More Thoughts on Housing

ELCA pastor Clint Schnekloth has been doing some interesting thinking and writing about housing and the Church's responsibility in this time of housing lack; this piece about the vacant (not abandoned so much as underused and underutilized) church space is his latest, and this piece has some specific examples of responses by individual churches.

My church is much smaller, both in terms of space and members, than Schnekloth's church in Arkansas.  We have had members who needed temporary housing, which has led me to ponder our own use of space.  We don't have an educational wing/building with unused space.  It would take some radical rethinking to transform any of the rooms below the sanctuary.  It's a country church, with the sanctuary and restrooms on the first floor, and in the basement, a kitchen, a small fellowship hall, two bathrooms (one with a walk-in shower), three classrooms, one storage area, and a pastor's office.

As a very part-time minister who is only at the church on Sunday, I would be happy to give up my office to be a one room sleeping area for someone in crisis, even if the crisis lasts weeks.  But would the person who comes after me be happy with that decision?

And let me also remember that the Church Council has more say in this than I do.  My church in Bristol is amazing in terms of the members being responsible for the vision and the mission.  They've had very temporary pastors for over a decade now.  I don't want to undercut them.

Satisfying Sunday

Yesterday was a fairly good day.  At church, as I was moving through the communion liturgy, I could feel my throat about to crack, and sure enough, I went into a coughing fit.  Because I was at the words of institution, I felt weird about having someone else speak the words--Lutherans believe that only ordained or specially appointed ministers can consecrate the bread and wine.  I think it would have been fine, as long as I was there, but I don't really know how members feel.  So I drank some water, coughed a bit, and powered through.  People were kind.

I have spent most of the week wondering if I'm fighting off a cold:  I'm more tired and less hungry, and my throat has felt a bit scratchy off and on.  And I'm still not here.

I felt good about my sermon, although I'm aware of all the ways it could be improved; you can view it here on my YouTube channel and read it in this blog post).  We spent Sunday afternoon as we usually do, watching other people's sermons from churches where we feel a connection.  No one else preached on the Gospel.

I wanted something else of depth before we reverted to our usual viewing of old TV shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway?  We watched this podcast of David Brooks interviewing philosopher Meghan Sullivan. My spouse and I both have solid liberal arts educations along with graduate degrees, so it wasn't groundbreaking for us, but it felt nourishing.

I did some stitching in the evening so that I stayed awake past 7:15--success!  I'm making smaller squares, the first level of a log cabin square--but they're not all the same size.  I may put them aside and go back to the quilt I'm making for my cousin's first child who graduates from high school this year.

And now, another week:  week 6 at one school, week 3 at another.  We've got sanding to finish at the fixer-upper house.  The work at Faith Lutheran continues.  Onward!

Satisfying Sunday: Worship/Cookout in the Pavilion and Reading in the Evening

Yesterday, I made this Facebook post which sums up my Sunday morning:

"We had a great morning at Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church, where I preached on Matthew 16 and ended my sermon by asking us to think about how our lives themselves are gospels that testify to the identity of Jesus and his role in our lives. We had a hamburger/hotdog lunch in the pavilion, with delicious food and nourishing fellowship. I'm not sure how the morning could have been much better, short of winning a lottery amount that would let us solve the shortage of affordable housing in the area and provide quality health care for all."

To see a recording of my sermon, go here to my YouTube channel.  To read the manuscript, go to this blog post.

The afternoon was also good.  I did a bit of sewing, caught up on chores, and got ready for the week.  In the evening, my spouse was listening to old Hank Williams songs, and I read--a delight!

I read most of Tara Menon's Under Water last night.  I read a bit of it earlier in the day, in the just after midnight moments of Sunday, where it confused me at first.  It took me a bit of time to realize the narrative is shifting back and forth in time, mainly from 2004 to 2012, but also back to earlier childhood years of the narrator.  I read the Acknowledgements and figured out the tsunami angle. When I picked up the book, I thought it was more of a future apocalypse kind of novel, but it’s a different kind of climate catastrophe novel.

At first it seems like a slight book. But it packs a powerful punch—about a woman who undergoes two catastrophes, the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

And now, a new week--a week that ends in Quilt Camp.  Let me get ready.

Endorsed!

I thought about making a Facebook post that said "Endorsed!"  But most people wouldn't know what I meant--they'd rightly ask, "Endorsed by whom?"

