02/07/2024 0 Comments
From The Vicar: Our Abundant Offering
From The Vicar: Our Abundant Offering
# From The... - Letters to the Congregation
From The Vicar: Our Abundant Offering
Dear Ones of St. Columba's,
Every once and a while I like to walk the church property and pray. It's a thing that always feels more productive than I anticipate. Honestly, I mostly do it because it feels like a thing I should do, as your vicar and one of the people who is on the grounds regularly. But I always end this walk and pray time feeling like maybe I should do this prayerful walk every day. I walk the parking lot and yes, there is usually a car or two that has someone sleeping in it (depending on the time of year, time of day), but this reminds me how in the past several years we have become a community that is invested in, and safe for, our neighbors without shelter. Our relationships with them are not without tension, but we are learning to value those relationships. I walk past the parking lot and into the community garden, and I remember how it used to be blackberry bushes. Now refugee and immigrant families use the land to grow food, connect with the land, and be in community with us and each other. Past the garden is the muddy road to the south cell phone tower, with the rainwater collection "pond" and eventually a piece of tattered barbed wire that marks where St. C's property ends and the easement next to I-5 begins. On my most recent walk no one appears to be living there, but I remember how Nate Chapman and I walked back there last summer while assessing garbage pick-up needs on the property, and how he stepped on a nail. I feel grateful for Nate, and for the many people who give their time to make sure our land stays safe and useful.
After my walk to the cellphone tower, and a prayer of Thanksgiving for the income it provides to us for ministry, I retrace my steps back to the community garden and walk north. The fruit orchard needs work - some of our community gardeners have spread out a little too much. It's not a bad problem to have, really, but we will need to clear out some of the space around the trees if they are going to thrive. I look over at the fenced in backyard of our church and remember how empty it was when I arrived seven years ago. I think about Bob Ewing, who took an idea about stained glass windows and ran with it, as I see those windows standing there now. I imagine what will soon be the new reality of the garden - with garden beds to hold the ashes of our beloved dead and garden beds to grow food to give away. I feel excited to see this happen.
And then I turn right at the end of the chain link fence, skipping the other cell phone tower road this time but just as grateful for its presence, and heading toward the bee hives. I stop there to marvel a bit. I do visit the bees more often than I walk the entire property - I find them mezmerizing and hopeful and mysterious. I feel like St. Columba would deeply approve of our bees.
After the bees I turn and face the building. So much happens on this land and so much happens in this building. I think of children and adults baptized here, of the conversations, the food consumed, the relationships built and maintained, the songs sung and art created. I think of how our space has housed homeless men and women, been a meeting place for our South Sudanese siblings in Christ to connect and affirm their shared culture, and how weekly our hungry neighbors can come here to this place and be fed. I think of how I have cried and laughed and loved here - so much that these are exactly what I expect to do when I come to work and to worship in this space and on this land. I think of how that stayed true even through the pre-vaccine pandemic, when the laughing and loving and crying mostly happened in front of cameras and while looking at you all on screens.
Your stewardship team chose the theme "Abundant Offering" for this year's faithful giving campaign. This is an accurate description of God's stance toward us here in this community of faith - God has given to us abundantly. We have been blessed with love and connection and resources and relationships in ways that feed our hearts, our souls, and yes often also our tummies, if it happens to be St. Columba day or any other opportunity for us to have a potluck.
Andrew and I give ten percent of my income to St. C's, which amounts to a pledge of just a little over $10,000 a year. We are proud to do it, we have worked hard over several years of our marriage and family life to be able to do it, and this giving has and does bless us. We hope to keep increasing our pledge in the years to come. Whether or not you have pledged in the past, I invite you to consider pledging this year to consider making your own abundant offering to the place where God shows up for us, so that we can show up for each other and for our neighborhood and world. And friend, we all give at different levels, what we can. Every pledge counts in this place - because what matters is that we give in the ways we can, and in the ways we are called.
This Sunday we will hold our in-gathering of pledges and wine. Please come, join us in celebrating all that ST. C's is, and all that we are becoming. If you have not already pledged online, bring your card to the service and we will collect and bless the pledges that enable us to plan and budget for 2022. You are also invited to bring a bottle of ruby port wine, in faith that we will soon be sharing wine and bread together abundantly, and to fill our sacristy cabinets for the communion feasts of the coming year.
You are also, incidentally, welcome to come in costume, as it is Halloween. We will have festive desserts after each service, and a party with pizza and slime after the 11am. We will eating the pizza and making the slime. My good friend and colleague Stephen McHale will be our guest preacher.
Dear ones, thank you for being the abundant offering of hope and joy and provision in this place. I look forward to the celebration this Sunday, the planning of the weeks to come and our shared vocation as a local expression of Christ's body on the West Hill of Kent in the year to come.
with care and gratitude,
Alissa
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