A Steady Pace

The Friday Five challenge from RevGalBlogPals asked what steadies your pace, recharges your batteries or invites peace to your soul.

My five are:

1. I play ball with my dog. The rhythm of playing catch, her insatiable love of fetch, and being outdoors causes the rest of the world to recede for thirty minutes.
   
2. I sink into a good book. I have been on a tear of reading Laurie King’s series about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. I love mysteries that don’t involve gore, and the stories, especially those set in London and San Francisco where I’ve traveled, capture my imagination and transport me, even though they are set some ninety years ago in the years following The Great War.
   
3. I find a distraction. I am a champion worrier and schemer, who can play, “What if…” with the best fortune tellers. When I fall into that practice, I root myself in today and find someone to visit or talk with, a project to work on, or a place to go. There isn’t a day that goes by when I couldn’t be less self-centered so I intentionally try to focus on other people.
   
4. I cook or bake. The results aren’t always edible, but that’s ok. Apart from the everyday drudge of having dinner on the table, I enjoy being in the kitchen and I love most food. Recent discoveries include meatball pie, frittatas, roasted vegetables, zoodles (zucchini noodles) and homemade crusty bread. Tying two loves together, I recently finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and while I’m not ready to embark on a year of eating local, it challenged me to consider more carefully where food comes from and what I eat.
   
5. I pray and I cry. Sometimes, life sucks. Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes, it seems like people are asked to endure too much. Sometimes, I want to turn my back on the messiness but other times, I stay where I can hear or see it and weep and pray. God is present in our suffering and hears our cries. Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals now has an app for iPad and iPhone that includes clips of songs and links to Scripture. Twitter folks including Weavings and Rev. Naomi King, publish prayers. One of the beautiful things about the family of God, despite the things that make being a family hard, is that we are not standing alone against the darkness and brokenness of the world.

How do you respond to the tension or disparity of life?

Great Things Come in Small Packages

When I was a child, I was one of the smallest kids in my class at school and, because I was the youngest in my family, I was smaller than anyone else in my house, too. Somewhere along the line I had a t-shirt that read” Great Things Come in Small Packages.”

Naming gratitude for the small things in life that make us happy or those things that are comforting, is one way of overcoming the darkness that is the world around us, whether we experience that darkness

through the international headlines that declare Malaysia Flight 370, and all of the people who were its passengers and crew, fell into the South India Ocean, or that tensions appear to be escalating between western countries, Russia and the Ukraine;

or through the local news of another person shot and killed, another Amber Alert for a child missing and endangered, another life lost to addiction;

or through the way in which our lives are woven together so that the loss of one person’s father or brother is the loss of another person’s pastor or mentor; the loss of one mother’s son is the loss of another trusted colleague’s child; the loss of one person’s sister to disease strengthens our resolve to fight harder to find cures and compels us to walk or run in honor of the fallen.

The things we name may be small, but they hold the promise of great things to come. We name what we can recognize as good because the naming sustains our hope that we can, and will overcome the darkness. That darkness and brokenness will not triumph.

I cannot answer, “Why do bad things happen?” beyond acknowledging that we live in a broken world, in a world that is natural and physical and chaotic, and a world where we are very, very good at hurting each other. I find my hope in believing that we are not abandoned to a life limited by what we know. I believe God is greater and we have hope for a world where healing, reconciliation and restoration will reign.

For today, I find my hope in naming the small things:

• the cunning of my cat who watches the aquarium as though it’s her own sushi bar
• the tenacity of my chocolate lab who carries a ball everywhere
• the joy of hearing my daughters laugh
• the luxury of sleeping in when there’s a snow delay
• the blessing of the arrival of a newborn
• the singing of favorite hymns
• the surprise of stories I am hearing for the first time
• the comfort of heat, hot water and electric lights
• the way a good book transports you in time and place
• the gathering of a community to shelter the hurting and comfort the grieving.

I hope you will name the things in your life that sustain your hope, and if you are struggling to name them, find hope in one of the ones I have named.