On Wednesday, I met for an Endorsement panel for Candidacy in the Southeastern Synod for the ELCA, the more inclusive expression of the Lutheran church in the U.S.  I had already written a 39 page Endorsement essay, which was really 7 writing prompts, which had me do a mix of new writing and including papers written for classes.  So I had already answered a lot of questions that the Candidacy Committee might have had:  why do you want to be Lutheran or why do you want to be ordained or how do you understand Luther's theology for our time?

We talked about some of those answers, of course.  But we spent more time talking about my experiences as a creative/artistic person and as a minister at a small, country church in Bristol, TN.  It was a wonderful experience:  I felt affirmed and supported the whole way through.

I know that I am lucky.  I've heard the Candidacy horror stories, stories across denominations.  My experience was much more like a really deep, really nourishing conversation during a retreat where the real world won't intrude.

I'll probably write more about this experience in weeks to come.  I didn't want to write about the Wed. conversation before I got word about the decision of the larger Candidacy Committee that met yesterday.

By late afternoon, I got the word by way of e-mail:  "Congratulations! The candidacy committee overwhelmingly approved you for endorsement!"

What does this mean? It's the last phase before Ordination. I have an internship to do, which will be at Faith Lutheran, where I am their Synod Appointed Minister. It will be from Advent to Easter. I will meet with the Committee in April, with ordination expected shortly after.

The synod is very supportive of my need to be bi-vocational, as I am now on the tenure track at Spartanburg Methodist College.

Speaking of teaching, let me shift my attention--one last day of teaching to do this week, and if I go now, I can get a quick walk in before the commuting and the teaching.

Sermon on Acceptance Finds Acceptance

Yesterday was a good Sunday.  As I was driving and driving and driving on Saturday followed by a night when I was up and down, I wondered if I would be just exhausted on Sunday.  Happily, I felt fine.  I got up and reworked my sermon, taking out the bit I had written about grad school experiences as a Community Outreach Worker for a Methodist church, leaving in the later experiences about a church welcoming a transgender visitor who became a member.

I did wonder if I should feel worried about children in church hearing about a transgender human and asking their parents questions, but I decided that it was likely to be fine.  Most children aren't paying much attention during the non-youth sermon.  If the teenagers paid attention, I reasoned that they're likely to know what a transgender person is.

I had an encounter after church that reassured me.  One of the younger members, a father of two of those teens, thanked me for my sermon, thanked me for including modern issues.  I said that I had worried a bit about the children hearing about transgender issues for the first time, and he said, "They already know.  It's all over the place."  He thanked me again, and I thanked him for reassuring me.

As we drove home, I reflected on the sermon, which isn't nearly as radical as I might have made it sound with my worries about it.  The Gospel, Matthew 10:  40-42, is a standard hospitality text, and I used the example of my South Florida church welcoming a transgender visitor to show that radical acceptance and radical hospitality blesses everyone in all sorts of directions, like how remodeling a bathroom with cramped stalls into a single use bathroom benefitted people in wheelchairs or with mobility issues, who now had more room, and parents with babies who needed a diaper change, who now had a bathroom with a changing table.

But of course, the more important change is hearts and minds.  Once we know a transgender person (or any one member of a minority group), it's much less easy to accept the demonization of a whole group of people.  And it's so vital for members of minority groups to find support from majority groups so that the forces of empire and forces of evil have less traction.

You can find the manuscript of the sermon here, and you can watch/hear the sermon here.

A Short TEEM Report

This morning has less blogging time, but I have finished my movie review, the first assignment for my TEEM class on Pauline letters.  I have done the practice quizzes one more time--I've been doing them over and over in the hopes that I'll do well on the quiz that will begin today's class.  

We have another quiz tomorrow, and I haven't done any practice for that one.  So tomorrow may be a light blogging day too, as I practice and practice.  I have not taken a quiz for course credit since undergraduate school.  Of course, I've taken quiz after quiz as part of HR training--those quizzes that you can take over and over again so that you can continue to be employed.

Each quiz counts for 10% of the course grade.  My inner good girl wants to make an A.  My pragmatic older self knows that whatever grade I make will be fine.  I'm not even sure if TEEM classes show up on a transcript.

And then, part of me wonders why I care about my official record.  Am I going to do more graduate work?  Maybe--and that's why I care.

Yesterday's TEEM training was a workshop on stewardship.  When I first heard about the workshop, I felt a bit of despair.  I've already had so much stewardship training.  But it was a great workshop.  We talked about a much broader vision of stewardship:  what do we value?  How do we protect what we value?  It's far more than money, budgets, and a finance team. 

I've been part of small churches, with attendance below 50 members, so these are not concepts that are new to me.  In a very small church, one can't assume that others will pick up the slack, unlike in a church that has over 100 members in the pews on Sunday.

