Julie's News from Maryland

After last year's terrible bug bites and emergency room disaster, I have been trying to be more mindful of the bugs this year. A few weeks ago we were at the park after dark and I came home with 4 bites. Naturally they swelled to unusual proportions and I headed to the doctor for advice - both about how to care for them and how to prevent them. The doctor was fabulous and gave me an oral antihistamine to help with the reaction. It helped quite a bit and the swelling went down and the welts cleared up much quicker than last year. He advised me to wear bug repellent any time I am out in the evening, so I have been very careful to do that. It's made a huge difference - I haven't gotten bitten once since. Whew, maybe I'll actually have a bug free summer.

Except, of course, for the millipedes that moved into my house today. That's right, the millipedes. Ella's preschool teacher asked if we would be able to care for the millipedes this summer. That's what I get for being the first one there this afternoon. Anyway, it would seem that the care and feeding of millipedes is rather simple. They live in a plastic container that is about a foot tall and 18 inches wide; the top half of it comes off. There is 2-3 inches of dirt in the bottom, with large pieces of bark on top. The millipedes live in the dirt, so it is hard to see them unless you move the bark and the dirt. All we have to do is spray the dirt with water every few days so that the dirt stays moist. Then, we just put a slice of apple in the box once in a while. I have a feeling that Rick and the kids will do more millipede chores than me.

Rick and I had the funniest exchange today.  He said something about how he was starting to think about the places where we are going to eat while we are in California.  I immediately thought of my favorite local restaurant in Mountain View, Frankie Johnnie & Luigi, but before I could say it Rick said, "Round Table Pizza."  Yes!  Round Table Pizza.  It's not great pizza.  In fact, it is pretty lousy pizza, but it is familiar pizza.  Then we thought of all those other silly places: In & Out Burger, Una Mas (a REAL burrito from Una Mas, not one of the horrible things they try to pass off as burritos in New York!), Taco Bell - you get the picture. 

The food in New York really is just amazing. We have so many restaurants near our house it would be impossible to count them  all.  And, best of all, they all deliver at almost any time of day.  We have great ethnic food, yummy diners, cheap delis, the whole deal.  But, they still don't quite taste like home.  A few of them do, a few have become regular and familiar to us.  But it only took a moment for Rick and I to get totally lost in dreaming about stupid, familiar food that we can have in California.  Ah, it really is the simple things that make life comfortable. 

Just 7 days and we'll be on a plane on our way to California. We are all very excited about the trip. Everyone has someplace they want to go: the beach, the aquarium in Monterey, a friend's house, etc. The list is long and we only have 11 days. It was hard to decide how long to make the trip. We wanted to feel like we got a good vacation and have plenty of time to do fun things and spend time with people, but we didn't want to be gone so long that we wished we had left sooner. It's so hard to find that right balance on a trip, especially with kids. Some moments I'm feeling like 11 days was too short and we should stay longer, then other days I think that it will be just right. Guess we'll find out. In the meantime, we get more excited each day.

Oh, and a bonus, I get to preach at St. Tim's, my home parish, on July 8. I am excited just to get to worship there, it still feels so much like home to me. Plus, there is no worship in New York that is even remotely close to what our worship at home is, so I can't wait to worship with familiar music and prayers and such. I'm particularly grateful to have the opportunity to preach - I know that crowd won't let me get away with anything!

Did I mention that we got a fish at Christmas?  Our friend, Jack, used a beautiful beta fish in a vase as a centerpiece for his holiday party and then brought the fish to us.  It has lived in its little plastic bowl with its fake rocks and fake plant on the dining room table ever since.  However, this morning, we awoke to discover the fish lying on its side, sunk to the bottom on the rocks.  Yep, that was the end of the fish.  We thought that the fish had died yesterday, it was looking pretty bleak - its colors had faded and it was barely moving - but it was hanging on.  Not anymore.

There has been a surprising lack of emotion about the fish's death.  I was dreading this day for fear that there would be weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth, but, the kids barely even batted an eye, except for Ella who kept saying, "Let me see. I want to see it.  I can't see!"  There hasn't even been any whining about wanting another fish.   

I suppose that it is sort of difficult to have much of an emotional connection with a fish.  In fact, after whining about wanting one for years, the day after we got the fish Nicholas remarked, "The fish is kinda boring."  Yep, fish are boring.  Or at least this fish was.  No tricks.  No interaction.  Nothing. Just roaming around in its plastic bowl taking up space on the table.  I think we are done with fish for a while.  Thank goodness, one less thing for me to worry about trying to keep alive. 