Inspired

Cold temperatures and a professor's New Year's resolution to bake pies inspired me to try making a meatball pie.  As he noted, his resolution was to make pies, not homemade crusts, or meatballs from scratch. Sometimes, I make homemade sauce but for today's recipe, I used store-bought sauce. This simple recipe is adapted from one offered by Better Homes and Gardens.

I learned the trick of making lattice pie crust from the folks at Inspired Taste.

Meatball Pie

Ingredients

2 refrigerated pie crusts

1 egg, lightly beaten

2/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1 cup ricotta cheese

2 teaspoons dried basil, crushed

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1 pound (approx. 23) frozen cooked Italian meatballs, thawed

1 24 ounce jar purchased tomato and basil pasta sauce or marinara sauce

1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese (6 ounces)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.
2. Thaw meatballs by cooking for 2 minutes in the microwave.
3. Grease a 2-quart square baking dish. Take crust out and bring to room temperature (15 minutes) Spread crust out in glass dish. Prick crust and bake 10 minutes. Take out of the oven and reduce temperature to 350 degrees F.
4. In a small bowl stir together the egg, the ricotta cheese, the basil, and the pepper. Spread ricotta cheese mixture over crust. Spoon 3/4 cup of the pasta sauce over layers in pan. Sprinkle with 1/2 cup of the mozzarella cheese.
5. Toss meatballs with 3/4 cup of the pasta sauce and 1/2 cup of the mozzarella cheese. Arrange meatball mixture over layers, forming a mound. Top with 1/2 cup of the remaining pasta sauce (reserve remaining pasta sauce and mozzarella cheese).
6. Cut second crust into ¾” lattice strips and cover the layers*.
   
 

7. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes more or until heated through. Watch for browning and tent pie lightly with foil if needed. 


8. Sprinkle with remaining mozzarella cheese and bake an additional 5 minutes to melt cheese.
9. Let stand, uncovered, on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Using a serrated knife, cut pie into wedges. Heat and pass remaining pasta sauce.

Lattice pie crust: Cut one 9" refrigerated pie crust into ¾ inch strips. Lay 5 strips across pie. Pull #2 and #4 back toward you and lay a strip perpendicular to the three remaining strips. Lay #2 and #4 back flat. Pull back #1, #3 and #5. Lay another perpendicular strip and then lay #1, #3 and #5 flat. Repeat until the lattice is completed. Crimp edges together with your fingers. Watch a short video at Inspired Taste.

Jesus, Lamb of God - Sermon from December 29, 2013

Preached this morning at Lutheran Church of the Nativity
John 1:19 - 34 Christmas 1 (Narrative Lectionary)

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Today we stand between the crib where the baby Jesus lay at Christmas
And the cross toward which we’ll journey between now and Easter.

In this in-between time, we’ll accompany John the Evangelist,
hearing his account of Jesus’ ministry,
written some fifty years after his crucifixion and resurrection.

Today, we hear the testimony of another man, John
who was sent by God as a witness.

The Fourth Gospel doesn’t give us the familiar birth stories of Jesus
that we know from Matthew and Luke and our children’s pageants.
There are no angels, no shepherds, no magi.

Instead of a swaddled infant, lying in a manger,
Or an impetuous boy whose parents find him in the Jerusalem temple,
We meet Jesus, fully human,
Fully man.

Unexpected by a people waiting for the return of the prophet Elijah
and scandalous to a people waiting for a divine Messiah

In Jesus we meet God’s Word made flesh.
God’s Light shining in the darkness.
And now, God’s Passover Lamb
who takes away the sin of the world.

The comfort and joy of Christmas turn into bleak despair as we listen to John’s testimony,
Because just as a witness called by the prosecution testifies against the accused,
John bears witness against us,
Naming the brokenness he sees in the world –
our alienation, our distance, our rebellion against the very God
who created us and wants to live in relationship with us.

The sin of the world is not a catalog of all of our moral shortfalls –
in John’s Gospel – sin is a problem in one’s relationship with God
It is our human condition of standing against God,
like petulant children,
rebelling against God,
refusing to believe we are loved by God.