Our workshop leader, Tim Brown, was both compelling and entertaining.  We had worship in the middle of the day, followed by Indian food.  It was good to have that long break.

Let me bring this writing to a close so that I can get some breakfast before the day begins.  Onward!

The Lectionary Cycle Begins Again

We are now at the 3 year anniversary of my being the Synod Authorized Minister at Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bristol, Tennessee.  I still find it very fulfilling.  I've enjoyed the weekly worship, along with the high water moments, like baptisms and Confirmation.  I've learned so much.  I've wished that I could go back to apologize to some pastors when I was too tough in my judgments.  I'm amazed at how being the minister in charge has enriched my Sunday worship and sustained me through the week in ways that I both anticipated and did not.

But that's not what's on my mind this morning.

Three years means that we're back at the beginning of the lectionary reading cycle.

There's been repetition before, of course.  Christmas Eve is Christmas Eve--how to make it new every year?  But now we're back at the beginning.

I will continue to write something new every week.  I'm paid a specific amount, $100, to do that; the preaching and presiding is at a different rate.  I don't feel a temptation to use the sermon from three years ago.

I did pull it up to look at it.  It's a good sermon; I understand the temptation to use old material without revising it.

I am a bit relieved that while I'll be using some of the same ideas, it will be a different sermon.  I am also sad that some of the ideas about the ways that empires function by making outsiders and pitting us against each other sadly are even more relevant.  

It will be an interesting new phase of weekly ministry, finding ways to make the lectionary readings new in a place where I have preached them before.

Our Next Fixer-Upper

If such a thing exists as a regular reader of this blog, that reader would notice that my regular schedule of posting has been disrupted.  On Monday, we left town until Wednesday for a wedding.  Yesterday we headed down to Spartanburg because I scheduled a turn-on date for water and electric utilities at our new-to-us fixer upper-house in Spartanburg.

Yes, we bought another fixer-upper when we're not done fixing up the house we have at Lutheridge.  Let me be clear--we're not selling that house.  We are fortunate enough to be able to afford 2 small houses.  And one reason why we can is that each house needed work, and very few homebuyers these days want to put in that sweat equity.

In the spirit of full disclosure and complete honesty, I, too, would like a house where I didn't need to think about upgrades, where someone else had already made the decisions and installations.  But as we looked at houses, we kept saying, "Why would someone make the kitchen this way?  Why didn't they do the bathroom that way?"

I almost didn't look at the house we bought.  The pictures were just too scary, like this one of the kitchen:

Did they have a fire?  Some catastrophic plumbing issue?  But it was around the corner from a very cute house, so I swung by.  As I peered in the window, I thought, well this isn't as scary as it looks.

When we had our realtor show it to us, we all said, "This house is much better than it looks.  And more solid than it looks."  So we made an offer which was accepted.  We closed on the house May 8 and because of travel plans made a year ago, we are only now having time to make upgrades.

You might say, "Yes, but why 2 houses?"  In March, I accepted an offer of a tenure track Associate Professor position from Spartanburg Methodist College, which means more job stability--income to count on and a schedule to count on, a schedule which means I need to be on campus every weekday, during the 8 months of the year that school is in session.  I have done that kind of commuting for the past 2 years, and it's getting tiring.

I'm still a Synod Appointed Minister at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, so our thinking is that we'll be at the Lutheridge house on the week-end, in the Spartanburg house during the weekdays.  And I will want to spend the summer months in the Lutheridge house.

Of course, much could change, as much has changed.  It hasn't been that long since we bought our current fixer-upper, the Lutheridge house.  It was just 4 years ago, when I had only done a year of seminary, when I didn't even know that SMC existed.

Parish Church as Community _____(Builder, Resource, Space to Breathe)

Later today, we head to Bristol, TN for the last fish fry for the community.  It's an outreach activity of a sort, but we're not really reaching unchurched people.  In the far-eastern mountain part of the state, most people who want a church home have found one, and almost everyone already knows we're there.

So why do it?  In part, my very tiny congregation raises an impressive amount of money for the local charities that feed the hungry.  But in part, we do it to feed the souls who come for dinner.  It's a great space for people to sit and eat and to linger with others that they don't see as often.

This morning, I read a blog post by Pastor Clint Schnekloth, and I want to capture part of that blog post here, so that I have it in the future, in case the post goes away.  It captures what I've been thinking about ways that the physical church community, including the building, can be important in new ways that are old ways, particularly in the space to breathe/refuge way:

"But over time I have also come to think that many of us internalized a false opposition between the local and the public. We sometimes imagined that meaningful ministry always happened elsewhere, beyond the congregation itself, when in reality local congregations can become some of the most important sites of public trust remaining in contemporary life. The parish was treated as a launching pad for the “real” work of the gospel, rather than itself being a primary site of public life.

