Pastor's E-Letter

Pastor's E-Letter

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Pastors E-Letter 1/1/21

Happy New Year!
 
We made it, can you believe it? 2020 is over! Cue the dance music, balloon emojis, and “Auld Lang Syne.”
 
2020 has been a rollercoaster of a year, hasn’t it? I’m sure you, like me, are tired of the words “unprecedented,” “unimagined,” “unusual,” and “interesting.” I did not imagine when I set my New Years Resolutions for 2020 (to work out more and be more balanced) that I would be offered a few months working from home, online worship, losses in our congregation, and the rewriting of allll of our plans for the year. Yet, each day offered a new beginning as we journeyed through 2020, and we pushed on *hoping* that the year would end in a better position than we found ourselves on January 1, 2020, or on March 15, 2020, when the world began to flip upside down. We have been waiting for the number of that year to flip over, maybe more than we usually do.
 
But we’re here. You’re reading this. The year number is one more than it was. Yet not much is different from just 12 hours ago, is it?
 
I’m struck by that inconvenient truth each time the ball drops, marking a new calendar year, or each year when I wake up on my birthday. I am still… me, after all. The world is still itself. Life is still life. And moments of transformation rarely happen when the ball is dropping, or your age ticks forward another year, or 2020, the “unprecedented year” ends.
 
True transformation is sneakier.
It happened when you gave generously this year, even in the midst of a pandemic.
It happens when you say yes to Jesus, again, after all these years.
It happens when you allow your mind to be changed.
It happens when we listen to our brothers and sisters who are marginalized, and try to be less racist in our daily lives.
It happens when we feed the hungry (like you can on January 6th with Daily Bread!) or love the unhoused with blankets, or donate to a cause that needs our monetary resources more than ever.
It happens when you keep getting up, day after day, as you mourn the loss of your spouse, sibling, child or friend.
It happens when you decide to get treatment for a mental illness.
It happens when you decide to forgive someone, even if they will never accept that forgiveness. It happens when you decide you won’t touch the drink, or the drug, or the affair anymore.
 
It has nothing to do with the date on the calendar.
 
So in all honesty, 2021 seems a little too much like 2020. I’ll be wearing masks and socially distancing on vacation this coming week, despite scribbling in my planner, “Surely we’ll be done with this!” multiple times throughout the year. (How that alone did not ultimately change the trajectory of the pandemic, I do not know.) I do have a New Years Resolution, but I’m aware more than ever that I can’t plan what 2021 has for me. Only God knows that, and I learned this year that despite my best efforts, I can’t engineer what only God can see.
 
This Sunday is traditionally “Epiphany Sunday,” while Epiphany itself is on January 6th and closes the Christmas season. At Epiphany, we hear of the Wise Men, who started out on an very ordinary journey to follow a star. They were professional star-gazers, after all, and this would have been just another week in a star-gazers life. But the journey was one of extraordinary transformation as they turned away from Herrod’s evil plans and “went another way” after meeting Jesus. Their encounter with Christ, relatively unnarrated, changed the way they saw the world. They were transformed without a ball drop, without an increase in their age, without a New Years resolution. Their decision reminds us of the biggest grace of our God, and the hope of this 2021:
 
Every day is a new opportunity for us to be transformed by the love of God.
 
Lamentations 3:22-23 says,
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
   his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
   great is your faithfulness.
 
Great is God’s faithfulness, no matter the date on our calendar. We made it. Happy New Year!
 
Peace,
Pastor Allee
Posted by Allee Willcox with

Pastors E-Letter 10/30/20

There is an old folklore that says when a red cardinal visits your yard, you have a visitor from heaven. I grew up believing this folklore in my family- pointing out the red birds that would sit on our window sills and in the yard. It is one of the many ways I remember my grandparents, particularly my maternal grandmother. She had passed the folklore onto my aunts and uncles, and then onto me. I still find myself looking for red birds to this day. Just in the last year, when my sister went wedding dress shopping, there was a red cardinal on the tree by the first store. My first Good Friday here, a red cardinal sat on the bush outside of my office. I felt Grandma Jackie’s spirit both times. She has been gone for 13 years, yet I still look for little signs that she is proud of me, or watching over me. I still want to pick up the phone to ask her what she thinks about this election cycle, coronavirus, or my career. I wonder how she’d feel about the world now. Grief has a funny way of asking us those unanswerable questions.
 
When I see cardinals, though, I think: someone from heaven is cheering me on, visiting. They, my grandparents, mentors, extended family, have stopped by for Good Friday, in a dream, for a wedding celebration. Even in its superstition, I feel the promise of Scripture’s “great cloud of witnesses,” and trust that my relatives who have passed away are still with me. This is a promise that we communicate at every funeral service we do, and one that is a touchpoint for so many who grieve. Whether you’re looking for sunbeams, rainbows, butterflies or birds, we all long to feel the presence and spirit of those who have died before us.
 
This Sunday is officially All Saints Day around the world and throughout the church. Contrary to the name, All Saints Day isn’t just about the formally sainted. In the Catholic and particularly the Protestant Church, we celebrate ordinary saints and the ways they have changed our lives. It is the church's moment of cardinal watching. We tell stories, light candles, and remember tangibly the saints who have made a way for us. All Saints Day ushers in a season of memory for me: during the holidays, our storytelling and remembering increases a hundred fold as we make the traditional family recipes and use the antique and treasured holiday decorations. Year round, the cardinals are one such sign of the mark “my saints” have made on my life.
 
This year, All Saints Day feels especially important. 2020 has been a “pandemic of grief,” as Nadia Bolz-Weber said in March. It has felt overwhelming to watch the news and to hear about death, loss of jobs, and illness day after day. In worship, we will lift up the names of those who have died in our congregation and light candles for all of our losses. In addition to that, we will remember the 227,000+ who have lost their lives from COVID in the US, and the 16,600+ here in our home state who have died from COVID as well.
 
All Saints Day doesn’t imply that every person we remember is perfect. Far from it! The best stories that we tell often involve their mistakes, failures, or quirks in our lives. The saints are ordinary folks, who have lived lives with purpose and meaning. The saints are people who have made our ministries, our vocations, and our personal goals possible. They have lived lives, as our Scripture will tell us, “to become more like him,” in every way. We honor their legacy and are grateful for their gift, even as we grieve. We also trust that God can do miraculous things in resurrection- leaving legacies of Saints behind that we can trust in, rely upon, and follow after. We remember that God has not left us alone, but with a great crowd of witnesses that cheers us on in “becoming more like him [Jesus.]”
 
I am excited to do that work with you this week.
 
See you Sunday (and don’t forget your bell!),
Pastor Allee
Posted by Allee Willcox with

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