bat, man

Before I got on the bus for the Wednesday night festivities, I saw a baby bat on the ground in the parking lot.  I thought it was dead.  It was not.  I took a video of it crawling, but haven’t uploaded it yet to post here.  It made me scream a little bit, as I thought it was dead and had gotten rather close to it.  Then, while on the way to pick up the first person on the bus route, the wind (it was really windy) blew open one of the bus doors and shattered the entire window.  The sound of shattering glass is really something to hear – I haven’t heard it since I broke my grandmother’s clock many years ago (sorry, grandma).

The rest of the night was really quite fine, considering how it began.  I was sort of braced for weird and wild, and it was a full moon, too.

love letters from the edge

There are people who like to study up on the text they will preach to a congregation.  Then there are people who like the act of preaching.  There is much overlap and nuance between these 2 groups – they are by no means opposites.  While I am almost always astonished by what I learn when I study a text, I must confess to enjoying the act of preaching more than I do the researching to preach.  I have found this is a careful balance to maintain so that I don’t end up preaching internet forwards or chicken schlock for the sole due to a lack of study.  (Ok, really.  This isn’t going to happen.)

BUT: If you hear me preach, and you detect soft, fluffy filling, call me on it, would ya?

My internship has had me on a pretty tight preaching schedule.  I think I’ve preached some 20 sermons thus far, and have many more to go.  So, I’m still establishing what my habits around getting ready to preach are.  So far, I’ve noticed a feeling that accompanies me each time I sit down to try and start to write the actual sermon.  It’s part anxiousness, part excitement, part dread, part ….well, I don’t know.  It’s a feeling that keeps me on my toes and, literally, on the edge of my seat as I write.  Usually, I feel like I am on an egdge when I am writing a sermon. It’s not a comfortable feeling, which I think is critical.  I wonder if you’d feel it, as a listener, if I were lounging, feet propped up, waxing on and on about grace and the like.  ”Isn’t it just, well, …super?”

It’s like I am writing a love letter each week, but a love letter that reads like a sweeping, epic drama.  It’s a love letter that includes heartache, betrayal, forgiveness, and redemption all mixed up with the mundane, the absurd, the tedious, the ordinary, and the extraordinary.  Just ready the Bible sometime.  It’s all in there – sex, drugs, and rock & roll.

“Preach like there’s someone who is about to die and is going to hear it.”  This was the advice given in my first introduction to preaching class.  It seems sitting on the edge of my wooden chair is the least I can do.

What do you think about preaching?  Or about sermons you hear?  How do you write?  What do you anticipate as a hearer?  When do you want to stand and clap?  When do you want to throw something at the preacher?

witness deadline

The church is great at insider language. And by great, I mean horrible. (Check out this link to my friend’s blog where she lists all kinds of insider language used at seminary and in the church – way to go, Nina.)

Being the vicar in these here parts means I get all the other pastor’s mail when they’re done looking through it.  A lot of it is newsletters from other Lutheran churches in the area.  I thumb through them and sometimes even find things that are enlightening or even inspirational.  But again and again, I notice the insider language in them.  And, I guess, who else gets those things but church people?

I had a good laugh one day when I read “witness deadline” printed in bold letters on a church calendar.  And I wondered what that would look like to a person not from that church.  I mean, Lutherans are not known for their evangelical ways, and it looked like this church was taking a stand on doing something about that.  

I didn’t see any stonings or excommunications planned after the witness deadline, so it must have worked.

p.s Check out the “wurd” tab on this blawg.  I am trying to take the sting out of some church words of every day kind of faith living stuff.  Is it working?

you are here

I rode out to our “satellite” congregation (in Fabius, NY) with the visitation pastor and his wife on Sunday morning.  And for about the zillionth time, I marveled at the surrounding countryside of Upstate New York.  When I was at school in St. Paul, I would drive 30 miles one way just to try and get out of the reach of the city lights so I had a chance at seeing stars, and could experience the dark that is supposed to be night.  

I guess I’ve been spoiled working for camps all these years.  Especially in Idaho, I could step out my front door and soak in a dark, starry night, or grope for a flashlight as the dark enveloped me.

The picture is not of the countryside on the way to church the other morning, but of trails that are a simple and joyful mile from my apartment.  The first day I made my way onto those trails and into the woods, I felt like I had stumbled into Narnia.

I’m still looking for the lamp post and Mr. Tumnus.

is this what pastoral care looks like?

 

yes, this is what pastoral care can look like.

I was on the phone with Nina, a good friend of mine earlier this week.  She has the great habit of asking me what the best thing from my week has been.  I love it when I don’t have to think about it and a story comes flying out of my mouth.  She seems equally aware of the good in her life as well. Although, it seems the question is often asked after we’ve shared a partciularly yucky story, or a series of them, depending on the week.  

Nina hadn’t asked this question yet in our conversation and I found myself in the middle of a “I can’t believe how sad and complicated this is” sort of story about a congregation member here.  While I wasn’t sharing all the gory details with Nina, I was trying to give her sense of the sadness this person lives with every day. This person and I had had a particularly intense conversation after church one Sunday.

All of a sudden it dawned on me.  While I was painting this picture, I realized I hadn’t given Nina the setting I was in.  A wide smile crossed my face as I said “Wait!  I just realized something.”  I had been listening to this person’s story, with tears and hugs and all, dressed as Professor Gizmo.  I will say that I did take off the wildly flashing yellow plastic glasses and my blinking headlamp during this conversation at church.  But I still wore a pig tail on the top of my head, my bathrobe, my wild hawaiian pants with skirt.

There on the phone that night a question I had been asking since cpe settled into a deeper sense of knowing.  Who is pastoral care about, anyway?  It’s not about the pastor, the vicar, the intern.  It just isn’t.  And it’s easy to get sucked into thinking it’s about you, believe me.  This person didn’t care one bit about how I was dressed, how I looked.  In this case, it didn’t even matter what I said.  Listening and being there were my main roles.

I think the pigtail looks especially attentive, don’t you?