I felt bad about being so hard on vestries--all those I have served with over the years.
Maybe I've gotten over it a little.
It's like complaining about car engines.
Complain all you want--your car won't run without one.
And Episcopal Churches wouldn't run without Vestries.
So if you're a member of a vestry, be proud--you keep your church on the road! Yea, you!!!
(Hope that makes up some for my harshness yesterday....)
I know they are important--parishes have to take care of business.
I know all the members mean well--that's why they are there, to serve their parish.
What vestries do is vital to the church.
We need vestry meetings to keep the parish going.
But Vestry meetings might just do it for me--make me 'really' retire!
I sat through one today. I know it was necessary and that all the members are doing their part.
But having been a part of vestry meetings for all these years, I may have had my fill.
I'm being unkind to vestries everywhere, I know.
I'll try to behave better about the meetings.
I'll try....
Really try....
It comes tomorrow.
My sermon is about a conversation I had with my Zoom friends (Bern calls them 'the boys' since they are all male) about baptism.
But what I really talk about tomorrow is how the altar can lead to the font rather than the font leading to the altar.
As a priest, I'm supposed to only give communion to the baptized.
But in my long tenure as a priest I've never once refused to communion to the un-baptized.
And I've had over a dozen people ask to be baptized after they had tasted the Body and Blood.
It has always humbled me.
I feel the way John the Baptist felt in tomorrow's gospel when he tells Jesus that he (John) should be baptized by Jesus.
The font and the altar should be side-by-side.....
I went to my Cardiologist today.
He's on Barnes Ave. in a neighboring town. Don't get me started on that--there are 4 different left turns for Barnes Avenue!
The last one I tried was right only after asking a policeman to direct me.
Barnes used to be all connected back in the farming days, but building other things broke it up. What a mess!
But my a-fig (whatever that is) is gone.
My blood pressure and cardiogram were great.
The doctor even patted me on the back for keeping my weight down--40 pounds less than when he saw me 4 years ago.
So my heart is fine for now.
And I have so many things in my heart that matter so much to me.
Lucky guy--me....
Tuesday is a sort of busy day.
From 9:45 until 11 I'm on a zoom meeting with friends and colleagues in ministry.
I have to take out the trash.
I have to make a large salad for dinner.
All of that should translate into improving life.
Friends and colleagues are obvious--we need human interaction even if it's on a computer to keep our thoughts and goals on track.
But we should also take the trash out of our minds--things we don't need to ponder, things that scare us and hold us back, things that turn good-work into no-so-good.
And we should make a salad of our lives every day. Slice up and add those things we need to get done, things we've forgotten, things in the back of the refrigerator of our mind and heart.
And dress it all with hope and wonder and love.
Take out the trash, beloved.
And enjoy your salad....
Looking in a drawer for something else, I came upon a photo of my Grandmaw Jones. (I know my computer doesn't like the spelling of her title, but that's the way I said it in my youth!)
She lived up on a long hill in Conglentown, West Virginia, across a dirt road from my uncle and aunt's house.
She had an outhouse, which I thought of today when I went to the bathroom at Trinity Church and found the heat wasn't turned on in there. At least in the outhouse, old bowel movements warmed things up a tad.
Her name was Lina Manona Sadler Jones.
The picture I found looked like a school picture, but she was at least 80 in the photo, so I don't know what it was from.
She was a great cook and a great Grandmaw.
At the end of her life she lost some of her sensibility and was out wandering around when aunts and uncles and cousins found her.
I miss her even now, all these years later.
Maybe I'll see her again if there is a heaven when we die....
I hope so....
Bern when to the grocery store this morning and was checked out for over $80 when she realized she had forgotten her purse.
She asked the clerk to set it aside and she'd go home ("I live close to here....") to get her credit card.
But the man behind her said, 'I'll pay for it.'
Bern told him she'd only be a few minutes but he insisted and paid for her groceries.
She told him, "I'll pass it on...."
And he replied, "I know you will".
The kindness and generosity of that total stranger was enough to thrill Bern to her inner being.
She almost cried when she told me about it.
Nothing is like kindness and generosity--we need more and more and much more of that in our world.
Be kind.
Be generous.
It will make a big difference....
