Week of June 3

Choir Sunday, this Sunday!

Mich used to like to say that on Choir Sunday the choir gives the Sermon.

(That never really stopped him from delivering a sermon of his own those days.)

What Mich knew and was saying is that strong and beautiful words can be carried directly into the heart by the melodies and harmonies of human voices- and the Talmadge Hill  Choir will be doing our best to testify to that this Sunday. And Susan will be there to support us all- as preacher AND as soprano.

Here are some advance quotes from the choir sermon- words according to a few of our spiritual guides- Curtis Mayfield, Rumi, Machado, Hank Williams and Bob Marley:

“Like the blind man that God gave back his sight, Praise the Lord! I saw the light!”

“Help each man be a better man with the kindness that you give.”

“Wade in the water! You gotta go deeper if you’re gonna cross over.”

“There’s room for all of the loved and the lost.”

“One Love, One Heart.”

“Lift you foot, cross over.”

“It is God I have here inside my heart.”

And, I am truly excited to announce that joining us from Bridgeport for the first time Sunday will be members of the KEYS Chorus.  The KEYS kids  have been working hard and they have learned quite a few of our songs.

Please come and be inspired by the singers (you getting inspired inspires us back), support the children and feed your heart!

With love, Rob

Medtation

Sabbath ceasing means to cease not only from work itself, but also from the need to accomplish and be productive, from the worry and tension that accompany our modern criterion of efficiency, from our efforts to be in control of our lives as if we were God, from our possessiveness and our enculturation, and, finally, from the humdrum and meaninglessness that result when life is pursued without the Lord at the center of it all.

—Marva J. Dawn

Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.

—Eugene Peterson

Meditation

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming.  We must find the courage to enter that still room where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember; and if we are honest and charitable in our remembering, the future opens to a brighter landscape."

Fred Buechner

Week of May 13

Dear Friends:

In the United Kingdom and parts of Europe during the 16th century, there was a Christian festival known as "Mothering Sunday," which was celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent, and was a day to encourage everyone to return to their “mother church” for a special Sunday.  After some years, the holiday morphed: many female laborer and domestic servants were given the day of to visit their families and mothers.  

In the late 1800s, In the United States, one Ann Reeves Jarvis started “mother’ day work clubs to teach women hoe to properly care for their children.  Around the same time, Julia Ward Howe wrote the “mother’s Day proclamation," which was a call to mothers to united in promoting world peace.   Mother’s day was envisioned by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became a holiday in 1914.  Jarvis herself would end up denouncing the holiday because of its commercialization, and even went so far as trying to get it taken off the calendar as a US holiday.  How wanted a Mother’s Peace Day, Jarvis’ daughter wanted her mother’s work continued.    President Wilson signed the holiday in to being in 1914.  But soon thereafter, Anna Jarvis lamented that the card companies, florists and other merchants were capitalizing on its popularity.  

For many, Mother’s day is a complex holiday, full of guilt, grief, sadness and longing.  Many mainline churches have attempted to rebrand the day as “the festival of the Christian home.” But somehow mother’s day has a cultural velocity that is hard to stop.  

What I do know if this:  When life is complex, church is the place I want to be.  It is here we are able to be welcomed whether Mother’s day strikes you as a welcome day to get and give attention, or a day in which you’d rather hide in your bedroom.  We have no expectations for you, no dogma regarding the holiday.  What we do have is worship, good music, your new and old friends, and lots of food to share.  

Blessings, 

Susan