Faith in Progress

Christmas Eve December 24, 2015 All month in Sunday School the Godly Play kids have been talking about how Advent is the time to get ready to enter the mystery of Christmas.  During this season people can be so incredibly busy.  Shopping  and wrapping and cooking and going to parties.  We get so busy that sometimes we miss the mystery of Christmas that is all around us, everywhere we go.  For most of us, kids and adults alike, the last month of December is less an Advent preparation to enter the mystery and more a Countdown to Christmas.  For me it went something like this: * Advent Week 1, or 24 Days Until Christmas.   It was the first Day School Chapel after Thanksgiving break.  I was out in the entryway greeting the kids as they came in like I always do.  That particular morning, the kids were a little more rambunctious than usual.  Maybe they’d eaten too much pumpkin pie, maybe it was the weather, maybe they were just happ...

December 20, 2015 Luke 1:39-55 Over the years stopping by the magnificently lit house on Collingwood Road has become a staple of the season for my family.  We join the line of cars in front of Manor Care and turn our radio to 88.1 as we edge slowly forward to watch the colored lights burst and grow to the beat of the music.  We, and all the others sitting in their cars, are just casual surveyors, not particularly invested.  And then a few minutes later we each drive away and don’t think much more about it.   We don’t consider what goes into the creation of the majestic show - the cost, the effort, the intentions of the owner.  And it doesn’t affect us much once the lights are gone from our rearview mirrors.   Until this week, that is, when I saw on my Facebook feed that something had gone wrong with the owner’s electrical system requiring some expensive part.  The local community was encouraged to step in, to help with small donations that mig...

It is easy to get overwhelmed by the busy-ness of the world during the Advent season.  All around us the world is pushing materialism and the idea that we need more stuff.  But what we really need is so much deeper than that.  Delving deep into Advent will help us to more fully enter into the true mystery of Christmas.  Here are some ideas that might help to make your Advent more meaningful. Create your own Advent chain calendar Instead of toys or chocolate, mark each day of Advent by adding a new link to an Advent chain of your own creation.  Cut 25 strips of purple and pink construction paper.  On each strip, write a prayer, short Advent scripture passage, or an idea for your family to do that day to prepare to enter the mystery of  Christmas .  Ideas might include writing a letter to a friend or family member, bring cookies to a neighbor, or telling everyone in your family why you love them.  Advent Wreath Create or buy an Adv...

Yesterday instead of a sermon I created a series of prayer stations.  We are on the cusp of Advent, the start of the Church year, so it seemed like a great time to take a walk through the seasons of the Church calendar. Advent Advent is a season of waiting and hoping.  At this prayer station, people could create a different kind of Advent calendar.  We each chose 25 strips of purple and pink paper and write a prayer, scripture passage, or idea of something to do on a day of Advent on each strip.  Each day, a link is added to the chain until it is complete for Christmas. Christmas During Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus.  At this prayer station were gathered multiple nativity creches.  People were invited to read the Christmas story from Luke and Matthew and walk through the story, imagining what it might have been like for its participants.  We had on hand the People of God figures from Godly Play so we could even place ourselves into ...

November 15, 2015 Hebrews 10:11-25 I’ve always had a problem using nice things.  When I was in college my sister sent me a set of paints from Russia, where she was studying.    Having never used tubed paint before, and certainly never with cyrillic lettering on it, the paint seemed too special to use for just my ordinary artistic dabbling.  I wanted to take painting classes to learn how to use them.  25 years later, I finally broke out the paints to use with my daughters.  We had the best afternoon, squeezing the tiny tubes and mixing our own colors and experimenting with different techniques.  It didn’t matter at all that our art wasn’t perfect or technically correct because our experience was full of beauty and joy. I think we often do that same thing with God.  We think we have to be perfectly clean or put together or sin-free before we go to God.  We think the circumstances have to be perfect - our minds calm and our hear...

October 18  Mark 10:35-45 Every so often, I can tell my kids are plotting something.  They disappear for a while, and then they come back with big grins on their faces.  “You ask her.”  “No, you ask her!”  They hem and haw for a while.  Maybe harken my memory back to some exemplary behavior or action from the past that makes them worthy of merit.  Then they speed into their proposal, rushing headlong into the arguments against whatever they suspect my objections might be. Today the plotting children are James and John.  They’ve been huddled together off to the side of the group of disciples just out of hearing distance.  Their voices hushed, eyes furtively glancing periodically at Jesus.  This has been going on for some time.  Too long.  Then they finally come out, shoulders thrown back with resolve, each nudging the other to be in front, poking the other to speak first.  Finally they pull out the familiar chil...

September 27, 2009 Esther At Shrine Mont (which is not only where we go for our parish retreats, but where youth in the Diocese can go for summer camp), every night the campers in each cabin gather in a circle to share their day’s highs, lows and God-moments.  Several of our teenagers at St. Aidan’s have been formed by Shrine Mont, and so when we started our youth group back up for the year last week, they wanted to include that tradition in our weekly meeting.   We’d barely begun to go around the circle when it became clear that the non-Shrine Mont campers weren’t sure what a God moment was and didn’t feel like they could pinpoint any such moments in their lives.  I was about to jump in and offer a religious definition — God moments as times when you felt sure God was with you, or saw God at work in the world.  But, in what was actually something of a God moment for me , the camper youths began defining it first.  Their way of talking about God momen...

September 13, 2015 Mark 8:27-38 My mind has been on  Godly Play a lot this week.  That is St. Aidan's Sunday School program for the pre-k through 3rd graders.  W e hosted an all day teacher training yesterday and I’ve been organizing the schedule and preparing my story for our first gathering this morning. If you’ve been here long, you know that I love Godly Play - the generous and open theology, the beauty and simplicity of the materials, the structure of the sessions that follows what we do in here in such a comfortable and welcoming way.  But I think what I love most about Godly Play is its invitation to children to claim the stories and faith for themselves. After we gather and get ourselves ready to listen, the storyteller tells the story for the day and then the circle of children wonders about the story.  For most stories, there are four questions at the end: I wonder what is your favorite part of this story? I wonder what is the most import...