Theologically, however, Christianity has always resisted that abstraction. The incarnation is not an argument for generalized spirituality but an affirmation of locality. God does not merely send ideas into history but inhabits a place, a body, a neighborhood, a people. Jesus comes from Nazareth. He lives among actual communities, eats in homes, and becomes recognizable through repeated relationships. Even the resurrected Christ remains marked by wounds. Christian faith is therefore never purely conceptual or placeless. It is embodied, located, and relational.

I no longer think about congregational life primarily in terms of maintaining institutional machinery. Increasingly, I think in terms of cultivating conditions under which grace can circulate through a community. What we are tending in parish ministry is not only institutional continuity but a social and spiritual ecology shaped by trust, accompaniment, hospitality, beauty, mutual responsibility, and shared life. People arrive for worship, for healing from religious trauma, for acceptance of LGBTQIA+ children, for relief from loneliness, for grounding amid exhaustion and outrage, or for practical support in grief, family breakdown, or economic strain.

What has struck me more and more is that people often experience churches like ours less as providers of religious goods and more as places where they can breathe.

That may sound simple, but culturally it is becoming rarer and more important. In an anxious, fragmented, performative society, spaces where people can exist without fear, humiliation, ideological sorting, or relentless productivity become deeply public realities.

None of these dimensions exist independently."

Week-end Recap and a Look ahead at the Coming Week

It has been a good week-end; I haven't meant not to blog this week-end.  My basal cell skin cancer removal on late Friday afternoon went well.  In fact, it was the easiest skin cancer removal yet.  Is it because it was on my back, so I couldn't see what was happening?

Whatever the reason, I'm always grateful for easy medical operations.  

We had a week-end similar to so many, filled with cooking, baking, running errands, looking at mindless TV and mindful internet wandering, both together and apart.

In some ways, my Sunday was easier than most Sundays.  We had a group of seminarians and college students staying at the church.   They were in town for the race, and they slept and had meals at the church, which they've done every time they're in town. The seminarian preached 2 great sermons, both the youth sermon and the other one, and he and 2 friends assisted with communion. Their enthusiasm for life in all its facets made me feel like maybe civilization has a chance after all.

I didn't have to craft a sermon for yesterday, but I still spent time writing a sermon--I won't be with my congregation this coming Sunday, so I'll need to have a sermon to them.  I had hoped to have it ready to leave at the church yesterday, but it was not to be.  I got a draft done, but it was still in rough shape yesterday.

This morning, I've done some revising, and I'm happy that it's stronger now.  I'll put it aside, do one or two more revisions and call it done.

This week will be one of schedule disruptions.  Tomorrow, all classes are cancelled so that we can all participate in Pioneer Scholars day, where we'll have presentations of all sorts.  Faculty are required to be on hand for a variety of support.  I am judging a fine arts competition.

At the end of the week, I will be up the hill at Lutheridge, for my beloved Create in Me retreat.  I haven't really thought about the retreat too much at this point--I'm not that kind of member of the planning team.  I am somewhat surprised to find myself here, speeding to the end of the semester. 

Last Thoughts (and Recording of Sermon) on Maundy Thursday

Last night was a good worship service.  I felt a bit frazzled at first.  We left a bit early, but afternoon traffic around Asheville still left us almost late.  

That's not true.  We got to the church with 10 minutes to spare, and most people came after us.  Still, I was feeling a bit frazzled.  It's one of the disadvantages of the geography that is part of this SAM experience.

Worship went well, and I was pleased with my sermon, which you can view here on my YouTube channel.  I put the sermon manuscript in this blog post.  If you follow along, you'll see that there are places that I expand on thoughts in the manuscript.  I wasn't thrilled with the ending when I wrote it, but I like the impromptu ending better.  I felt something moving through me, as if the Holy Spirit knew what someone listening needed to hear.  I am always happy to be that vessel.

As my spouse and I reflected on the sermon on the drive across the mountains to get back home, I did wonder if the sermon needed firmer boundaries between the Holy Week holidays.  I still worry/wonder if the sermon has too much of a Good Friday vibe.  But since Faith Lutheran doesn't have a Good Friday worship with a sermon, I am O.K. with that. 

The First Fish Fry of the Season

Yesterday afternoon, I finished teaching, drove from Spartanburg to Arden, where I live, and then, after changing clothes, drove from Arden to Bristol, Tennessee, where I am a part-time minister at Faith Lutheran.  Last night was the first of four spring fish fry events.

