Blessing the Beginning

Beginnings and endings have me thinking about blessings. There's something about the beginning of the school year and the changes and transitions that it brings that is always a little nerve wracking - both the school year and (for me) getting ready for the beginning of programs at church. In fact I went back to my Midweek Message from last year because i knew I'd written about a back-to-school litany and I thought maybe I could take my own advice and give myself some language for remembering God's presence with me and my kids during stress.

This Sunday we repeat what has become a beloved transition to me: blessing backpacks (and bags and purses and briefcases and phones and tool kits etc; the things we carry). I know blessings aren't magical. These things aren't imbued with some kind of special power. I'm not a wizard. (Or am I? *cocks eyebrow*) They do, however, have a special place in the life of a community and in our relationship to God.

Weirdly, I often think of this advice column by hard-rock partier Andrew W. K. when I think about why prayer - and blessing as a specific kind of prayer - is important. He frames prayer as a way of letting go of our need for control and power and acknowledging instead our need for help and putting ourselves in a position of love and community. I also like Walter Wink's take. He calls prayer an aperture through which God works. Calling on God's presence and letting ourselves become magnifying glasses to focus the light of God into those places where we want to concentrate love and caring and peace, that seems very worthwhile to me.

So we've been blessing backpacks for about a decade maybe. And we bless food and babies and goings out and comings in. We bless students and teachers and service workers and council members. We bless all the things but we've never blessed our Sunday school rooms! At least not since I've been here. But that all ends this week. I was inspired by a post on the Dove's Nest blog by Allison Brookins, who talks about praying the 23rd Psalm over the children of her congregation. This Sunday, in addition to assembling school kits and eating sandwiches, I invite you to join me in doing a blessing tour of our Sunday school rooms. We'll bless these spaces in which we trust that our children will learn and laugh and create community and experience the love of Jesus, opening ourselves and those spaces to God's loving care and attention.

The Day You Begin

There will be times when you walk into a room and no one is quite like you.
Maybe it will be your skin, your clothes or the curl of your hair.
There will be times when no one will understand the way words curl from your mouth,
The beautiful language of the country you left behind...
And because they don't understand the room will fill with laughter until the teachers quiets everyone...
There will be time when the words don't come.
Your own voice, once huge, now smaller.

I love every, single thing I've ever read from Jacqueline Woodson.  (In fact I wrote about some of her middle grade fiction here.) This beautiful book about the fear of new beginnings is no different.  I got teary just from reading the preview pages online. Beginnings are hard! We who have had so many first days of school can easily forget that our children are staring into the unknown and possibly scary when they walk into a new classroom or a new school for the first time.

Beginnings can be full of anxiety, especially if you have a kid that leans that way anyway.  What will my teacher be like? Will the work be too hard? Who will be my friend?  Am I wearing the right thing? I don't want to leave my mom! Woodson's book layers in the additional complexity of language and race and offers an opportunity to ask, "Why do you think 'the curl of her hair' might make her fell out of place?" and "What make you feel unsure or alone?" Young or old we all know what it's like to want to be understood and feel welcomed in a new place.

We may not be able to completely remove our kids' anxiety about beginning something new, but we can assure them of two things: our love for them and God's constant care.

Small comfort? Maybe.  But if you have the space for it and can carve out the time, try a night-before or morning-of blessing and litany of beginning.  You can make up your own words that make sense for your context and the age of your child, but the scripts that we repeat in our heads are powerful, no matter our age, so give your kid the script.  It might go something like this:

Tomorrow you are beginning a new thing. I'm proud of you and I want to bless you and send you on your way with words to help you when you feel nervous or uncertain. When you need to remind yourself of your own strength.  I want to to say these words each time:  God is with me. My family loves me. I can do hard things!

When you step into your new classroom for the first time...
When you're discovering all your new routines and schedules...
When you're wondering who will be your partner, who will sit with you at lunch, who to be your friend...
When you feel challenged by the school work...
When you feel overwhelmed or anxious...
When you miss the ones you love...
God is with you.  Your family loves you. You are strong and you can do hard things!

An optional addition to such a blessing which has been helpful in my experience is a meaningful tangible reminder of the care, love and safety for your child to carry with them.  A piece of jewelry or small item that fits in a pocket quietly says, "God is with me, my people love me, I am not alone."

If you have a child for whom newness is exciting, an adventure to be embraced, rejoice! Or even if this new beginning is just another day, I think it's still worthwhile to bless these new steps with courage and joy and determination.  To thank God for the the Spirit within them, delighting in the opportunities that await.  A litany for such a child can be a celebration, in the spirit of the end of Woodson's book:

This is the day you begin
to find the places inside
your laughter and your lunches,
your books, your travel and your stories,

where every new friend has something
a little like you - and something else
so fabulously not quite like you
at all.

