meeting with a bishop

Bishop Laura Ahrens met with me and the two wardens at the Diocesan offices because she is visiting Trinity on Feb. 18.

I have had issues with bishops before, but not with Laura.

We have a fine relationship based on mutual respect.

I enjoy being with her.

Our Jr. Warden had probing questions about the Episcopal Church and the conflict in Gaza.

But mostly we just talked about Trinity and what she should expect when she comes.

I also saw my old friend, H.D., who works at the Diocese.

We go way back and have shared joy and sadness with each other several times.

Not a bad bishop visit at all.

 

my handwriting and my 7 year old granddaughter

 My handwriting has degenerated so badly that I can't even read it.

I make my grocery list by printing and even then I sometimes can't read it!

If it wasn't for my key board I'd be cut off from the world by my writing.

Eleanor is 7--my daughter and son-in-law's girl.

Bern talks with her on zoom for an hour every M-W-F and sometimes other days.

I poke my head in and say hi from time to time.

But it is her and Bern's time.

Today, Bern had her phone turned up (maybe she too is losing her hearing) and Eleanor sang for 45 of the 60 minutes.

Her dolls were having a talent show.

She sings well (my singing is just below my handwriting) but our two kids got Bern's musical ability and passed it on to their kids.

Hearing Eleanor singing down the hall gives me great joy and hope for the future.

No church this Sunday

Steve, who fills in for me on my off Sunday and does Morning Prayer has Covid.

So I was going to go up to Milton tomorrow.

But heavy weather is predicted tomorrow, especially in the North West Corner of CT where Milton is.

So church is cancelled.

It was going to be interesting since I didn't have a sermon. I usually write them by Thursday.

I was going to 'wing it' and see how it went.

But no need now.

And tomorrow is the NFL semi-finals.

Go CHIEFS!!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Empty Thursday

 So, he who will not be named, won in New Hampshire but not by much.

And a Fox News survey (of all people) found that 35% of Republicans will not vote for him in the general election.

Amazing and bad news for what's-his-name.

Biden was not on the ballot, but write-ins gave him as many votes as the former president with a dozen people 'on the ballot'.

I'm feeling better but not relieved.

I'm still worried about democracy and this crazy orange guy who wants to be a dictator.

Pray for our country.

Please.

Fly me to the moon

Some mornings I wake up with a song in my head.

This morning it was "fly me to the moon".

It was written by Bart Howard in 1954 and recorded by  Frank Sinatra.

I know that because I looked it up on my computer.

 What I don't know is why I woke up with it zooming around in my mind....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Week's sermon

 

God Still Calls Us

        Last week’s sermon was titled “God calls us; are we listening?”

        This week’s sermon is called “God still calls us….”

        I have some more to say about God’s call to us.

        Let’s begin with the collect of the day. Listen: “Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation….”

        We need God’s ‘grace’ to answer God’s call to us.

        The ability to answer is also a gift of God—a gift we need to respond.

        Pray always for that gift.

        God called to Jonah to go and preach to the people of Nineveh to change their ways. Jonah doesn’t do what God asks him so God sends a whale to swallow him and spit him up on the shore of Nineveh.

        Sometimes God can bring us kicking and screaming to do what he calls us to do. Stay away from whales!

        Then, what we read today tells how the people of Nineveh listen to Jonah and change their ways. Then Jonah sits on a hill and ponders why God brought him halfway around the world to condemn the Ninevites and then saves them. God makes a Castor Oil tree to give Jonah shade then sends a worm to kill the tree.

        Jonah’s story ends under the ruined tree still pondering.

        Now I think ‘pondering’ is good—but there is no way we can ever understand the ways of God.

        Then, in todays Psalm, we heard these wondrous words: “For God alone my soul in silence waits; truly my hope is in him.”

        That’s a verse to ponder. Our lives are so full of noise, how can we make our souls ‘in silence wait’ for God’s Call?

        Then in Mark’s Gospel today, Jesus calls his first disciples—Simon and Andrew, James and John. They leave their lives behind to follow him and fish for people.

        We’re reading the Gospel of Luke on Wednesday’s and got to the point where Jesus is calling all people he meets. One man says, “I have to go bury my father first” and Jesus says, “Let the dead bury the dead, follow me and I will give you life.”

