December 19, 2025

 

Dear Friends,


Have you ever heard Richard Burton read Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales? You can if you click the link here. You can also hear, with a little bit of searching, Dylan Thomas reading his own work. “It was always white on Christmas,” according to Thomas’s memory. It’s a beautiful nineteen minutes—a mixture of nostalgia and the document of change. Back when there were wolves in Wales, before cars…cats standing on walls…old men slapping at smoke with their slippers. You can hear the rasp of alcohol and cigarettes drying Burton’s voice like lumber, his rich rolling r in words like “crrrrrack” and “rrrrose,” all drenched in the amber sound of mid-century analog recording. 

In other words, you could do worse than listen to this for twenty minutes. Or rewatch A Charlie Brown Christmas, or reread A Christmas Carol, or rewatch A Muppet Christmas Carol, or reread or rewatch How the Grinch Stole Christmas. These are all great works of art, and ostensibly comforting. But only ostensibly. The best Christmas art works because it reminds us of risk: the risk required for reconciliation, the risk of taking another person and their problems seriously, the risk of compassion and empathy. Memory is stronger when it is tied with other people, and all these stories, whether for children or adults or both, are stories about the chasm between people, the friction and even the opposition, and of how human beings overcome their errors and failures and find forgiveness. 

In this way, these stories hearken to the real Christmas story, or perhaps I should say the most real Christmas story. It is a nighttime story, a story of the past, even a memory. And yet it is full of risk—the risk of God’s own incarnation, of the immortal choosing the path of death. It is the story of reconciliation of the divine and humankind, the possibly of peace among all people, and God’s good news for the poor. 

Here are your chances to hear this story again with us:

December 24th:
4:30 pm: Children’s service
7:30 pm: Communion and Candlelight

December 25th:
11:00 am: Contemplative Service

December 28:
11:00 am: First Sunday of Christmas


O Come Ye!

See you soon,


Pastor John

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December 12, 2025

 

Dear Friends,


It’s John the Baptist Sunday! What a character: rough clothing, vegetarian, charismatic, uncompromising. A voice crying out in the wilderness. 

This Sunday we get different picture of him. He’s in prison, soon to lose his head. He hears news of Jesus, and wonders. Is Jesus the promised one? Far away from the crowds, buried in a place his voice won’t carry, all John has are hope and intermediaries.

There’s a lot of scholarship that wonders if John and Jesus were competitors for the same audience. In a sense that must be true—both preached about the coming kingdom to the Jews longing for light and freedom. But competition, to me, seems wrong. Jesus was baptized by John—it marked the beginning of his public ministry. Some of his disciples may have first been John’s—and I’ll bet that once John was beheaded, more of his disciples followed Jesus. But Jesus did not speak ill of John and mourned him when he died. Competitors seems wrong to me. Perhaps colleagues—even cousins.

When John sent his messengers, he sent them in a desperate hope. He knew his days were over. He knew that Herod would figure out some way to kill him. But it would be worth it, wouldn’t it, if his work was real, if Jesus really was the one that God promised?

So, Jesus tells the messengers: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5 the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” That message makes up part of the Gospel song Mary, Did You Know?  which we will hear sung at our Festival of Lessons and Carols this Sunday at 7pm. By saying that, Jesus also gives us signs about what the kingdom is all about: where Jesus goes, healing follows. Where Jesus walks, death dies and life flourishes. Where Jesus goes the poor rejoice.  

I hope that we can see those signs today. Sometimes it’s hard to know where Jesus is—sometimes, like John the Baptist, we languish in the dark, sending out our furtive messengers, inquiring, is it you? Is it you? But we know we’ve found him when we find those signs, the flowers of God’s mercy in this long, dark field.


See you soon,

Pastor John

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December 5, 2025

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Hey Friends,

I just have time for a quick blurb today—I recently finished unloading all the Christmas trees for tomorrow and returning the U-Haul! That means tomorrow is the Advent Fair!

We will be here from 10 am - 2 pm. Hot drinks, craft-making and cookie-baking, alongside some advocacy letter writing. It’s always a really fun time.

We need:
-more baked goods
-clean-up help at 2pm

If you can’t do any of that, just come when you can, hang out, and buy a tree or a wreath.