It is in this bleak space that we meet Jesus

Not as a baby and not even as a shepherd but as a lamb....

What does John mean?

Growing up in the city, all I know about lambs I learned from nursery songs and from James Herriott’s All Creatures Great and Small. 

But for Israel, the words “Lamb of God” meant something.

The Passover Lamb was not a sacrificial lamb,
cut and burned on the altar.
Those animals were more often bulls and goats.
The Passover Lamb was Israel’s reminder of God’s deliverance when they came out of slavery in Egypt.
It goes back to Exodus 12 when the Lord instructed Moses and Aaron to have every household slaughter a lamb and smear the blood of the lamb on the doorposts and the lintels
so that when the Lord passed through, they would be spared from destruction.

After Israel was spared, when they reached the Promised Land that the Lord gave them, they kept the Passover as a way of remembering what God had done.

The Passover Lamb was God’s sign to Israel of God’s deliverance from oppression, from bondage.

In the same way, Jesus delivers us out of the bondage of sin,
removing our unbelief and rebellion against God
and calling forth FAITH.

Herriott says, for farmers, the arrival of new lambs and the lambing season means the end of a long, harsh winter;
In the same way, the arrival of God’s Passover Lamb means the end of our bleak winter –
our alienation from God,
the end of our rebellion.

It is God’s overcoming our sin,
God exhibiting God’s eternal love for us

It is Christ’s taking up our sin as his own,
and giving us all that is his.

This is what John the Witness comes tell us –
the Good News of the Gospel –
Not that suddenly, we will live a perfect, blameless, sinless life;
Or that if we always do the right things and always make the right decisions, we can draw nearer to God on our own,

No.

John’s message for us is that even in our brokenness,
even in our imperfection,
even in the dark places where we live and where we hurt,
even in the Cross
God overcomes our sin and creates faith in us,
Forgiving us and drawing us into relationship.

By God’s grace, we are made new every day, restored to new life and forgiven.

Freed to believe
in God’s mercy and in the new beginnings God promises.

Sitting on the cusp of a New Year,
bombarded with messages about resolutions
that would have us lose weight, exercise, eat healthier,
and unplug more often,

John’s testimony challenges us
To find new ways to announce God’s grace, love and forgiveness in our lives.

Maybe it is letting someone step ahead of you in a long line,
Or paying for someone else’s coffee or lunch.

Maybe it is giving your time to help someone else who is hurting or
Listening to someone who is alone.

Maybe it is changing a habit that takes you farther away from God,
or starting one that helps remind you of God’s presence in your life.

Or maybe it is going to someone and offering them a fresh start;

Or sitting with someone and telling them,
“Jesus came to live for you
that you would know how much God loves you.”

Whatever you do, in making God’s love visible in your actions,
like John,
you are pointing away from yourself,
toward what our life-giving, living God has done and is doing
in the lives of the people you love and with whom you live and work.

Thanks be to God.


Let us pray…

God of life and God of faith,
Thank you for your son Jesus who takes away our sin,
Who calls forth faith in each one of us.
Take us into the New Year,
strengthened by your grace and
filled with hope by your promise of new beginnings.
May our words and actions be witnesses to your love and forgiveness.
Amen.

(c) Christina Auch, 2013.

Advent Confidential

As the Church enters a new year, the first four Sundays (which happen to begin on December 1 this year) mark Advent, a time of waiting and preparation for the celebration of Jesus’ birth at Christmas. RevGalBlogPals asked about our favorite memories or traditions for today’s FridayFive Advent Confidential.

Growing up, my family (1) had Advent calendars (2), and each day in December began with our opening a cardboard window and trying not to peak ahead to the manger scene hidden under the double doors marked “24” or sometimes "25". Sometimes they had verses but often they were just pictures related to the story of the birth of the infant Jesus. At least one year, on Sunday nights during Advent, my mother played carols at the piano while a fire was lit in the fire place, and my dad read from the King James Bible at our very own wreath lighting (3).