        It sounds harsh of him, but God’s call sometimes gives us a difficult choice.

        Believe you me, I tried every way I could think of to avoid the priesthood. And here I am today!

        Today is Trinity’s Annual Meeting. We will evaluate how we responded to God last year and try to silence our souls to see where he is calling us, as individuals and as a congregation to follow him This year. Listen well, beloved,    

Listen in the silence of your soul.

Shalom and Amen.

 

 

So What's-His-Name wins Iowa

We knew he would.

And he is odds-on to get the nomination--even if he's in jail.

Can someone convicted of a felony run for President?

I hope we'll find out.

I'd rather have a younger Democrat running--but Biden is only 5 years older than me and I expect to be around for four years.

We shall see.

If What's-His-Name regains the White House, Democracy, as we know it is over.

We can't let that happen.

Go, old Joe! Go!

 

Snow and Ice

It snowed an inch or more and then turned to sleet.

Our walkways and driveway and our car were covered in ice.

I put on the heater and defroster in my car for 20 minutes before we left to take Brigit for her check-up and it melted a lot of the ice--but I had to rake off the rest.

Brigit is fine, in good health and had her nails clipped.

I took Bern and Brigit home and then went to the store.

Slick roads for sure.

It's snowed a little more--an inch or so--since then.

And Cornwall Avenue, where we live, hasn't been cleared at 7 p.m.

We live in hope.

I'm supposed to go to Milton tomorrow at noon.

Wish they would cancel.

I hate winter and slick roads.

   

cold

 I told someone at church that a lot of Republicans in Iowa could freeze tomorrow.

He said, "Good."

That's why I love Trinity, Milton--everyone there is liberal.

But it is going to be dangerous to go to the Caucus tomorrow.

Wind chill of under 30 degrees below zero.

We'll see if the chill cuts into Trump's lead.

If you haven't see this week's New Yorker, the cover drawing is of Trump in a blue suit covered by medals, goose stepping like a Nazi in black boots and making a Nazi salute.

It's titled "Back to the Future".

Let's hope and pray not....

This week's sermon

 

GOD IS CALLING US—ARE WE LISTENING?

          The lesson today from 1^st Samuel is a message to us.

          God is calling us—are we listening?

          Samuel is just a boy entrusted to ‘look out for’ and ‘serve’ Eli—an old man losing his sight. They live in the Temple of the Lord.

          One night Samuel is in his room and hears his name called. He knows his job so he runs to Eli and says “Here I am, you called me.”

          Eli tells him he didn’t call for him and tells him to go back and lie down.

          That happens two more times—three in all. Then Eli realized God must be calling Samuel. He tells him to go back and when he is called for again to say, “speak Lord, you servant is listening.”

          Samuel does as Eli asks and God speaks to him.

          But it took four tries.

          God calls for us. Are we listening? Will we recognize it is God calling? How many times will God call before we say, “speak Lord, your servant is listening”?

          Nathnael is quicker to hear the voice of God, even though he said, on the way to meet Jesus, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

          As soon as Jesus tells Nathnael he saw him under a fig tree, Nathnael says, “Rabbi, you are the son of God, you are the King of Israel!”

          And Jesus tells him he will see greater thing. He will even see “the heavens opened and angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

          God calls to us.

          Do we hear him?

          I’d say evidence that we do are found in the back of the sanctuary where you bring food and clothing for the ‘least of these in our midst’.

          More evidence is your work at Soup Kitchens and Homeless Shelters.

          Beyond that is your financial support for Trinity and your attendance at services here.

          We may not always recognize the voice of God—but you members and friends of Trinity Church hear it enough to make a difference in the community and the world.

          “Speak, Lord, for your servants listen….”

Shalom and Amen

         

         

The title of this blog

 

My first post

Sitting under the Castor Oil Tree (March 7, 2009)

The character in the Bible I have always been drawn to in Jonah. I identify with his story. Like Jonah, I have experienced being taken where I didn't want to go by God and I've been disgruntled with the way things went. The belly of a big old fish isn't a pleasant means of travel either!

