human, spiritual impulse remains the same: sharing with others and God part of what we earn so that the gospel of God’s love and human justice and compassion are spread to others.
We share because we are grateful for what God has done for us and our families and our world.  That has not changed, no matter how we get those symbols of our thanksgiving to the front of our sanctuary.

      Be generous as God has been generous to us!

                                                                          In Christ,
                                                                          
                                                                                    David

      A quick reminder: on the 17th, we will be doing the U.S. Congregational Life Survey at the end of worship.  Please make an effort to attend on November 17 to contribute.  We can make special arrangements for you if you cannot attend that day, but even the blank surveys must be returned, so we have to make sure they are accounted for.   Call the office at 607-257-6033, and we will work something out for you.  In one of the surveys there is hidden a “Golden Ticket” for a chocolate bar from the Equal Exchange project the Youth Ministry Team is doing to support the Heifer Project.  How’s that for an extra incentive!?!


Texts For Sunday Worship:

      From the Hebrew Bible     Haggai 2:1-9
      From the Epistles             2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
      From the Gospels             Luke 20:27-38

 

Looking in the Mirror

      In The Who’s rock opera, Tommy, there is a song called “Go to the Mirror.”  Tommy, for those of you not so steeped in classic rock history as some of us (well, OK, as people like me!) has shut down in a form of selective mutism, blindness, and deafness.  It takes a couple of more cuts for him to break out of his traumatized condition and break free.

      Mirrors are one of Paul’s illustrations, of course, and we interim's like to say we are holding up a mirror to the congregation so it can see itself as it is.

      The downside is that sometimes when we look in the mirror we are not so fond of what we see, but the fact is that mirrors are an accuracy check.  Once in a while, we may need to wipe the accumulated haze off our mirrors to see clearly.  If you shave or put on makeup, fogginess is not a good thing.  Nor is nostalgic haze good for a church.  Sometimes a bit of magnification of a blemish is distressing, but it helps you deal with things.  That’s also true for shaving and makeup!

      This Sunday, as part of our all-church self-study, we turn to who we are as a congregation now and what our general priorities are as First Congregational and the people in it moving forward.
A large part of our time Sunday will uncover the activities and programs and caregiving and such that we value, but we also have a few hopefully fun ways at learning more about who we are right now.  (Think of your favorite vacation places, favorite foods, and television show or music, and bring your phone downstairs with you.)

      Then, on the 17th, we will be doing the U.S. Congregational Life Survey at the end of worship.  This is a well-normed survey that will help us see where we are in the wider religious spectrum of the country.  It, unlike many surveys done during interim times, builds up from members’ responses instead of starting with lists of programs or activities in a congregation.  If you are the kind of person who groans when given a survey, this one should be more interesting than most, and the data is really, really, really valuable to our search process.  Most people find the questions thought-provoking and interesting.  So please make a serious effort to attend on November 17 to contribute.  We can make special arrangements for you if you cannot attend that day, but even the blank surveys must be returned to the data company, so we have to make sure they are accounted for.   Call the office at 607-257-6033, and we will work something out!  For what it’s worth, the last church-wide survey was in 2003.  Some things have happened since then.

      I remember when I realized that the image I had of myself from photographs was not looking back at me from the mirror, and I’m familiar with the sort of sigh and shrug church members have when they get clear on who the congregation actually is now.  Kind of the same.  For what it’s worth, I didn’t mind the graying at my temples, but the first gray hairs in my moustache made me wince.  But most days, the actual truth seems better than the out of date memory.

      Please join us as we look at ourselves a bit.  Even if you cannot stay for the discussion, please stay long enough to have lunch with each other!  I hear there may be ice cream for dessert…

                                                                          In Christ,
                                                                          
                                                                                    David

And remember to change your clocks back an hour Saturday night!!


Texts For Sunday Worship:
   From the Epistles          2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
   From the Gospels         Luke 19:1-10

Context Is Everything

      And context is an often overlooked factor for churches!  Usually, it is mostly when doing mission studies or transitional self-studies or trying to find a date that doesn’t conflict with events in the community when “context” rises to the level of consciousness for most congregations.

      Here’s an interesting context:  as the children attending the Community Nursery School downstairs arrive past the pastor’s study window or come tumbling out at day’s end, they’re speaking maybe a dozen different languages with their families.  And you hear all the world’s languages on the school campuses and on the Commons and at Wegmans and walking by you in cell phone conversations around town.  It is simply that First Congregational sits in an international community with diverse tongues.  That is an unusual context.