People pay $10 for a wonderful plate of food:  fish (fried or baked), mac-and-cheese, pierogies and caramelized onions, cole slaw, green beans, rolls, and an amazing assortment of desserts and drinks.  I use the word amazing because I know how many members we have and how many desserts we offer, and that means people are making a lot of dessert.

All of the money goes to local charities, primarily the local ones that deal with hunger.  But people come for the food.  That's what I thought until last night.

We arrived at 4:45, and the event was supposed to start at 5.  When we got there, people were already there, waiting for food.  Many of the people who came were so excited to be there.  They love the food, but more than that, they love the chance to sit and reconnect with neighbors from across the community (and a few of them are reconnecting with literal neighbors).

We had a steady stream of people coming and going, with almost every place in the smallish fellowship hall occupied for the first 80 minutes of the event.  We ran out of cole slaw, but we didn't run out of desserts.  

I thought about how past Kristin would have viewed this event.  She would have wondered why we were having this event, when so many people who come already have a church home.  She would have looked at the amazing amount of work that it takes to put on this event, and she would have suggested that we donate a chunk of money instead of buying the food and cooking it and selling plates.

But current Kristin has a glimmer of a different way of thinking about this.  People are hungry for community.  They want to have a chance to reconnect with people who live in the same geographical area.  They care less about people's religious or political beliefs.

I realize that what I observed last night may be more true in small towns than in big urban centers.  But I suspect that even in the big cities, people are longing for the kind of connection that a fish fry event can give them.

Sunday and Salt

I was pleased with my sermon yesterday--it was a tighter composition than I'm always able to pull together.  And I feel like both sermons went well.  I preached on Matthew 5:  12-20, and I decided to focus on salt alone.  The believer as light metaphor is fairly easy to understand, and I feel like I've done that several times before.  But I didn't see any references to salt in my past sermons.

Yesterday morning, for the youth sermon, I made a big bowl of popcorn.  I left some of it unsalted and put it in sandwich bags.  I salted the rest and made more bags of popcorn.  

I'm not crazy about all the sandwich bags, but it's the easiest way for me to do my youth sermon on salt without getting popcorn all over the place, the way we would if I just passed around two big bowls.  Plus it minimizes germ spreading--no hands in the same bowl of popcorn.

As I divided the popcorn, I thought about seminary, about my Foundations of Preaching class.  In that class, we had a lot to do in a very short time, so I don't fault the professor for not talking about children's sermons much.  I'm glad that I'm old enough to have seen plenty of examples of both good and bad children's sermons through the years.

I did check with the parents before giving out popcorn--no allergies to popcorn or salt.  If I preach on this passage in the future, I might do the same for the adults.

To read a manuscript of my adult sermon, see this blog post.  To see the recording, I uploaded it here on my YouTube channel.

A Look Back: 2025

I've been thinking about my approach to the new year; I have been keeping a blog since 2008, so I also have a fairly easy way to see what I do each year.  Some years, I set intentions or adopt resolutions.  Some years I have a word/phrase.  Most years in the waning days of December, I look back.  So, for today's blog post, let's look back.

My Intentions for 2025

On January 1, 2025, I wrote a blog post where I had three specific intentions for 2025.  Up until the moment that I wrote that post, I had no plans to adopt these intentions.  Let's start with these intentions, as I look back on 2025:

--"I want to do strength training 20 days out of every month, 10 minutes over an exercise session."  Most weeks, I did a day or two of strength training, either with weights, or with the weigh of my body.  That means that most months, I did 6 days of strength training, not 20.  

--"I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished."  I did much better with this goal during the first three months of 2025.  I did end up with somewhere between 15 and 25 finished poems, which is more than I would have had without that intention.

For both of the above intentions, the good thing about those intentions is that I remembered that I had the intention, and throughout the year, the intention called me back, tugged me back to the behavior I wanted to cultivate.

--"I want to concentrate on faces (both from the front and profile) and hands, and not in isolation, but as part of the figures that I draw."  Here, too, I did much better with this intention in the first months of the year than in the last 9 months of the year.  I drew much better faces, when I was concentrating.  I still have trouble drawing hands if they're connected to the rest of the body.

Other Aspects of 2025

--I continue to enjoy teaching.  It was great to teach literature survey classes again.  I revisited some classic texts, which is always interesting, especially as I revisit them at very different times of my life.