Peace to you in the days of preparation and beginnings.

Blessing the Transitions

For those of us who have children in school, the end of school is a significant transition, whether it's into a new grade, a new school or graduating and going off to college. We mark these transitions with chalk board "end of x grade" photos on Instagram (or is that just in my feed - can't say I'm that organized myself). In our congregation we have a tradition of marking the transition out of high school with a quilt and an invitation to grads to bring some show-and-tell mementos of their life as students. But how, for all our children, do we honor and bless the work and accomplishments, the joy and anticipation, and mark these transitions as significant life moments that are held in the hands of God?

Traci Smith, whose work I've recommended before, makes the suggestion to present to a graduate the gift of new shoes. Along with the new shoes, a picture of or the actual shoes they wore as they began school and a blessing. Something like this: "We remember the feet that wore these little shoes and we are so proud of all the places your feet have take you and taken us together - the classrooms, and sports fields and stages and trails. We have seen your feet, and every part of you, grow so much! May God bless your feet. As you as you continue to grow in knowledge and in spirit, may God walk with you wherever your future takes you."

Maybe the gift is shoes decorated by a family member or maybe there are additional mementos and gifts inside the new shoes, or a special letter. Maybe it's just a gift certificate to pick shoes that the graduate will like. I love this idea for a transition or graduation. We usually think of giving new items of clothing at the beginning of a school year, but this really honors the path that has been trod. And not to get all "Footprints," but Jesus has been walking with our children every step of the way.

This end-of-school time is a time for a benediction, a blessing to send us into something new - even if the something new is just summer break. So I offer you this benediction and a blessing on the transition:

May your feet come alive
in the unknown geography that waits for them.
May you step from this threshold into an adventure
in which the One who created you,
in whose image you are beautifully formed,
calls you into love,
compels you toward joy
and promises to be always present when your feet stumble.

Amen.

Darkness is as Light to You

Psalm 139 is a beloved text for me, as for many. It names the intimacy and thoroughness with which God knows and loves us. "For it was you who formed my inmost parts, you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." The author continues, naming the distant places they could go. There would be nowhere where God was not, including the grave, including the dark cover of night. In these dark places, still God is there.

It is Epiphany Sunday this week, the Sunday when we are called to "Rise! Shine! For your light has come!" Beautiful words from Isaiah 60 but am often troubled with the way we use lightness as a stand in for good and darkness for bad. The Psalmist knows that God is in the darkness.

There is a richness of language that we are missing when we forget about the goodness of the dark. The words of the hymn "Joyful is the dark" capture the magisterial grandeur or darkness: "Joyful is the dark, holy, hidden God, rolling cloud of night beyond all naming...Joyful is the dark depth of love divine, roaring, looming thundercloud of glory."

In these words is a vast and beautifully energetic darkness. But the dark is also intimate and close and fertile. In dark, warm soil grow buried seeds. In the dark bedchamber lovers caress. In the dark nursery we hold our little ones and sing them to sleep. In the dark we feel our way, are gentle.

There are indeed times when it feels like we are flailing in dark nothingness. That feeling of being alone and un-seeing can certainly feel like all dark is. But nothing is darkness to God. There is nowhere we can go that God does not hold us firmly and gently in hand.


May your darkness be blessed.
May it be the soil in which love is rooted and grows.
May it be the ocean over which the Spirit hovers.
May it be the holy place where you are met by God.

Wisdom's Blessing

I have been dwelling with the call of Wisdom this week, as she raises her voice from Proverbs, calling to all humanity. God's Holy Wisdom in Biblical tradition is personified as a woman standing at the city gate and calling with longing for all humanity to embrace her. The Inclusive Bible reads in chapter 8, "Doesn't Wisdom call? Doesn't Understanding raise her voice?" and "I was God's delight day after day, rejoicing at being in God's presence continually, rejoicing in the whole world and delighting in humankind."

The Wisdom of God delights in us! I was inspired to write this blessing:

Mary Cassat

May you hear the voice of Wisdom.
And like a child who
     hears the call of her mother,
     and comes with eagerness
     as to a celebration,
May you run to her,
     where she waits
     with open arms
     to catch you up
     and lend you the warmth
     of her knowing.

Amen.

(Folks are welcome to use this in their own contexts, but please attribute authorship. Thanks!) 

Christmas Tree Blessing

I've really enjoyed Traci Smith's Seamless Faith for it's everyday suggestions about how to incorporated conversations and easy rituals into family life. The following is a seasonal example as we approach Advent and the annual installation of Christmas decorating:

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This tradition allows families to bring a moment of spirituality to the secular tradition of decorating the tree. Try having a different family member read the blessing each year.

