Playground Surface Blessing

Written to dedicate the new playground surface donated by a member of Grace Lutheran Church in Westminster, MD for Little Friends of Grace.

What does it mean to dedicate something, to bless it?

It means we set something aside for a particular purpose, or for a particular season, and we ask that God bless both the item itself and everyone who will use it!

This, of course, is a playground which means that main purpose is PLAY!

Over the years that this playground has been here, countless kids and their families and their teachers have run and sung and slid and climbed. …and, before now, they did all of that on a surface that tracked in some pretty dirty stuff into their classrooms!

Now, thanks to an incredibly generous donation, we have this awesome new surface in place and it is ready to get broken in! Let’s say a prayer together:

Gracious God of Joy, 

We give you thanks for the gifts of fun and play. 

Bless this space and let your love rest upon it.

May your promised presence be manifested in it through exuberant laughter and praise. 

We commit into your care, all who pray here, and play here, that they will grow in their love for you and their love for all of creation. 

We dedicate it to your enjoyment and service. Amen

(adapted from Rev. Sarah Strosahl-Kagi)

A New Way of Working

Beginning my interim at Grace has been a real adjustment for me. My internship congregation was small. My first call was very small. My second call was a little bigger, but not by much. I got used to what it looked like to be a solo pastor. Even when I was on internship, the model was still one pastor, even as I shared in some of those responsibilities.

As a solo pastor, particularly in a congregation without a lot of staff, you really get used to needing to be a pastor-of-all-trades. Every aspect of congregational life, even if it’s not your strength, requires something of you. If you’re smart, you identify and equip and engage volunteers to help you, but, still, the onus is on you.

And when it comes to weekly habits, it all becomes about the sermon. One Sunday is over and the next Sunday is just ahead and that sermon isn’t going to write itself and so a decent amount of time, week in and week out, is devoted to sermon prep. It’s a fact of life and every week off from preaching feels like a major break.

When I transitioned into interim ministry here, I wondered what it would feel like to be sharing a preaching load–and not just sharing the preaching load with one other preacher, but with a diaconal intern, as well! We wanted to mix up our preaching, so sometimes I preach twice in a row, other times it’s three weeks between sermons.

What I’ve learned is that any extra time I might have imagined as a result of not preaching every week is a fantasy.

That time is quickly eaten up by additional programing (and planning for said programming!), additional pastoral acts (we’ve had three funerals so far in the last six weeks), and additional administrative work (so much more communication, scheduling, etc.).

What’s more, since I am now a co-pastor with many additional full- and part-time staff, there is a lot of checking in and touching base to make sure we’re all on the same page. Don’t get me wrong, this time, and our weekly staff meetings, are super important and make sure no one is operating in a silo, but it’s not something I thought about when making the change for a congregation where, by the end, I was by myself in the office more often than not.

None of this is a complaint. I’m really enjoying my work here! I just wanted to highlight some of the big changes I’ve felt as a pastor moving into a larger context. I’m excited to see what the rest of my time here teaches me!

Planted in Love

I was trying to write a blessing…and this came out. I don’t usually write poetry and certainly don’t consider myself a poet, but I like what happened here.

May you remember, on the days that you feel stuck—

feet in the mud, toes locked in the muck—

that this is not all there is.

 

May you remember, when “Reach up!” they say or “Reach out!” they cry,

that maybe the place to reach is deep inside.

 

May you remember that the place you’re being called is maybe not above ground.

Strain to listen and, if you can, turn your ear to the sound

of the voice calling to you in stillness and earth.

 

What would happen if you let yourself grow

—not up and out, but down and low?

Centered in yourself and that nurturing soil

with roots deepening, lengthening, and continuing to toil?

 

May you remember, when the days seem bleak,

That you are so very far from weak.

That it might not look like much from up above,

But your roots, your body, your soul, were all planted with love.   

 

 

 

Rebecca Ajer Frantz, 2021

Holistic Relationships

Sermon preached Sunday, August 1, 2021, the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, at Grace Lutheran Church in Westminster, Maryland. 

Alright, it’s week two of the bread cycle. If you’re unfamiliar with how our readings are structured, every three years, we get five weeks in a row where the Gospel reading is from the same chapter of John—the chapter when Jesus talks aaaaallllllllll about bread. Bread, bread, and more bread. Buckle in!

The difficult part about this section of our lectionary is that, as preachers, it’s hard not to repeat ourselves. I also don’t want to accidentally go in a direction that Pastor John or Leanne was planning to go…so if you see either one of them looking panic stricken, it’s because I took their ideas!

But a little repetition isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, this week’s segment of the bread chapter brings us back around to something that I touched on last week. I mentioned how this sign of feeding the five thousand points us to a God who cares about our physical needs just as much as our spiritual needs.

Our God is a God who holistically cares for us, recognizing that our needs are connected, intertwined, and cannot be neatly put in silos and separated, as convenient as that might be.