      Here’s an interesting context: modern U.S. culture is pluralistic, diverse, and much less accommodating to religious observance.  Most of the world’s major religions are here, which is also a significant context, of course.  But all of us worship and live in the larger social environment where soccer (football), hockey, football (American), and a dozen other games and competitions and practices encroach on times once sacrosanct.  For many of us, church is no longer the primary affiliation, but just one of many organizations and activities in which we participate.  That’s a new… and inevitable… context.

      Here’s an interesting context: for all the affluence around the church building, we know (because we drive through Ithaca and Tompkins County) that the median family income is $49k with close to and that the poverty threshold for a family of four is about $23k and that about a quarter of county residents are near or below the poverty level.  The median for Cayuga Heights is $89k.  Uneven economic conditions are an uncomfortable context.

      Here’s an interesting context: we have twice the percentage of young adults in our community as the national average.  No big surprise for a town with a major university and a college.  With 18.2%, Cayuga Heights has the highest percentage of doctorate degrees in the country, by one listing.  Los Alamos has 11.7%.  We are also one of the major centers of animal sciences and have nationally respected schools of all sorts.  So the academic industry is a singular context for us.

     This Sunday as part of our all-church self-study, we will review our community contexts (contexts, plural) to see both how they shape First Congregational and how First Congregational can serve our broader neighborhood and the people in it.

     Please join us as we look around us at our community.  We will also catch up a few things on our timeline, particularly recent years.  Even if you cannot stay for the discussion, please stay long enough to have lunch with each other!

                                                                                       In Christ,
                                                                                     
                                                                                        David

Texts For Sunday Worship:
From the Hebrew Bible          Joel 2:23-32
From the Epistles                  2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
From the Gospels                  Luke 18:9-14

Physical Therapy and the Interim Process

        Some of my very favorite people in the medical industrial complex are physical therapists.

        Not only are they generally cheerful, calm, considerate, and compassionate people doing a great job helping their clients, they have a distinct perspective on their work.  Physical and Occupational Therapists have as their overall outcome their patients getting back to their lives as successfully and completely as possible.  Much of the medical community is, by necessity, illness-based and centered on hospital, office, or care facility.  Physical and occupational therapists are health- and recovery-focused, and center their work on the patients’ home or workplace.  They aim for “real world” results.  People getting back to doing what they do and able to do as much as possible for themselves is their goal.

        Sometimes their work is not comfortable.  Often they are working on strengthening muscles and expanding range-of-motion.  They are well trained and very attuned to the person they are helping and understand what is needed.  Sometimes they can push people farther than they like and may often cause discomfort with their exercises, yet they encourage the person to push on through the discomfort.  I remember hearing one PT explain to someone, “this may be painful, but I will never hurt you.  I know how far to push you so you get better but not so far that you damage anything.”  Good physical therapists also help patients learn or relearn good behaviors, to adjust their motions to maintain good health.  A good sports therapist might not merely massage injured muscles or flex joints but help the athlete develop better form that doesn’t cause damage and good recovery routines.  Good practices avoid repetition of problems.  Their intention is that we get stronger and healthier so that we can do everything we can.  Like so many therapists, they are health-oriented and outcome-oriented.

        A number of us in the transitional ministry business feel an affinity.  We are focused on congregations getting back to doing what they need to do.  Unlike many consultants, we are hands-on with congregations.  We have research and experience to know what might be underlying a problem.  We may need to push to free up frozen joints or loosen adhesions, which may certainly be uncomfortable at the time, but allows fuller healing and recovery.  Helping develop better practices and behaviors helps a church get back onto its stride and get back out there in the game.  We sometimes have to torque things, and sometimes we have to give recovery time.  Like PT/OTs, we know the idea is to get people moving, and to help them establish good patterns that will last.  Like PT/OTs we know we only have a limited time working with someone, and like them, we know it is actually up to the person— or congregation— to commit to a healthier course.

        And, like PT or OT sometimes it takes a while to get back the range of motion or the strength or the new habits, and the process can be frustrating.  Or annoying.  But if you do the work, you get better.  If you work on good technique and good recovery practices, you decrease the chance of another problem.