I'm a list maker.  I love to make lists.  Mostly I make "to do" lists.  They are not elaborate things. Not tacked on a wall anywhere.  Usually they are just boring little text documents that I leave open in the corner of my laptop so that I can see them and slowly march through getting things done.  Today, I opened my laptop and consulted my list as I always do.  Here's what it said:

Horace: goals for internship
ember day letter
call Henry
pay bills
menus
Friday night activities
finish sermon

I looked at the list and I thought to myself "menus?"  What on earth does that mean?  I remember adding something to the list yesterday and that must have been it, but I had no idea what it meant.  Was I supposed to look up menus?  Was I supposed to create a menu for something?  Menus?  Finally, after knocking some other things off the list, I decided that I must have typed the wrong word.  I must have been thinking about something that needed to get done, but got distracted by something else and typed the word 'menus' when there is really something else that needs to be accomplished.  But darn if I could figure out what it was.  I mean, if  I bothered to put it on the list that means it is something that really needs to get done and I don't want to forget it. But what could it be.

Finally this afternoon, when I reopened my laptop and looked at the list again I remembered what it meant.  I am part of the seminary welcome team and I am responsible for collecting menus from various neighborhood restaurants so we can include them in the welcome bags for incoming students.  I need to wander the neighborhood and collect menus and that's what menus means. 

You'll be relieved to know that the entry on my list now reads 'get menus for newcomer bags' so that I can avoid going through this whole thing again tomorrow. 

Ella has been wanting earrings for a while now. I almost got them done when she was a baby, but a friend suggested that I wait until she was old enough to ask for them so that it would be a really special thing for her, so I did. She has been talking about it for a while now - she is all about the accessories: shoes, purses, jewelry. She started talking about it again this week and asked if she could get it done this weekend. We had a lazy day today, just wandering down 5th Ave (ohmigod, we live in New York City and wander down Fifth Ave after church - it is still so cool and exciting for me). We found a place on Broadway called Claire's and she got a darling pair of flower earrings and is very excited about them. Nicholas kept trying to demonstrate for her how it would feel by pinching her ears, as if he would know how it felt. The lady put the first one in and everything was fine, she didn't even seem startled, then all of a sudden she said, "It hurts! My ears hurts!" and started to cry. Poor baby. It hurt a little more than she expected, but she didn't hesistate about wanting to finish. She cried for a few more minutes and then was all smiles. She is pleased as punch about it and showed her new earrings to everyone on the street that would look. I've posted some photos in Albums on the right.

Yippee! My diocese elected a bishop today - you can read the news article here. Now the other kids at school will stop making fun of me because I don't have a bishop.

One of the downsides to being so far away is that I didn't get a chance to meet the bishop candidates in person. Naturally I read all that I could about them on our diocesan web site, but that doesn't really do justice to them as people. I am looking forward to meeting her and learning more about her.

Ok, so this is sort of a dorky, church geek, kind of pet peeve, but it is just annoying me so I have to say something. My latest pet peeve is church web sites whose front page has a giant (or even small, really) photo of the exterior of their church building.

I'm all for beautiful churches and pretty church architecture - we can praise God with all sorts of art, architecture and buildings included. But, people, if I am going to come to your church I want to know what the PEOPLE look like, not what the building looks like. Maybe I am just strange that way. Maybe lots of people make a decision about what church they will attend because of what the exterior of the building looks like. But, you know, a big stone building with some grass around it does not exactly give off a warm friendly feeling on the front page of a web site. However, pictures of parishioners with big, smiling faces certainly would. It's fabulous if you can get a big group photo - like at the annual parish picnic or whatever - but if you can't, just throw up some photos of people doing stuff - in worship, in the choir, kids playing on the playground, people chatting at coffee hour, people listening attentively during a class. Anything that indicates that there are actual people that come, what they look like, and how they look when they are doing stuff at your church. It hits so many marketing points at once: the demographics of your parish, the kinds of things you do together, what worship is like there, etc. etc.

I suppose that this sort of exposes my bias about church web sites. Church web sites are great places for parishioners to get information about up coming events but they are also essential MARKETING tools. When I visit a new city, the first thing I do is use Google to find the Episcopal Churches. The churches that don't have a web site are out of luck, I'm not going there. And, you have no idea how many church web sites don't include the current worship times - or are so out of date (for example, the front page has the Christmas service times and it is JULY!), that I don't trust any of the data that I find there.

Here are what I think should be basic rules for church web sites:

Front page should include the following:

• Pictures of people
• Service times - or at least a prominent link to service times
• Prominent link to directions to get to the church
• Contact info (or a prominent link to it), such as phone number and email address for more information
• Maybe a short (and I mean short) mission statement
  

Web sites can also include other information, but it must be carefully used:

• Calendar - if you are going to have a link to a calendar or a calendar somewhere on your site you must be committed to keeping it current. If you are not going to keep it current, then it is useless and leads people to mistrust the other information they find on the site.
• Staff and other biographies - It if nice to give visitors to your site some insight about who works at your parish, but keep them short and never put them on the front page.
• More pictures - put up albums with photos of events - let us see what you look like and what you do
• Ads for current events - you can even put these on the front page, provided that you are willing to take them down when the event happens. You might even use these as links to another page that has more detailed info about the event.
• And tons of other stuff - all links of course: info about becoming a member, info about the Episcopal church, the history of your church, how to get married/baptized/buried there, etc. etc. Just organize the site with easy to understand links so people know where to go.

