Tag: worship

The Healing Power of a Church Potluck

barnstormingblog3 Comments

The church, I think, is God’s way of saying,
“What I have in the pot is yours,
and what I have is a group of misfits
whom you need more than you know
and who need you more than they know.” 

“Take, and eat,” he says,
“and take, and eat,
until the day, and it is coming,
that you knock on my door.
I will open it, and you will see me face to face.”

He is preparing a table.
He will welcome us in.
Jesus will be there, smiling and holy,
holding out a green bean casserole.
And at that moment, what we say, what we think, and what we believe will be the same:
“I didn’t know how badly I needed this.”
~Jeremy Clive Huggins from “The Church Potluck”

Perhaps a celebration at the end of a long cold winter month
Possibly a need of respite from a month of dieting
Likely a response to bad headline news day after day:
A potlatch, a potluck, a communion of comfort food.

What to bring? What soothes stomach and heart?

Macaroni and cheese, with drizzled bread cubes on top
Beef stew chuck-a-block with vegetables and potatoes
Buckets of fried chicken
Greenbean casserole
Meat loaf topped with ketchup
Tossed Caesar salad
Tator tots drizzled with cheese
Jello and ham buns

Home made bread, steaming, soft
Whole chocolate milk
And ice cream sundaes

Nothing expensive
Or extravagant
Or requiring going into debt to pay.

A fitting ending to a Sabbath of worship,
After meeting for prayer and hymns and the Word;
When times get tough, when we feel all alone,
When we drown in discouragement.

This is time for connecting congregation and community,
For huddling against life’s storm
Forgetting our worries for a time
And sharing God’s comfort food, all together, misfits that we are,
Smiling to know — we all badly needed this.

All We Know of God

barnstormingblog1 Comment

It hovers in dark corners 
before the lights are turned on,   
it shakes sleep from its eyes   
and drops from mushroom gills,   
it explodes in the starry heads   
of dandelions turned sages,   
it sticks to the wings of green angels   
that sail from the tops of maples.     
It sprouts in each occluded eye   
of the many-eyed potato,   
it lives in each earthworm segment   
surviving cruelty,   
it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,   
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs   
of the child that has just been born.     
It is the singular gift   
we cannot destroy in ourselves,   
the argument that refutes death,   
the genius that invents the future,   
all we know of God.     
It is the serum which makes us swear   
not to betray one another;   
it is in this poem, trying to speak
~ Lisel Mueller “Hope” from Alive Together

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,
E. B. White ~from Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience 

We can’t claw our way out of
the mess we’ve made of things;
it takes Someone
to dig us out of the hole,
brush us off,
clean us up,
and breathe fresh breath into our nostrils.
We can only hope
hope will be more contagious
than any pandemic virus.
We can only hope
and grab hold and put down roots
when His hand reaches down
to plant us firmly the dirt.

Embraced By God’s Restless Love

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

The old church leans awry and looks quite odd,
But it is beautiful to us, and God.
~Stephen Paulus “The Old Church”

The church knelt heavy
above us as we attended Sunday School,
circled by age group and hunkered
on little wood folding chairs
where we gave our nickels, said
our verses, heard the stories, sang
the solid, swinging songs.

It could have been God above
in the pews, His restless love sifting
with dust from the joists. We little
seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting
to grow toward the light.

Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside,
an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp-
edged shadows back to their buildings, or
how the winter air knifed
after the dreamy basement.

Maybe the day we learned whatever
would have kept me believing
I was just watching light
poke from the high, small window
and tilt to the floor where I could make it
a gold strap on my shoe, wrap
my ankle, embrace
any part of me.
~Maureen Ash “Church Basement”

There could be so much wrong with the church overall,
comprised as it is
with fallen people
with broken wings,
looking odd and leaning awry,
determined to find flaws in each other’s
doctrine, rituals, tradition, beliefs.

What is right with the church:
who we pray to, why we sing,
whose body we comprise
so bloodied, fractured, yet healed
despite our thoroughly motley messiness~
Our Lord of Heaven and Earth
rains down His restless love upon our heads.