--I finished my MDiv degree at Wesley Theological Seminary.  I find it interesting that when I thought about the high points of 2025, the teaching was what came to mind before finishing the MDiv degree.  I'm not reading too much into that.  I finished the MDiv in May and my brain tends to work back in chronology--so since I've been teaching more recently than finishing the MDiv, that's what came to mind first.  It's also because I had such a good fall semester teaching such great students and classes.

--When I went back and counted my non-drinking days, I've been very successful.  I still drink, but I did have a long stretch in the summer where I drank no alcohol.  Stay tuned for my 2026 intention in terms of health.

--I haven't read as many books this year (only 50, if my list can be believed), but at the end of the year, I've been on a reading binge, and I'm always happy to find my powers of concentration still allow me to read a book from beginning to end.

--I finished a quilt top, which I used with an old quilt that I created twenty years ago to create something new.  The old quilt had a back that was in good shape, so I quilted the new top to the old quilt and created a binding/border.  I've continued to put fabric together in ways that delight me.

--My job as a Synod Appointed Minister continues at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  They like me, and I like them, and although they've tried to find a full-time pastor, those attempts haven't led them to a viable candidate.  Periodically, I remind us all that if the congregation finds a great candidate and decides to offer them a job, I'll understand.  Similarly, we don't know what my Candidacy Committee will decide at various stages.

--In terms of candidacy, I have made some progress on the road to ordination.  I finished my MDiv which some people might think would mean I should be ordained by now.  But I went to a Methodist seminary, so that's not the way that ordination works at this point in the ELCA, the more progressive expression of Lutheran churches in the US.  Over the summer, I did the required CPE training at the Asheville VA Hospital, but I have had to wait until Spring 2026 semester to take the Lutheran Foundations course that I need.  Will I need more classes?  Will I also have to do an internship?  Stay tuned.

Christmas Morning, Christmas Eve Report, and Sermon Recording

It is Christmas morning, 2025, and through the decades, I've had a wide variety of Christmas mornings.  By choice, I had no children of my own, but I have spent Christmas mornings with little children, and I understand how wonderful it is to have that enchanted kind of morning.  I am also a fan of a leisurely morning, even if it ends up feeling like a regular morning.  I've had Christmas mornings in my own house and Christmas mornings in the houses of relatives, along with the occasional Christmas morning at a vacation property.  I love them all.

This morning, I unwrapped the pumpkin roll that had been waiting for me in the church freezer.  I thought we took home the pumpkin roll intended for us, back in the fall, but there was another, in the upstairs refrigerator.  The woman who baked it assured me that it was mine, and so I brought it home.  It makes a delicious breakfast.

I thought about rolled cakes, about my one attempt to make a Buche de Noel.  It was back in my teenage days, when I subscribed to Bon Appetit magazine and actually attempted to make some of the recipes, if the ingredients were ones I could find in Charlottesville, VA and Knoxville, TN, back in the days (1980's) when grocery stores didn't have the wide range of products that they have now.

It was a tasty enough cake, that long ago Buche de Noel, but we all agreed that it was an awful lot of effort for a cake that tasted like, well, cake.  My pumpkin roll breakfast was also delicious, but it doesn't really taste like regular cake.  It does taste like autumn, so it's a bit out of place on Christmas morning, but since I love both autumn and Christmas, that's fine.

Yesterday was a delightful day which revolved mostly around our trip across the mountain to Bristol, TN, Christmas Eve service, and the trip back.  It was unseasonably warm for December, which I no longer complain about; I took advantage of the warm weather and took a longer walk.

I love the Christmas Eve service; it will always be my favorite.  Everyone is in a good mood, and all the hymns are familiar.  The central message of Christmas is easy to preach, unlike many other texts.

Speaking of sermons, my Christmas Eve sermon was recorded, and you can view it here on my YouTube channel.  If you want to read along (or read instead of watching the recording), I posted the sermon manuscript as a post on my theology blog.

One Week Until Christmas

Here we are, one week before Christmas.  I am grateful for my slow schedule, for my family members who don't cause me stress, for my years on earth which help me keep perspective when it comes to the holidays and many other days.

I am also grateful for my congregation.  Unlike other congregations that I've heard of through clergy sites and individual experiences of friends, my congregation is low stress.  It may also be part of the nature of my very-part-time position--they have no reason to have expectations of me beyond Sunday.

I am not stressed about my Christmas Eve sermon.  Advent and Nativity texts are much easier for me to preach than Easter texts.  Actually, Easter texts are easy, if I focus on resurrection.  The crucifixion is so tricky.  And sadly, so many churches spend far more time mired in the crucifixion and the whole issue of personal sin than they do on resurrection and the overcoming of the powers of evil and death.