In those days, in the Episcopal tradition, we used the pink and purple candles. The colors of candles, the variety of four-fold meanings of the candles, and the significance of where and when the wreath lighting happens in worship are all nuances that were lost to me before going to seminary. If your curiosity is piqued, you can check out Advent resources on Text this Week, or from Worshiping with Children.

As an adult, my favorite Advent memories are from the soup suppers (4) and worship services on Wednesday evenings. Admittedly, when my children were younger, I figured we had done well just to slow down enough to get to the supper, so we often left before the actual worship began. Last year, I participated in community Advent services that brought together four different congregations, rotating the cooking responsibilities as well as the hosting of the services. As fewer people attend the midweek worship services for Advent, they are becoming harder to find, but these special services provide a much-needed chance to reset and refocus (5), an art often lost by the third day of a busy work week.

For me, this year’s season of waiting is punctuated by the different kinds of waiting we have happening in our house as I await my first call as the pastor of a congregation and my daughters await news of school acceptances for next school year. We are, as the people were at the time of Jesus’ birth, filled with hope and anticipation at what God is doing, and we wish and pray for peace and healing in this season.

Preacher without a pulpit

I finished my seminary internship, completing thirteen months of pastoral ministry at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Asheville in August. Approved for assignment, I am now eligible to receive a letter of call as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) following the completion of my MDiv degree this December.

This in-between time is interesting because I formed my identity as a pastor, a preacher and public Christian leader during this past year, but right now I do not have a congregation or a pulpit. For now, my family and I are waiting for what will unfold. It's interesting in this interim to think more fully about the idea that the Holy Spirit forms faith through preaching, that preaching brings a person to Christ and knits them into the body of Christ, and then to think about what preaching looks like outside of ordained ministry.

Meanwhile, here are my last two sermons from St. Mark's.

July 21, 2013
9th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C)
Amos 8:1-12
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

Listen Now



August 25, 2013
14th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C)
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17

Listen Now

"Always Being Made New"

As you know, if you are reading this here, I am a church geek. On Wednesday, August 14, 2013, I joined more than 2,000 others watching a LiveStream of my denomination's Churchwide Assembly -  a national gathering of about 952 representatives that happens every 3 years. Thankfully, this year's gathering of the Evangelical Church in America (ELCA) is being held in Pittsburgh which makes it easy for me to indulge in conversations and watch the live feed.

I watched in the morning as four people  - our Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, and three women currently serving as synod bishops - spoke about leading our Church in the next six years, and I watched in the afternoon as a fifth ballot between the two final nominees was held.

For those of you who think this is as interesting as watching grass grow (my frequent analogy for watching golf on television, or live for that matter) what made it wonderful was the color commentary provided by other church geeks, like me. As the people in the room listened and made their decisions about which candidate would receive their vote, I listened on Twitter (#ELCAcwa) and chat to the overwhelming respect and affirmation of our current leader's gifts and ministry. Presiding Bishop Hanson has led the ELCA for twelve years with grace and compassion even as congregations are getting smaller, even as seminaries are struggling, even as controversy erupted over who we ordain as leaders for our congregations.

And in the midst of recognizing the blessing that Bishop Hanson has been to the office of Presiding Bishop, and at the same time listening to the leading of the Holy Spirit for us in the world today, our church elected a new leader - and for the first time, a woman. It was a day to celebrate the Good in the Church even as we look for ways to move forward.

As a seminary student anticipating assignment and my first call in the ELCA, I am grateful for the day and the memory. I am grateful for the women in ministry who have preceded me. I am grateful for the faithfulness of all the leaders - women and men - who have challenged us to "always be made new" and who have shown courage in walking with us into new places and new ways of being church.

If you are a church geek, too, here is the video of Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson introducing Presiding Bishop-Elect Elizabeth Eaton. (This is a formal moderated press conference. Bishop Hanson's remarks begin at about 2:34 mark and Bishop Eaton begins about 5:27)