This idea of our needs being interconnected was on full display this week. Like so many others, I love watching the Olympics. I love watching sports I never otherwise follow, like fencing, or beach volleyball, or archery. I mean, who knew you could win a medal in trampoline? I didn’t until this morning! I love when the underdog wins. I love when an athlete is able to do their best work and be recognized for their talent and skill.

On Tuesday, everyone following the Olympics and gymnastics, in particular, was shocked to see Simone Biles, gymnastics superstar and 2016 gold medalist several times over withdraw herself from the team competition and, later, the all-around competition. She’s since withdrawn from two of the individual events as well. Some have critiqued her, saying she’s let people down or that she’s a quitter, but many more have praised her because she is displaying this truth: her body and her mind and her spirit were not all on the same page, were not all working together, were not all ready.

She could have tried to push through, but think about how risky that would have been. For her teammates, she could have ruined their chances at a medal if she made too many mistakes. For herself, she could have hurt herself badly, even resulting in a life-threatening injury, because of how dangerous some of these gymnastics skills are. Instead, she listened to herself and did what was needed. This disconnect meant that she wasn’t dialed into that muscle memory that she’d trained for over and over and over again.

Now, I don’t know if you know this, but I am not an Olympic athlete. (Sarcasm!)

But I know what it means to have the pieces of myself be out of whack, out of sync. It makes everything harder. It makes everything more stressful. I’m a singer and there have been times when I am getting ready to perform and all of a sudden that passage that I’ve practiced a thousand times—it just goes wrong. I know the note I’m supposed to sing, or how to make sure I’m not going flat, but my body just isn’t listening.

Maybe there’s a time in your life when you’ve felt something akin to that, too.

But even in these times when everything feels disjointed, I give thanks that we have a God who is always with us, coaxing us, calling us, shaping us, and healing us back into a place of wholeness.

And God is always doing this, even when we so clearly don’t deserve it.

In the Gospel account for today, we hear what happens after the feeding of the five thousand, and after Jesus walks on water out to the disciples in the boat. The crowd realizes that Jesus is no longer there and so they get into boats themselves to go find him.

When the get to him, they start out by questioning when Jesus got there. Jesus knows why they’ve come: “You’re looking for me because I fed you,” he says. And then he tries to get them to understand that the food was not the point—it was a sign that points to him, to God, to the grace and salvation that is being given.

The crowd wants to know what they need to do and Jesus says, “nothing,” that the work of God is believing in who Jesus is.

And how do they respond? “What sign are you going to give us, then, so that we may see it and believe in you?” They talk about manna in the wilderness and want to know what Jesus is going to give them?

Um, what? Weren’t these people paying attention? Did they forget what literally just happened? I can just imagine Jesus at this point, looking around, trying to tell if these folks are messing with him.

“What am I going to give you? You mean, besides the baskets full of food that you all ate your fill of? Besides that?”

But, of course, that’s not what Jesus says. He turns a corner and presents himself as the bread of life and living water, presents himself as the ultimate sign of God’s love and faithfulness and grace.

And Jesus does this because Jesus is after a real relationship. I can very easily imagine Jesus getting upset and sending these people away because they so clearly don’t get it. But he doesn’t. He continues teaching them, continues talking with them, and offers himself to them, regardless of their ability to accept him, intellectually, emotionally, or otherwise.

This relationship that God is after with humanity is not transactional. It is a not a “We do this for God so God does this for us” or “God does this for us so we need to do that for God.” No, it is truly a relationship, built upon what we holistically need for both our bodies and our spirits.

God is constantly offering up both literal bread and spiritual bread, both water that quenches our thirst and water that refreshes and renews our souls, both abundant life in the here-and-now and eternal life in the presence of God.

These are gifts, offered freely by God who does not wait for us to complete a list of prerequisites or check off a list of tasks. These are gifts offered to us, not because of who we are, but because of who God is.

And God is one who desires relationship and reconciliation with us above all else, and pursues that through providing and caring for us in every way.

So what might our response be to that kind of love, to that kind of relationship?

Not completing our own check list: fed the hungry (check), clothed the naked (check), forgave someone (check), read the bible (check). These things are all good! They are things we are called to do as disciples of Christ! But they are not obligations or requirements.

I believe our response to God’s desire for holistic relationship with us is to nurture and pursue relationships with God and with our neighbors and with the rest of creation that have that same holistic nature.

In which God has a larger role in our lives than the hour we spend in worship, or the time we spend reading scripture, or the time we spend in prayer—in which we are constantly talking with God, walking with God, and listening for what God is calling us to do.

In which we care for the whole person, making sure they are fed and sheltered, and that their mental and physical health are looked after, and that their basic needs are met and exceeded, allowing for a life filled with joy and abundance.

In which we care for this incredible world God has given us, searching for sustainable ways to produce what we need, adjusting our habits to make an impact, and protecting plants, animals, and landscapes from destruction of our own making.

God has given us an incredible example of what this kind of relationship can look like.

Body, mind, and spirit, God is there, holding us all together.

Amen.