Happily, I am not a preacher who addresses Good Friday on Christmas Eve, as interesting an approach as that may be.  

I am interested in the ways that Christianity might have been VERY different, had we built our customs and beliefs around the Nativity and not the crucifixion.  But that's a topic for a seminary class, not a sermon.

Let me enjoy this last week, and let me continue to remember how lucky I am that this is a week of enjoyment untinged by the kind of stress that most people feel a week from Christmas.

Recording of Sunday's Sermon

For the past several weeks, I've gotten up on Sunday mornings and studied weather reports.  I've enlarged screens to better study the radar and try to figure out where precipitation is falling.  Last week the forecast was for freezing fog, but we didn't see any impact on road conditions.  

Yesterday I knew we would encounter some precipitation between Arden, NC and Bristol, TN, but I was surprised by how much was falling.  The roads were mostly wet, but at the highest point, there was more snow sticking to the pavement than I expected.  I felt a bit of panic and wondered if we should turn around.  But I also knew that road conditions on the way back were likely to be just fine, and once we headed down the mountain, the road conditions went back to being wet, not white.

To view the recording of yesterday's sermon, head here to my YouTube site.  To read the manuscript, head over to yesterday's blog post.

I'm glad I had a chance to be with the congregation of Faith Lutheran yesterday.  My sermon went well, as did the rest of the service and Confirmation class.  The trip back was fairly easy, and we had a restful end of our Sunday.

Week-End Update: Cooking and Other Types of Mood Management

In some ways, it was a good week-end.  Sunday at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee went well, the kind of Sunday where I find myself wishing this position as a Synod Appointed Minister could continue for several more years.  It might, but much of that decision will not be up to me.

It was the kind of week-end where I hear about the travel plans of neighbors and feel a weird sense of emotion.  It's not envy, exactly.  They're taking a 10 day walk across England, 7-8 miles a day, carrying everything they need on their backs, following the same path that the pilgrim's in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales traveled.  They are at least 10 years older than I am, maybe 15.  It's the kind of plan that makes me wonder if I should retire/work less now rather than later.  But I am not sure we could make this kind of trek now.  For one thing, the long airline flight to get there is a dealbreaker for me.  And my spouse would need a very flat route, and he would need to do some training to be ready for even a flat route.

So, not envy, but the kind of feeling I have had so often in my life, wondering what is wrong with me that I don't want what so many other people seem to want.  In the above paragraph, it's vacation plans and bucket lists.  I look at the larger culture, particularly the desire to have the latest cell phone and hours to spend scrolling, and I don't feel like something is wrong with me.  I do worry about the health of the larger culture, particularly when I stumble across particularly disturbing information about what tech is doing to our brains.

I organized a cookie tasting for our neighborhood group, and I tried to make a recipe, pecan sandies, from childhood.  As with the chocolate chip cookies I've tried to make, the butter seemed to melt outside the cookie and fry it.  Not untasty, but not the memory of the cookie.  And there was that distressing moment when I said, "I can't cook anymore."  A ridiculous thought, but a distressing one.

Yesterday, though, we had great success making pizza with cast iron pans.  Before putting them in the oven, I turned the burner to medium heat for 3 minutes, as recommended by this blog post from King Arthur Baking Company.  It was the first time since being in this house when we've had a good homemade pizza.  My usual experience is to go through all the effort to make homemade pizza, only to be left with a mess of a kitchen and a blah pizza and a yearning for pizza from somewhere else. 

Yesterday as we ate pizza, we watched the recording of the Sunday worship service at the National Cathedral.  The service was beautiful, and once again, I found myself observing a strange mood evolving in me.  There was some nostalgia for the year I spent in seminary, where I went to the Cathedral occasionally.  I felt nostalgia and wistfulness and sadness for a time that is gone and won't be coming back.  I felt fortunate to have had the experiences and the opportunities and at the same time, I know what I had planned to do with that time in the city and the ways I fell short.  I tried to keep focused on what I did manage to do.  

When the worship service was over, we switched to Saturday Night Live snippets, so it was easier to manage my mood.  And then it was off to bed; I've been going to sleep increasingly earlier, and I feel like I need to get back on a more reasonable track.

A Wonderful All Saints Sunday

 We had a great All Saints Sunday.  Much as people complain about the time change, every autumn when we turn the clocks back, I have a night of wonderful sleep.  This year was no exception.  Because of the time change, we were both up early, and we headed over the mountains to Bristol early.