        Another way to put this is that we are really early in the process of understanding what has happened with FCCI over the decades.  But remember that I like the image of PT/OT; this is not a post-mortem looking back.  It is helping us look forward and push forward and get back to being the kind of church members and community benefit from.  We need to understand the past not to dwell there but to find clues for doing things more healthfully into the future.  If we learn where the congregation has stumbled in the past, maybe a few adjustments will keep our stride from faltering again.

        We are still figuring stuff out.  In the second part of our all-congregation work we will be taking “the data,” drawing some perspectives from it, and defining a shared vision of the way forward.  After a break for the Thanksgiving through Christmas crush our question expands to “So, what’s next for us?”  From there we will elect a search committee to match up our vision with the right pastor or pastors.  I expect that our conversations and “ah ha!” moments this fall will lead us also to work on some ways to avoid some of the difficulties of the past and define our life together in ways that will work in years to come.  Already some themes are emerging after only two at-large meetings.  I suspect we will need to look at clearer structures and processes for working together and at pastoral relationship support.  Positively, there have been several times of tension around different subjects, yet the congregation and its leaders have dealt with them as they arise in fairly creative and practical ways.  Some of that history can provide insight for the future.

         All in all, you are to be commended for good work and good (very good) spirit.  Honestly, I think FCCI is rebounding remarkably well and is amazingly open to the work needed to get out there running again.  Yeah, there may be a few owowowow moments when something gets pushed past comfortable, but if you keep the main goal of a strong witness to God’s love foremost in your mind, you’ll get there!

        The secret?  The real spiritual therapist in all this is God!

                                                                                       In Christ,
                                                                                     
                                                                                        David

Texts For Sunday Worship:
From the Hebrew Bible          Jeremiah 31:27-34
From the Gospels                  Luke 18:1-8

Weekly Word from the Interim Pastor

        Our Hebrew Bible lesson this Sunday from Jeremiah 29 is, honestly, a bit odd.  It is the prophet’s words to the captives dragged off to exile in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BCE, telling them to settle in for the long haul, to raise families, and to become part of the city’s life.  This is not exactly what either the Jews deported to Babylon nor the ones remaining in the ruins of Palestine wanted to hear.  They, of course, wanted to know that they would promptly be repatriated and that the nation could rebuild.  Nope, says the prophet, it will take time, maybe close to a generation.  Instead of being put in a time-out chair in the kitchen for five minutes, you are grounded for months.  This isn’t just POWs, this is wholesale resettlement, like the British Expulsion of the Acadians to Louisiana, the Trail of Tears of the forced removal of native Americans to Oklahoma in 1830, and, ironically, the relocation of Arabs at the founding of modern Israel in 1948.  Jeremiah is telling the exiles that they very well may never see home again.

        But his words are not that downbeat.  He tells them not to live on the edge, to settle down (at least kinda settled), to go about life as if it was normal (or at least normal enough), to raise families, make livings, become good expatriate citizens of Babylon.  Resume your lives, even if displaced from your beloved Jerusalem.  The big reason they can do this it that God is just as present in Babylon as Jerusalem, that they are chosen and covenanted and precious no matter where they happen to be.  And this becomes a key turning point in Judaism.  From being totally centered on the temple in Jerusalem, the nation and religion become, for lack of a better word, portable.  The primary interaction between human and divine is no longer on the rock of the Temple Mount but in keeping Torah, keeping to the word of God in Scriptures.  Even when Cyrus returned the exiles home (and it wasn’t the same place as before), Judaism continued to be about a people and a promise more than a place.  You can be faithful wherever you are.

        In Jesus’ time, that strain of Judaism picking up on keeping Torah was represented by the Pharisees even as the Sadducees represented the strain focused on the Temple.  The Christ Followers centered on the relationship between the believer and Jesus Christ.  Both the Pharisees and the Christians had the advantage of carrying their belief with them in scroll and community, and in the case of the Church, in sacrament.  Those became advantages as Judaism underwent the Diaspora, the Dispersion, and as Christianity became a world religion, too.  Jeremiah prophesied more than he knew: be faithful wherever you are, be it Jerusalem, Babylon, Rome, or Ithaca!

        Join us for worship Sunday and for the second of our all-church self-study lunches.  As the old song goes, “grow where you are planted!”


                                                                                       In Christ,
                                                                                     
                                                                                               David

Texts For Sunday Worship:
      From the Hebrew Bible        Jeremiah 29:4-7
      From the Epistles               2 Timothy 2:8-15
      From the Gospels               Luke 17:11-19