Faith in Progress

It may sound strange, but for me, the most meaningful Lenten services have become the kids' services at St. Aidan's.  We had a wonderful interactive pre-Holy Week service last night. Our children's Holy Week service walks through the main events of Jesus' last days from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. Older kids take roles that help us place ourselves in the scene.  We begin outside and hear a story about Jesus coming into Jerusalem in triumph and one kid finds a "donkey colt" that we follow into the Church while waving palms.  Then we hear about how Jesus and his friends were coming to celebrate Passover and remind them of the story of Moses leading the people of Egypt out of slavery.  When we look for someone carrying a water jug who will lead us to the room where we'll have our Last Supper, a kid dressed the part comes to lead the way.  We sit at beautiful tables to have a kid-friendly meal together (usually mac and cheese, carrots and grapes). Duri...

March 15, 2015 4 Lent (Year B) Numbers 21:4-9 “But the people became impatient on the way.” I love that line from our Old Testament story this morning because it helped me to get past the weirdness of this snake on a stick to see that this story is my story, our story together here at St. Aidan’s, and the Church’s (with a capital C) story. When we meet the grumbling people in the desert this morning, they have had an incredible history with God.  Their stories are so rich that we have been continuing to tell them ever after.  They have forebears that received incredible promises of God.  They would be God’s people, and God would be their God.  When God heard their voices crying out in slavery, God saved them through miraculous plagues, which passed over them and washed over their captors.  God helped them to escape from Pharaoh’s army by parting the sea.  God made food to fall from the sky for them to eat, and water to gush from rocks for th...

February 8, 2015 5 Epiphany Mark 1:29-39 So it turns out that Jesus and I have the same problem with prayer. I’ve been working on creating a more consistent morning practice of spending time with God.  Like many of you, I’m guessing, sometimes I feel stuck in the rut of my daily routine.  Every day making breakfast, overseeing lunch creation and outfit choices, reminding kids to brush teeth and turn in homework, schlepping everyone to school, buckling down to work and in what feels like the blink of an eye leaving work to begin the afternoon routine of picking kids up from school, trying to fit in some fun time with them while doing house chores, overseeing playdates and piano practicing and homework, schlepping to practices and Boy Scouts, cooking dinner, reading nighttime books, getting kids to bed, attending whatever meeting I have that night.  It’s all good and it’s all important, but it just doesn’t leave a lot of space.  So I’ve been hoping that s...

January 18, 2015 (1 Samuel 3:1-10, John 1:43-51) Epiphany 2, Year B Some people might get burning bushes and parting seas and dreams of angel-laden ladders reaching to the sky.  Some people might be hit as if by lightening with remarkable and astounding happenings that are clear signs from God.  Epiphanies that are obvious and indisputable. But I think most of us probably have fig trees.  Or voices that sound a whole lot like those of our friends and mentors.  Most of us are more likely to experience subtle epiphanies that might only make sense to us.  Even those are enough, but they are awfully easy to miss.  For most of us, it’s hard to catch our attention. Like Samuel.   Samuel was in a pre-sleep haze when a voice called his name.   Three times, Samuel assumed the voice was that of the only person he knew to be nearby, his mentor Eli.   He didn’t yet know the Lord, we are told, and it didn’t occur to him that God might be...

January 4, 2015 Epiphany Matthew 2:1-12 While the Feast of Epiphany doesn’t officially fall until Tuesday, we get a taste of it in our Gospel today, the last Sunday of Christmas.  Dante referred to God as “the love that moves … the stars” and that’s where we begin in our story this morning of the wise magi who followed a star from a far-away country all the way to Bethlehem. The light in the sky was for the magi an epiphany - a manifestation of God.   The inclusion of the magi in the story magnifies what was already a shocking story of God’s incarnation.  Early on, we watched as Mary, a humble, young, unmarried woman said yes to the invitation to be the mother of God.  Next we breathed a sigh of relief as her betrothed, Joseph the carpenter, agreed to stick with her and save her from social exile.  And then we held our noses as the lowbrow, dirty shepherds were picked to hear the tidings of good news and become Jesus’ first visitors.  But these...

December 21, 2014 Advent 4, Year B Luke 1:26-38 In the Godly Play Sunday School room we have an impressive collection of donated Legos that the kids use to work with the stories that we hear in there.   At first I worried the Legos might not belong in the room.   I think in the back of my mind I was worried that they were too human and not properly holy.   And sometimes they do become spaceships for aliens or Jedi Starfighters.   But they also have also become the Temple in Jerusalem and the tomb where Jesus was laid.   I recently found a Lego-compatible Nativity set online, so bought it hoping it could be on the scene for the Advent stories.   Unfortunately, it just arrived, and since the kids have pageant practice today during Sunday school time, they won’t get to create the scene from this morning’s Gospel story where Mary is visited by the angel and is invited to become part of God’s wildest plan yet.       ...

December 7, 2014 Advent 2, Year B Isaiah 40:1-11 The world has felt extraordinarily heavy to me lately. Unarmed African American men being killed by police officers and grand jury decisions tearing communities apart.   Hannah Graham’s disappearance and death.   A deepening realization of the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses.   Mass shootings, suicide bombings, polar ice caps melting faster than we’d feared, draught, famine, and wars raging in more countries than I can name. Probably the news isn’t actually any heavier now than at any other time.   I’ve probably just been paying more attention.   Or maybe having kids makes me worry more about the future.    Or maybe I’m just starting to feel so powerless to affect the pain I read about.    I’m betting that from a God’s-eye view the pain of the world has always been heavy.   Our Old Testament reading today from Isaiah is a perfect example.   It’s set in the ...