Stop What I Am Doing Right Now

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,

who could cross
a dry bed of leaves  
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,

conceived out of nowhere,
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

~David Whyte, from River Flow: New & Selected Poems

I remind myself how brief this all is.

How fleeting are the years when I look in the mirror and realize how much is past and how much remains – who knows how little?

How many questions remain unanswered but even more unasked?

This morning, as every Sabbath,
I sit silent in a pew of worship,
humbled and overwhelmed by the question
“what is my only comfort?”
but even more so by the answer:

I am not my own
but belong body and soul
to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

A question and answer that can make or unmake a life
that patiently waits for me
and will never go away.

photo by Barb Hoelle


A Bright Sadness: Trust Our Own Greening

barnstormingblog2 Comments

…every year
the dull and dead in us
meets our Easter challenge:

to be open to the unexpected,
to believe beyond our security,
to welcome God in every form,
and trust in our own greening.
~Joyce Rupp from Out of the Ordinary: Prayers, Poems, and Reflections for Every Season

The challenge after each Sabbath
is to go back to an every day routine
as if nothing has happened
when everything has happened.

There is laundry to do
floors to mop
patients to comfort
barns to clean
taxes to pay.

Nothing seemingly has changed,
yet…
everything is changed.

Now I know why,
though dead and pruned,
after every Sabbath I sprout green ~
I am alive only
because He is.

Traditionally, Lent does not include the five Sundays before Easter as every Sabbath is a celebration of Christ’s resurrection. We should let Him Easter in us every week!

This is one of six Easter reflections on Barnstorming during the next few weeks. We wait for the glorious day when we can meet as Christ’s body on April 21, first on our farm’s hill at dawn, and then later inside our church’s sanctuary to feel the full impact of “He is Risen!”

Winter Sunday

barnstormingblog4 Comments

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices? 
–  Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

We cannot know nor comprehend the sacrifices made for us, so much hidden away and inscrutable.

We who feel so entitled to comfort and pleasure and attention will find that none of it is deserved yet still freely given. May we ourselves someday feel such love for another – if we are so blessed to give of ourselves so deeply.

Our shoes shined, our hearts brimming with gratitude on a cold Sunday morning – we go to thank God for His ultimate sacrifice and His grace in loving us as we are: deserving nothing, filled with everything from Him.

To Find the Poem Itself

barnstormingblog5 Comments

yellowbegonia4

 

raindropsonroses1

 

In science we have been reading only the notes to a poem:
in Christianity we find the poem itself.
~C.S. Lewis from Miracles

 

daylily62215

 

IMG_3963

 

Science fails when we need a miracle:
it can’t
~love us always no matter what,
~give us reason to keep on living when we want to give up,
~grasp the hand of the dying who aren’t ready,
~provide hope to the weak and courage to the fearful,
~become sacrifice for all we’ve done wrong,
~redeem us through everlasting forgiveness and grace.

Science is merely the footnote
to a Word and Truth more vast:
a fermata allowing us just a long enough rest to admire Creation,
dwelling for a moment of silence
inside His ultimate symphonic Work.

 

rainbowfields2

 

rainbowbarnlight

 

hollyhockred

 

Two Kinds of Infection

barnstormingblog5 Comments

springlanerobin

 

Good things as well as bad, you know are caught by a kind of infection.

If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire:
if you want to be wet you must get into the water.
If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life,
you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. 

They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.
They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality.
If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry.

Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?
Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?
~C.S. Lewis- Mere Christianity

 

pinkdogwoodmay2018

 

upperfield

 

Each Monday morning, as I transition once again from the observance of Sabbath with God’s people to move into the secular world of government work, I feel an acute separation.

I want to remain infected (and contagious) with the reality of God yet my life feels necessarily compartmentalized.

On Monday, I’m gloved and masked to prevent my infecting others.

All week I am exposed daily to the reality of the world and must defend myself from getting infected.

If I’m to be contagious, let it be because I’m overwhelmed with the Spirit, not the world.