I'll give you a few examples of what I'm thinking. Some of these are really simple. A web site doesn't have to be elaborate to be welcoming and useful - both to parishioners and potential visitors:

• St. Mary's Episcopal Church
• St. Timothy's Episcopal Church
• St. David's Episcopal Church
• Trinity Lutheran Church
  

My grades were waiting for me in my box when I returned from Philadelphia. I'm pretty pleased with how I did this semester. Interestingly, I feel like I worked the hardest and learned the most this semester, but my grades are about what they usually are - As and Bs.  It would seem that working harder and doing more reading than I've ever done before doesn't really make all that much of a difference in my grades.  It did, of course, make a difference in the experience - adding richness to the class discussions and lectures that I really appreciated.

Well, for those keeping score, here they are:

• Church History 3: B
• Ethics 1: A
• Gospel According to Luke: A-
• Jesus and Family Values: A
  
• Pastoral Theology 2: B
• Readings in Modern Anglican Theology: B+

This week I am at Villanova University outside of Philadelphia at the Preaching Excellence Program. Episcopal seminary students from around the country have gathered to practice preaching and to learn more about it. Priests and homiletics professors have come to help us do just that.

The conference has us organized into groups of 8 or so, with two "faculty" members each. We each preached a full sermon to the group and then received feedback from our colleagues and our faculty about the structure, content, delivery, etc. We also preached draft versions of another sermon to get help while the sermon was a work-in-progress. Also, while here, we have attended several plenary sessions that have covered various methods and techniques for sermon writing and delivery. I have learned so much and I am so so grateful to be here.

And now, a shameless plug for the Episcopal Preaching Foundation: This foundation organizes and sponsors this event every year and brings the seminarians here at NO COST TO THE STUDENT. That's right, folks, the Preaching Foundation pays for everything, including travel. It is such an incredible thing that they do. Please please support them. Take up a special collection some Sunday. Or just make a small contribution. Whatever you do, you will be supporting the important ministry of developing preaching excellence in the Episcopal Church.

I thought I'd share the sermon that I preached to my group on Tuesday. We were each asked to preach a sermon about reconciliation and healing. I chose the text that I used, Luke 5:17-25, and this is what I wrote:

So, have you seen those commercials for Staples, the office supply store? The ones with the Easy button? There is usually some office crisis or problem that someone, who is seemingly helpless, tries to fix with some ridiculous solution. My favorite is the one with the cat. The boss walks into the employee’s office and he has an easel sitting on his desk and a cat painting is painting with her paw. She says, what is that? He says, “It’s a copy cat. He’s going to save us a boatload on color copies.” And then you realize that there is a pie chart next to the cat that the cat is trying to replicate. The boss says, “You need an Easy button.” And, of course, the announcer launches into the Staples spiel about how Staples can make color copies easier and cheaper, etc.

An Easy button. In the Staples commercial world, they portray us as helpless creatures whose office supply problems are solved by pushing an Easy Button.

----------------------------

A few years ago, a friend of mine found herself in a little crisis of her own, not with office supplies, but with her brother. When my friend was visiting her brother’s family, he made a comment about a parenting choice that she’d made, she overreacted and the next thing you know they had a horrible fight and she had said terrible things to her brother.

A couple of days later, my friend sent a letter to her brother. She apologized and explained the dynamic that had caused her bad reaction and asked for his forgiveness. She also expressed her forgiveness for what he had done. You know, pressing the Easy button - expecting that all would be forgiven and everything would go back to normal.

But, that’s not what happened. Her brother’s reply announced that he no longer wanted to spend time with her and her children. He blamed her and her “abusive behavior” for the entire incident and refused to acknowledge that he had any part in the disagreement. So much for the easy button.

As you can imagine, my friend was angry and disappointed and sad and lots of other things.

Well, because they live in separate towns it was easy to avoid each other, until it was time for their parents’ wedding anniversary. My friend said to me that she just didn’t know what to do about it. She didn’t know how her brother would behave – would he make a scene if they were in the same place? She was still angry and didn’t really trust herself to behave appropriately. And then she said something very interesting, she said, “You know, I really want to forgive him, but I just don’t feel like it anymore. I mean, I say in my head that I’ve forgiven him, but I don’t really feel any different about him, I’m still mad at him.”