The story ends (in case you don't know it) with Jonah upset and complaining on a hillside over the city of Nineva, which God has saved through Jonah. Jonah didn't want to go there to start with--hence the ride in the fish stomach--and predicted that God would save the city though it should have been destroyed for its wickedness. "You dragged me half way around the world," he tells God, "and didn't destroy the city....I knew it would turn out this way. I'm angry, so angry I could die!"

God causes a tree to grow to shade Jonah from the sun (scholars think it might have been a castor oil tree--the impications are astonishing!). Then God sends a worm to kill the tree. Well, that sets Jonah off! "How dare you kill my tree?" he challanges the creator. "I'm so angry I could die...."

God simply reminds him that he is upset at the death of a tree he didn't plant or nurture and yet he doesn't see the value of saving all the people of the great city Ninivah...along with their cattle and beasts.

And the story ends. No resolution. Jonah simply left to ponder all that. There's no sequel either--no "Jonah II" or "Jonah: the next chapter", nothing like that. It's just Jonah, sitting under the bare branches of the dead tree, pondering.

What I want to do is use this blog to do simply that, ponder about things. I've been an Episcopal priest for over 30 years. I'm approaching a time to retire and I've got a lot of pondering left to do--about God, about the church, about religion, about life and death and everything involved in that. Before the big fish swallowed me up and carried me to my own Nineva (ordination in the Episcopal Church) I had intended a vastly different life. I was going to write "The Great American Novel" for starters and get a Ph.D. in American Literature and disappear into some small liberal arts college, most likely in the Mid-Atlantic states and teach people like me--rural people, Appalachians and southerners, simple people, deep thinkers though slow talkers...lovely for all that--to love words and write words themselves.

God (I suppose, though I even ponder that...) had other ideas and I ended up spending the lion's share of my priesthood in the wilds of two cities in Connecticut (of all places) among tribes so foreign to me I scarcly understood their language and whose customs confounded me. And I found myself often among people (The Episcopal Cult) who made me axious by their very being. Which is why I stuck to urban churches, I suppose--being a priest in Greenwich would have sent me into some form of shock...as I would have driven them to hypertension at the least.

I am one who 'ponders' quite a bit and hoped this might be a way to 'ponder in print' for anyone else who might be leaning in that direction to read.

Ever so often, someone calls my bluff when I go into my "I'm just a boy from the mountains of West Virginia" persona. And I know they're right. I've lived too long among the heathens of New England to be able to avoid absorbing some of their alien customs and ways of thinking. Plus, I've been involved in too much education to pretend to be a rube from the hills. But I do, from time to time, miss that boy who grew up in a part of the world as foreign as Albania to most people, where the lush and endless mountains pressed down so majestically that there were few places, where I lived, that were flat in an area wider than a football field. That boy knew secrets I am only beginning, having entered my sixth decade of the journey toward the Lover of Souls, to remember and cherish.

My maternal grandmother, who had as much influence on me as anyone I know, used to say--"Jimmy, don't get above your raisin'". I probably have done that, in more ways that I'm able to recognize, but I ponder that part of me--buried deeply below layer after layer of living (as the mountains were layer after layer of long-ago life).

Sometimes I get a fleeting glimpse of him, running madly into the woods that surrounded him on all sides, spending hours seeking paths through the deep tangles of forest, climbing upward, ever upward until he found a place to sit and look down on the little town where he lived--spread out like a toy village to him--so he could ponder, alone and undisturbed, for a while.

When I was in high school, I wrote a regular collemn for the school newspaper call "The Outsider". As I ponder my life, I realize that has been a constant: I've always felt just beyond the fringe wherever I was. I've watched much more than I've participated. And I've pondered many things.

So, what I've decided to do is sit here on the hillside for a while, beneath the ruins of the castor oil tree and ponder some more. And, if you wish, share my ponderings with you--whoever you are out there in cyber-Land.

Two caveates: I'm pretty much a Luddite when it comes to technology--probably smart enough to learn about it but never very interested, so this blog is an adventure for me. My friend Sandy is helping me so it shouldn't be too much of a mess. Secondly, I've realized writing this that there is no 'spell check' on the blog. Either I can get a dictionary or ask your forgiveness for my spelling. I'm a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa ENGLISH major (WVU '69) who never could conquer spelling all the words I longed to write.

I suppose I'll just ask your tolerance.