Designed for All Ages

Time Investment: 1-2 minutes

Materials:

1. Blessing (printed below)

2. Christmas tree (before decorating)

3. Manger scene/crèche scene (optional)

How To:

1. Before the tree is decorated, gather everyone together around and read the following blessing:

God who created the bird in the air, the fish in the sea, the stars in the sky, and the trees in the ground, bless this tree as we decorate it and make it a joyful symbol in our home. May its branches remind us of the shade and shelter you provide for us and for many creatures. May its trunk remind us of your strength. May its light bring us peace. May we remember your gift to us this season, the gift of the baby Jesus. Amen.

2. Optional (see note below) – After decorating the tree, set up crèche or manger scene below the tree.

Note:

In the United States there seems to be a sharp division between secular Christmas traditions (the tree, the stockings, Santa) and Christian traditions (the manger scene, attending church, singing Christmas carols). As the tree is the focal point in many homes during Christmas, blessing the tree and setting up a manger scene under the tree (as opposed to gifts) can highlight the Christian significance of the day, something culture has lost sight of.

Variations:

· Print the blessing on an ornament and say it as the ornament is hung on the tree.

· Write a new blessing each year and collect them from year to year.

· Cut down your own tree and say this blessing before the tree is cut down and brought home.

· Adapt the language of the blessing to the age of your children or your own traditions and culture.

I can barely handle it

I spent too much time looking at pictures this morning. I found I could not stop gazing at the joy and beauty and tenderness captured by Jim of our blessing service for the children of the congregation. They are indeed all of our children. My absolute favorite pictures are those of people delighting in the children in their arms who are not their own. I can barely handle it, you guys. This is what I’m talking about when I say you are saints! We bear this beautiful gift and joy together.

Yet even as we dwelled in and cradled the sweetness of new life, we began to understand that we are also holding the tenderness of great pain and grief. Lives have been lost this year, my friends. People we love are no longer with us. It broke my heart. You broke my heart. Each poem, each name, each candle and the knowledge that there were poems, names and candles unread, unsaid and unlit in folks who stayed seated. I can barely handle it. We bear this terrible weight and sorrow together.

I am so grateful I can barely handle it. I bless you. I bless you. You have blessed me so much.

God will put love on you

Weldon is preparing to leave our congregation to retirement and we are preparing to bless and release him into life beyond.  This Sunday I anticipate his offering a blessing for us, his congregation of almost the past twenty years.  When we gathered as a pastoral team last week he invited us to consider what blessing means to us. 

We use both the act of blessing and the language of having been blessed often in the church: we invite God's blessing at moments of special transition, like birth, baptism and marriage, or sending and commissioning.  We bless our offerings and meals and at the start of school we blessed backpacks (photo above). We say we have been blessed when life seems to being going right.  But for me at least this language had gotten almost cliche.

A few weeks ago, though, we encountered the story of Jacob.  With Jacob, blessing is a struggle.  Blessing doesn't always come in the form of what feels good and blessing doesn't always come automatically or with gracious words.  Blessing can be messy.  Sometimes we need to demand it of God, just as Jacob did.  I won't let you go until you bless me!  Bless me, God!  It is in our greatest struggle that we are most desperate for the real and living presence of a God who names us and calls us precious.

I'm figuring out that we cannot bless ourselves.  But we can ask for blessing.  Blessing happens in relationship - always with the Divine and often in human relationship.  It is something we do for each other.  It is something that God offers to us without our intercession and which we can offer on God's behalf.  This has been a time of many transitions and changes in the congregation.  Emotions run high and leadership has been listening carefully, committed to the work of spiritual discernment.  I carry the weight of this and I have soaked up blessing at every opportunity when it is conferred upon me.

Pat Shaver recently wrote a beautiful and I think much longed for blessing to the members of Spiritual Leadership Team and to pastors.  My correspondence with her subsequently has also helped me understand that we receive and experience blessing in prayer so much differently than when we pray intercession.  "God help Amy with the struggle she is having" is a prayer I experience as begging God, a tugging on God's hem, working God.  How much more full is the experience of praying over or with the struggling one, "I bless you with God's gracious presence in the face of struggle.  I bless you with wisdom and strength and the fullness of God's discerning Spirit."  In doing so we open a window into the heart of God, into what God already longs for and desires for us.  I feel I can release myself into blessing in a way that is totally different from the pleading of intercession.

I think the one on the right is Jesus.

Not long ago Naomi made a little series of drawings that had written at the top, "God will put love on you."  She also did one that said, "God will put strength on you."  She has no idea how much I need to receive these blessings.  These drawings are a blessing.  Not as well crafted and eloquent as the blessing Pat conferred, but blessing nonetheless.  I asked her to make me one to keep in my office. (Click on the image to see a larger version)  Because receiving blessing can be tough in times of struggle.  And because this is a wrestling time, my prayer is, 'Bless me, God!'  And may I bless God's people.  God will put love on you.