 

sunset55181

 

pinkonwhite

God Was Here: How Can This Be?

barnstormingblog1 Comment

decdogwood

 

If God’s incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us into his superluminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths..we have misunderstood the words of Christianity.  
~Karl Rahner

 

dogwood111117

 

And he [John] will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
Zechariah asked the angel, “How can I be sure of this?
Luke 1: 17-18

…the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. 37 For no word from God will ever fail.”
38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.
Luke 1:29-38

 

 

dogwoodoct1

 

Zechariah asks:
How can I be sure?
How can I trust this is true even when it doesn’t make sense in my every day world?
How can I trust God to accomplish this?

These are not the questions to be asked; he was struck mute, speechless until immersed in the reality of impossibility and then he sang loudly with praise.

Instead, we are to ask, like Mary:
How can this be?
How am I worthy?
How am I to be confident within incomprehensibility and calm in the midst of mystery?
How am I to be different as a result?

It is when we are most naked, at our emptiest, that we are clothed and filled with God’s glory.
We do not need to be sure.
We just need to be.
Changed.

 

dogwoodsunset2

 

May it be an evening star
Shines down upon you
May it be when darkness falls
Your heart will be true
You walk a lonely road
Oh! How far you are from home

Mornie utúlië (darkness has come)
Believe and you will find your way
Mornie alantië (darkness has fallen)
A promise lives within you now

May it be the shadows call
Will fly away
May it be you journey on
To light the day
When the night is overcome
You may rise to find the sun

Mornie utúlië (darkness has come)
Believe and you will find your way
Mornie alantië (darkness has fallen)
A promise lives within you now
A promise lives within you now

 

 

pinkdogwood517

God Was Here: Come to Set Us Free

barnstormingblog1 Comment

chickadee1

 

swantokyo4

 

eaglecouple2

 

“Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.”
~Rainier Marie Rilke

Like the birds of the air flying free, we too were created to sing.  Yet too often we choose to be grounded — grousing and grumbling.

Many of us know nothing of anticipation of the coming of Christ, some of us might care if we knew, but plenty of us are ready for the whole Christmas thing to be over yesterday.

Whether we care or not does not alter that Christ dwells with us, just as the coming of spring is not stopped by a slumbering disinterested earth.

Like Mary, we say: “Let it be”, not “no, not me, not now.”

We are set free to fly and sing!
He has come on our behalf: a simple, but oh so difficult faith, like the shoot that must break through the crust of frozen earth to reach the sun, in order to bloom.

 

frozennorth12517

 

morningswans

 

A star rose in the sky
and glory from on high
did fill the night with splendor.
Came birds with joyful voice
to carol and rejoice with
songs so sweet and tender.

The eagle then did rise,
went flying through the skies,
to tell the wondrous story,
sang: Jesus, born is he,
who comes to set us free,
he brings us joy and glory.

The sparrow with delight
said: This is Christmas night,
our happiness revealing.
The sky with praises rang,
as finch and robin sang
their songs of glad rejoicing.

The lark upon the wing
said: Now it seems like spring,
no more is winter pressing;
for now a flower is born
whose fragrance on this morn
to earth brings heaven’s blessing.

Sang magpie, thrush, and jay,
It seems the month of May
in answer to our yearning.
The trees again are green
and blossoms now are seen,
it is the spring returning!

The cuckoo sang: Come, come,
And celebrate the dawn
this glorious aurora.
The raven from his throat
then trilled a festive note
to the unexcelled Señora.

The partridge then confessed,
I want to build my nest
beneath that very gable
where I may see the Child
and watch whene’er he smiles
with Mary in that stable.
~translation from Catalonian of “Carol of the Birds”

 

 

 

 

Whence comes this rush of wings afar
Following straight the Noel star
Birds from the woods in wondrous flight
Bethlehem seek this holy night

Tell us, ye birds, why come ye here?
Into this stable, poor and drear?
Hasting to see the new born King
And all our sweetest musics bring

Hark! How the winged finch bears his part
Philomel, too with tender heart:
Chants from her leafy dark retreat,
“Re, me, fa, sol” in accents sweet

Angels, and shepherds, birds of the sky
Come where the Son of God doth lie
Christ from the earth and man doth dwell
Come join in the shout, “Noel, Noel, Noel.”
~Carol of the Birds (traditional Catalonian carol)