Look forward to seeing you tomorrow,

Pastor John

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November 26, 2025

 

Dear Friends;


It’s Thanksgiving Eve, perhaps the best-smelling night of the year, depending on how you prep for Thanksgiving. I will spend tonight making pies and cranberry sauce and maybe roll dough, and giving that turkey in the fridge the side-eye, wondering how long it will take to cook, really, and how best to spice it.  I see you, turkey!

I love Thanksgiving because it’s so hard to commercialize—there’s no real custom of gift-giving, and the decorating requirements aren’t that much. But there is cost. The turkey, for one, and the sides, and the time it takes to make it happen. Last century’s version of Thanksgiving—Turkey, cranberry sauce or relish, stuffing, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie—costs. Not everyone can afford it. And thank God Thanksgiving is a holiday that most people are able to enjoy, because the time it takes to get all that stuff together is also significant. All you home laborers, we see you, too!

And finally, Thanksgiving has avoided the rush of commercial pressure because the whole name is hard to commercialize: gratitude is not about acquisition, but about being content with what is there. Of course, nothing truly escapes the ravening maw of capitalism, and there are plenty of home cooks that will go to bed tomorrow night wondering, “Did they really like it? Why wasn’t it good enough?” But I hope the common practice in many homes, of each person sharing something they are thankful for, will alleviate some of that. Don’t fret—enjoy what it is. Enjoy being together. Give thanks for the turkey, that gave its life, for the friends and family around the table, for the quiet moment, for noise of children—for whatever is, the long walk in the park, for the brilliant human of yesteryear that invented pie. Gifts and blessing of God, we see you!

But did you know that one of the names we have for Holy Communion also means Thanksgiving? The Eucharist means the Thanksgiving. And it resembles our national holiday in some respects—on one hand there is our sacrifice of time, bread, wine, prayer, and praise. On the other we remember the sacrifice Jesus made for us. He is the turkey, you could say. But we begin every Eucharist with a great thanksgiving prayer, recounting the deeds of God from creation and in human history, and then remember its culmination of Christ’s own self-offering, his death and resurrection. Then we ask for the Spirit, that through it we become what we receive, the body of Christ. 

This one moment on a Sunday morning is a meeting of something humans have done since there were humans—giving thanks for life, for food, for loved ones—and something God does eternally, the giving of the Spirit, blessing all of creation with the loving purpose of reconciling all things in heaven and earth to Godself.

And perhaps that’s one more way Thanksgiving resembles the Eucharist. I hope that for those that are estranged, or perhaps in difficulty, with another that you love, that reconciliation can happen. That perhaps for a day you can lay aside your history and enter into a few hours with laughter and feel the potential of history taking a turn. Anything is possible because the resurrection has opened the way of everlasting life. That way is open before us always.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Pastor John

 

 

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November 21, 2025

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Dear Friends,

In the theological field of the last century, a field inhabited by many strange and curious creatures indeed, one particularly weird creature was the theologian Joseph Sittler. Born in Sandusky, Ohio, to a pastor-theologian father, Sittler became the first theologian in the modern era to include nature and ecology in his work. And that’s what made him weird. While all the rest of the theological world was dividing itself between Barth and definitely not Barth, he kind of wandered into the meadow and touched grass. He was not a prolific writer or publisher, but rather spent most of his time speaking, teaching, and preaching, while enjoying beers and Polish sausages at Jimmy’s a bar of great renown near the University of Chicago, where he taught. He also did a lot of memorizing of Shakespeare and poetry and wrote about jazz and other things.

I’m not sure if his work is much studied any more, even though he laid a foundation for an entire branch of contemporary theology, what’s now called the eco-theology, or the theology of the environment, but there is an interesting work of his that I think is still very important, called “Called to Unity,” a lecture he delivered at the assembly of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi, India, in 1961.