Thoughts for an EPPisode

The following is a reflection I wrote for an Epp family reunion this past summer.  I was asked by my dad to reflect on family and genetic memory.

I’ve lived in Seattle for 8 years and before that most of my life apart from extended family and apart even from immediate family: time spent in Jordan with MCC, here in Rosthern at RJC for high school, in Winnipeg as an adult, and finally the move to the US 11 years ago.  Jesus told his disciples in Matthew that he came “to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” He left his immediate family and the work of his father to be an itinerant preacher and prophet and stir up all kinds of trouble.  While I certainly haven’t been set against members of my family – and I don’t necessarily think that Jesus was either – the call to go to seminary and to get married while there and then to ministry has meant being far from family.

Many of the members of the congregation where I serve as pastor and in fact many if not most of the people who live in Seattle are far from family.  We have all migrated from somewhere else – mostly from other parts of the States, but some like me from Canada or from other parts of the world.  And we build families out of the communities where we find ourselves.  It is a city of people who are looking to new starts and adventure.  Now, I might be one of the only Epps in Seattle (I Googled it and there may be one or two others) but my church family has become my primary network of care and support.

I think it may be true for my generation of this family more than any before that we are spread far and wide and see each other less and less often.  And it is often for really good reasons – I ran into Nathan a few weeks ago when we were both in Phoenix for a church convention.  He, like me has married and serves a church in the US. Others have left for work or to serve or to marry or for education.  David will be off in only a little while with MCC SALT.

But the thing is, it has in some ways, been my Epp family that led me to where I have been and what I am doing with my life.  When they took us off to Jordan and even in the stories of and travel to the Labrador coast, mom and dad were creating the foundation for service and travel.  The songs and stories at home, the visits to the homes of Epps (and Duecks and Reimers) at holidays and vacations shaped me into who I am.  The knowledge that I come from family in which there were many called to serve as pastors makes me feel deeply rooted in and proud of my work.  If genes have a memory, then they are telling their story in my choice of vocation as pastor and in my willingness to venture into a foreign land – in so far as the US is foreign.

Jesus may not have been so positive about the role of family – although clearly his family raised him as a knowledgeable and faithful servant of God – but Paul, a single dude, speaks clearly about the important of honoring the generation before, and about the influence in the life of faith  of parents and grandparents on the young.  He writes to his colleague Timothy in his greeting in 2 Timothy, “I am aware of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice, and now, I am sure, lives in you.”

It could as well be written, “I am aware of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandparents Paul and Lillian and then in your parents Larry and Denise, and now lives in you.” 

The challenge that I feel is that now I am raising yet another generation Epp.  In fact it was really important for me that Naomi share our name.  I was near Naomi’s age at the first Eppisode, in '81.  I am curious to know in another 30 years what she might remember about her family and its role in her formation.  I pray that God grant me – and Naomi’s dad Joe - the grace and faith and wisdom to be parents like those that Paul commends.  I am very grateful for the family that has formed me.

Chalking the Doors

This past Sunday, in addition to being New Year's Day, was the Sunday that we celebrated Epiphany. There were few children present, but with those who were, we blessed the church at 3120 NE 125th St in a new-to-me tradition using chalk colored chalk and the initials of the wise men who visited Jesus two millenia ago.

Now, the wise visitors may have been three - or fewer or more - we know they brought three gifts. They may have been advisers to kings, although they were almost certainly not kings themselves, in spite of what songs and stories say. We do not know their names, but tradition has dubbed them Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. They were philosophers, students of scripture, history and culture, who saw a star, read old prophesies and made a connection.

They did, as the song says, 'traverse afar' and they were strangers in a strange land when they were received into the home of Mary and Joseph and Jesus. When we chalk their initials onto our door frames, we bless our door with the prayer that we too may be gracious to visitors, that those who come may bring blessing and be blessed, that we may offer hospitality in the manner of the holy family, and that visitors to our homes may find safe harbor in their coming in and in their going out.

A variation on the prayer below is what I used in worship and what i send home on cards with the children and others from the congregation who wanted to chalk their own doors. You can be certain that it is a wonderful novelty for kids and adults alike to be given permission to write on the walls.

Door and Chalk Blessing:
C+B+M+2012

God of doors and homes, bless this home this year and every year.
Bless all who come and go through this door, both those who live here and those who visit.
May all who enter through this door come in peace and bring joy.
May all who come to this door find welcome and love.
May the love and joy in this home overflow and spread into the community and the world.