It was wonderful to travel in the daylight, to see the trees in their full and fading autumnal glory.  This year, various trees are on their own schedule.  Some are still green.  Some have lost all their leaves.  There's every variety of in between.  It's not as full and blazingly beautiful as two or three years ago, but it's been a treat, especially considering last year.

I was glad for the extra time, because we had a lot to unload.  I knew that the confirmation class, and perhaps all the youth who arrived for Sunday school, would set up the space I envisioned for people to put photos and other mementos of loved ones who had died.  I brought all the supplies:  fabrics, fairy lights, candles (both traditional and electronic), candle holders, 2 yellow mums, and a small table.  I gathered 2 additional small tables from the sacristy.

The youth did a great job of working together to create the space.  They are two pairs of siblings, and the siblings are cousins, so we had a head start in working together.  They seem like the kind of cousins who are more like siblings, siblings who like each other and have fun together.  I was so impressed with what they created:

The congregation came through too--we had plenty of pictures, so many that we added two additional flat spaces (flipped boxes with white tablecloths to hide their identity).  

After church, we spent some time in the front, hearing stories of the loved ones whose pictures had graced our worship space.  I had made extra bread, and people ate bread or took some home.  It was delightful, a way of having a picnic with the ancestors.

My sermon went well, which is always a treat for me.  What I mean by well is not that everyone loved it, but that I felt good about my delivery (not too much reading, not getting tongue twisted).  If you want to view the recording, it's here on my YouTube channel.  If you want to read a version, head to this post on my theology blog.

We came home and relaxed, as we always do.  Sunday afternoons come after very full mornings, so we're not going to be doing much of substance.  We watched a great PBS show about a man who was taking a last trip on a buckboard wagon pulled by his 36 year old mule on their last trip in Hyde county, NC.  It was oddly compelling.  I did a bit of sewing on my quilt top and headed to bed.

Today I have two days of work, and the rest of the week is spent at Quilt Camp, just up the hill at Lutheridge.  I'll sleep in my house and spend the rest of my time at Quilt Camp.  I'm hoping to make progress on a variety of projects.

It sounds heavenly, and it will be, but first I have to do the prep work so that I can be gone from my full-time teaching job.  I am probably further along on that project than I think, but I feel a bit of anxiety.  At the same time, I'm sure it will all be fine.  It's nice to be at a school where I can rest easy in the knowledge that it will all be fine, even as I'm feeling a bit of anxiety.

Halloween 2025

 And so our beautiful October comes to a close.  

Today is Halloween, and I live in a house that will have no trick-or-treaters.  We have discovered a Roku channel that offers nothing but NYPD Blue, so we'll probably watch some more of that.  I used to watch the show in the 90's, and I forgot how compelling it is.  I stayed up later than I meant to last night as I hoped to see how a narrative arc about a serial killer would end, so I may go to bed early tonight.

In my adult life, I approach Halloween as the beginning of an important time that lasts three days.  I'm a theology geek, so I call it a triduum.  Halloween emerged from its pagan roots as a natural bridge to All Saints Day (November 1) and All Souls Day (Nov. 2). More on those holidays in the coming days.

This year, I'll spend Halloween writing a sermon.  This year, what scares me is the willingness of politicians to let SNAP benefits expire.  I can create an All Saints sermon that references the Biblical texts, our current political situation, and all the saints who have come before us.

I still have to teach, of course.  But the semester has revealed that my classes on MWF are nothing to fear or dread; no classes are, but I'm trying to use Halloween words today.  In Brit Lit, we'll cover Joyce's "The Dead," in a bit of serendipity.  In English 101, we'll sketch leaves and pinecones and acorns while we explore how sketching might impact our ability to describe things.

That class will probably be more openly enthusiastic than the Creative Writing class where I did the experiment yesterday.  Every semester, I know that each class will have a different dynamic, but each semester often surprises me in how that dynamic plays out. 

I will wear my candy corn earrings one last time.  Here's a picture that I took at the school's pumpkin patch a few weeks ago (look at that glorious blue sky!):

This morning, I'm thinking of past Halloweens:  in childhood, where I'd spend months planning my costume, the joy of all that candy.  I'm thinking of 2016, where Halloween was my first day as an administrator at a new job, and my first impression of people was the costume contest and the joy with which they approached the idea of a costume contest.  

I'm wishing I had time to bake, time for more contemplation.  Well, maybe next year when Halloween will be on a Saturday.  This year, I'll continue to enjoy these elements of my best life:  getting ready for my Sunday at the country church I love so much, fun classes to teach today, and cozy time in the evening as we cook together and then revisit quality TV from decades past, while I stitch a new quilt top for the well-worn quilt on our bed.