Perhaps atypically for his time, he began is lecture with this week’s Epistle reading, an excerpt from the Letter to the Colossians. Part of Sittler’s life work was not to make a great name for himself in the intellectual pantheon, but to really bring the church together. He emphasized the cosmic nature of Christ in this letter: a doctrine of redemption is meaningful only when it swings within the larger orbit of a doctrine of creation. For God’s creation of earth cannot be redeemed in any intelligible sense of the word apart from a doctrine of the cosmos, which is his home, his definite place, the theatre of his selfhood under God, in corporation with his neighbour, and in caring-relationship with nature, his sister.” In other words, as creatures, we humans share unity with the rest of creation. As Paul writes, "For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” All things—all creation. All things. All that time wandering around in the meadows and the mountains, all that time touching grass, was good for Joseph Sittler. It broadened his understanding of God’s loving purpose for all of creation. And thanks to him, some of us Western people also had our consciousness expanded, too.

The news about the environment has fallen off the radars of our news organizations lately. Organizations being a bit of a strong word for the information maelstrom we live in today. But it appears that the goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celcius, is all but dead. It means that we will have to try now to limit greenhouse gas emission to below two degrees Celcius. That’s the difference between having some coral reefs left or none at all, the difference between ice-free Arctic once a century or once a decade, the difference between 14% of people experiencing extreme heat every one in five years to 37% of people experiencing extreme heat once every five years. It’s a huge difference.

Sittler went out and did his own thing. He focused on Scripture, human community, and the great theater of God’s glory, this creation. His name may very well likely fade into the dark sleep of time, but what he did, and what this Sunday’s text also does, we can do: we can turn our attention to our unity, as a human family, as creatures, as God’s beloved.


See you soon (hopefully tonight to make chrismons!),

Pastor John

 

 

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November 14, 2025

 

Dear Friends,


It’s hard to believe but Thanksgiving is just two weeks away, and Advent starts immediately following it. My daughters have already spotted Christmas trees in windows, and Cornell Weill has one of them in its lobbies. And the texts have taken that Advent turn, that sudden zig from parables and stories to the prophecies of doom. The Gospel text this week has Jesus telling his followers that the big, beautiful temple they see will be thrown down, and not one stone will be left on another. 

It can be hard to imagine these things. Today I had to drive my daughter to school and was listening to the radio. Sometimes a new song would come on, sometimes and old one. I began driving by the new building on Sherman Avenue, where the Packard plant used to be.  I was thinking about how I knew the neighborhood before the building went up, but many children won’t remember it at all, or will grow up in its shadow, or even inside of it, and that people who lived here for decades didn’t know it used to be a Packard showroom and service station, or what a Packard is. When the building rose, you’d be hard-pressed to believe it would become derelict and destroyed in less than a hundred years. Willie Mays used to live in the Heights and play ball at 155th Street. I suppose that in the middle of it, you’d have a hard time thinking the Giants would move to San Francisco, and the Say Hey Kid would be saying goodbye. And for some reason I started thinking about Sade, the great (and unfairly maligned—justice for Sade!) singer. I grew up listening to her songs, but there will come a day when she is gone, and I will be gone, and the things that I imagine will never be, and the things I couldn’t imagine stand in their place.

Jesus’ words to the disciples were meant to help them see through things. The disciples never knew life without the presence of the temple—forty years later it would be destroyed. The temple was a symbol of God’s permanence for them, but Jesus now promised them the permanence of it would disappear. And it is so with everything on earth, where it’s the United States of America or Sade, whether it’s my life or yours. 

I picked a hymn for this Sunday called the Canticle of the Turning, which is a version of Mary’s song, commonly known as the Magnificat. But the composer chose to highlight the social aspect of Mary’s song, and it tastefully weaves in this Sunday’s text with the Magnificat, in which Mary sings that the mighty will fall. Here’s one section of the hymn: “From the halls of power to the fortress tower, not a stone will be left on stone. Let the king beware for your justice tears every tyrant from his throne.” This hymn has the texts talking to each other, and shows us the common thread: like all human works, injustice is doomed. God has willed it so. 

Thus, the texts propel us to faith this Sunday—this powerful hymn, set to a folk tune, pounds the truth straight into our souls. God is permanent, and God’s goodness is permanent, and all the powers dashing themselves against God’s goodness and love will break. It might be hard to imagine, but it’s true. Mary sang it, the prophets testified to it, and Jesus lives according to it. 

See you soon,

Pastor John

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