-----------------------------

In today’s gospel, Jesus encounters a paralyzed man. A broken man. Really. Literally. A broken man. This man is physically broken and unable to move on his own or care for himself.

Now, I think it is safe to guess that this man was probably also spiritually broken. The text doesn’t tell us how he became paralyzed, if he was born that way or if he was injured, but I suspect that no matter how it happened, this man believes that he deserves what’s happened to him. We know from the story of the blind man and other stories that it was common for Jews in the first century to believe that physical injury or deformity were punishment for sins that someone, either the person or their parents, had committed.

This man lived not only with the physical difficulties of being paralyzed, but with the shame and the guilt that came with it. He was a broken man. Lying on a bed. Being carried by others. Broken. Guilty. Helpless.

But, he comes to Jesus. He comes with the faith that if he shows up, Jesus will heal him.
And Jesus does heal him, saying “Your sins are forgiven”. Your sins are forgiven. Jesus knows that physical healing is no good to the man if he remains spiritually broken. The man must first be reconciled to God, himself, and the world - he must lose his feelings of guilt and shame before physical healing will be worth anything. So, he says, “Your sins are forgiven.” “Your sins are forgiven.”

Naturally, as is usually the case with Jesus, the people around Jesus get nervous when he says things like this, so. Jesus replies to them by saying: “Which is easier, to say, “Your sins are forgiven you”, or to say, “Stand up and walk?”

Is it easier to say “Your sins are forgiven you” or is it easier to say “Stand up and walk?” In this passage, it almost seems like Jesus is pressing the Easy button. It does seem easy for Jesus to say these words to the man.
And it might be easy for Jesus, but I think it might not be so easy for the man. I mean, if you were paralyzed and someone told you that you were forgiven and to stand up and walk, would you even try? Or would you think they were crazy?

But the man does it. He comes to Jesus with faith - broken, shameful, guilty and helpless – but with faith. He comes to Jesus wanting healing and Jesus gives him forgiveness. And in that encounter, in relationship with the living Jesus the man accepts it – the man takes the forgiveness offered to him and is released from the shame and guilt. He sees himself as a loved child of God and is restored to wholeness. He stands up and walks.

-----------------------------------

I think my friend was a lot like that man on the pallet. Broken – she was bitter and angry. Guilty – knowing that she had caused this situation. Helpless – she knew she couldn’t make her brother forgive her and she didn’t feel like she could make herself forgive him.

And this is when it occurred to me, Christine really didn’t need her brother’s forgiveness. She needed Jesus’ forgiveness. And, Christine didn’t really need to forgive her brother she just needed to reconcile with him.

So I said to her, “You know, maybe it doesn’t really matter what you feel. I mean, I don’t feel like going to the gym and it’s not easy to get there, but I go twice a week because the exercise is good for me. I occasionally don’t feel like writing my tithing check and sometimes it’s not easy to write it, but I do because I know that it changes me – it changes my perspective about the world, it changes my relationship with God, it changes my relationship with money. Maybe what matters is that you just be faithful. That you just go forward with faith.”

I suggested to my friend that she go to her parent’s party and that she be polite and kind to her brother whenever she found herself in his proximity. She didn’t have to gush all over him or apologize again or force him to reconcile with her. She didn’t have to feel like she had forgiven him. It wasn’t going to be easy. But maybe she just needed to treat him with dignity, respect, and kindness, no matter how she actually felt about him.

And you know, it worked. Not quite like the Staples Easy button works in the commercial, but it worked. Somewhere in the process of treating her brother with dignity and respect she began to believe that he deserved that dignity and respect. She began to be relieved of her shame and guilt for her bad behavior – and accept the forgiveness that Jesus was offering, even if her brother wasn’t willing to offer it just yet. In the process of reconciliation – in the activity of reconciling – she encountered the living Jesus, she experienced the presence of the Holy Spirit and could feel herself being restored and healed. She was able to stand up and walk.

---------------------------

You know, the truth about that Staples Easy Button is that it really isn’t all that easy. Staples might have all the products that you need to run an office efficiently, but you still need to get in your car, and drive to the store, and find a place to park, and go inside, and ask for help because you can never find anything in those giant stores, and wait in line, and, oh yeah, have the money to pay for the stuff. The Staples Easy Button does not solve your office problems on the spot. It just doesn’t work that way.

I believe that reconciliation and healing work a bit like that. There is no easy button. We can’t just make reconciliation and healing happen – even if we ask for or offer forgiveness. But, we can show up. We can stay in conversation with each other. We can begin the process of reconciliation – the activity of reconciliation – even when it is hard, even when we don’t feel like it.

And somewhere in that activity, I believe we will encounter the living Jesus who forgives us and restores us to wholeness and health.