3/23/26

Pastor’s Ponderings

Lent is the season of mindfulness, and the call to move deeper into the practice of picking up our cross and falling in behind our Lord. If we get lazy about it, the Spirit is constantly present to  “stir us up to love and good deeds” (and not just during Lent!)

Several months ago I attended a prayer retreat with a group of about 30 people from our region. At the beginning of the retreat we drew names to be prayer partners during the time we were together.  

Did I draw the name of the person I felt closest to, or the one I most admired?  Did I draw the name of someone I knew could use my support, or someone I had taken under my wing to mentor? No. 

No, the name I drew was the one person in the whole retreat who gets on my last nerve.  The one I have to work to find something in common with, the who makes me uncomfortable with their language and their lifestyle, the one I do not choose to sit beside at dinner.

Of course theirs was the name I drew.  Because that is the kind of thing I have come to expect from the Holy Spirit, the Spirit active and present who is determined to keep us growing in our faith and on task in the call to love one another.

It has been a struggle since the very beginning of the church, keeping Christians on task in the call to love one another.  I think about that church dinner in Antioch when the Apostle Paul called the Apostle Peter out for hypocrisy right in front of the whole congregation, including the delegation of visitors who had just arrived from Jerusalem. If I had been the pastor in Antioch I probably would have changed the subject, called on the membership committee to serve dessert, and made a point to not invite Peter and Paul to the same church event ever again.

But that is simply not the way the Holy Spirit rolls.  We are not allowed to rest comfortably in a state of ignoring one another or pretending someone we do not care for is not sitting in the pew right in front of us.  If the church is to be the light of Christ in the world we must learn to get along civilly and respectfully, not snarling at each other, not trying to get other people to join us in ganging up on someone else, not leaving a congregation because there is someone in it who has hurt our feelings.  

And if you ever doubt this, just head over to a prayer retreat where there is one person who gets on your last nerve.  The Spirit will make sure theirs is the name you draw, will look you straight in the eyes, and will say to you “Pray.”

Grace and Peace as our Lenten journey takes us to the foot of the cross,

Beth

3/16/26

Pastor’s Ponderings

I was watching the news when the story broke a few weeks back of the sentencing of the man who murdered Duke graduate student Angela Risi in 2023. The first thing the reporter did was ask Angela’s father outside of the courtroom if he forgave the man who murdered his daughter.

 I struggle with the modern tendency of reporters to ask people “do you forgive so-and-so?”  then turn to the camera and report “victim’s family is pleased that justice was done today but says they will never forgive”, or “victim’s family says yes they will forgive”  –  as if forgiveness is as simple as saying “yes, I’ll take fries with that.”

Forgiveness is not a simple decision of how I feel but a conscious choice of how I hope to act. 

Yesterday I finished a three part sermon series on Joseph and his willingness to forgive the brothers who brutally attacked him and sold him into slavery.   It took three whole sermons because forgiveness is a long and complicated process.  First Joseph was horrifically wronged, and then he was presented with the perfect opportunity for revenge.  As a matter of a fact, Joseph’s opportunity for revenge presented itself in such a way that a lesser mind might have concluded God had actually created that opportunity just so Joseph could take his revenge.  However if he had done so, the future of God’s chosen family could have ended with just a few strokes of an Egyptian sword.  Thankfully Joseph understood he was part of a plan much bigger than himself, and because he loved and trusted God, he chose a more excellent way. 

But look carefully. Do we see anywhere in Genesis the narrative reporting “Joseph forgave his brothers and everything went back to just like it was before they sold him into slavery?” or even “Joseph forgave his brothers, and even though it took a few years, they eventually became the best of friends?” No.  Because it isn’t there.   

Instead, Joseph practiced forgiveness in three ways.  First, when the tables were turned, Joseph practiced forgiveness by not seeking revenge. He did not force his brothers to become slaves as they had forced him, for the simple reason he did not choose to be like them. Second, even while he was a slave and certainly when he rose to power, Joseph recognized God’s presence in his life.  He gratefully saw himself not as a victim but as a person cherished by God.  This allowed him to provide his brothers with food to ease their starvation, not because they deserved it but because he served God. Third, Joseph refused to allow the wrong done to him to pass into the next generation.  This terrible thing could have been the basis of a fracture that passed from generation to generation as children took sides and reenacted the tragedy by fighting among themselves. Instead, Joseph saved the future of God’s people by firmly refusing to treat his brothers with hatred or malice over the remaining years of their lives together.  His decision to be consistently fair and compassionate meant that Joseph became “Uncle Joseph who took care of us in Egypt” rather than “Uncle Joseph who demanded we side with him against our fathers.”

None of these three things mean Joseph loved his brothers as if nothing had ever happened.  All of these things mean Joseph trusted God to guide him to do the right thing regardless of how he felt about his brothers at any given moment.

So here’s my conclusion.  If I ever find myself in the situation of coming out of a courtroom to face a reporter who asks “Do you forgive them?”   my answer will have to be “All I can hope to do at this point is trust God.”

Grace and peace,

Beth

3/9/26

Pastor’s Pondering

The hellebores are blooming their heads off.

I love these beautiful harbingers of Spring with their muted colors and proficient blooms.  It takes forever to get them established, but once they are well rooted they are one of the earliest flowers to bloom, a dependable sign that spring is on the way. 

If you attempt to transplant them into their correct ecosystem, that is. I learned this the hard way.

            When we lived in a subdivision in town I had a beautiful stand of hellebores, or “Lenten Roses” as they are commonly called. When we moved out to Crantock Road I wanted to bring them with us, so I looked around for a shady, protected spot and my eye fell upon an old oak tree with a bare spot underneath - perfect, I thought, for the shade loving hellebores, and a spot that doesn’t even need to be cleared out to be ready for planting. 

            So I transplanted seven of my biggest, healthiest hellebores into the empty spot under the old oak tree. A good friend who noticed my new transplants warned me that planting beneath the oak would disturb its surface feeder roots and possibly even eventually kill the tree.  She need not have worried.

            Maybe city oaks have a problem with cultivation, but out in their own environment surrounded by their full ecosystem intact, oaks are in no danger of death by disturbance.  An oak tree has remarkable defenses and many allies. The clue for me should have been that the space beneath the tree was devoid of vegetation to start with.  It was not, as I assumed, a simple lucky break for a busy woman planting hellebores.  There were other reasons for this.

 First it was the huge crop of acorns that dropped directly onto the hellebores during late summer.  This brought the squirrels, eating and digging and uprooting plants beneath the tree, and then at night, deer doing the same thing - uprooting with their noses, digging with their hooves.   Then just as I had resettled the uprooted plants back into the soil again for the umpteenth time, the oak leaves started to fall - showers upon showers of leaves, smothering anything that lay beneath the tree.  With its acorns and its leaves, the old oak tree protected its own feeder roots by attracting allies to uproot and dropping leaves to smother anything that tried to take root beneath it. 

            I gave it a valiant try for a couple of seasons, resettling the plants after the deer and squirrels each fall and raking leaves out of the bed over and over through the winters, but each year I lost more plants to the uprooting and the smothering. Finally it dawned on me that what I thought would be beautiful – hellebores nodding their lovely heads under an old oak tree – was actually an arrogant attempt on my part to force plants to live together who were not created to share the same space.

            I knew it was time to surrender the spring I hurried over to the tree and saw one lone hellebore putting up two sickly little stems with one frail flower. I looked up into the grand limbs of the majestic old oak, a member of a keystone species of our region estimated to support over 2,300 species of life including mammals, birds, insects, fungi and lichens.  Humbly I thanked the tree for teaching me its valuable lesson:  we are all part of a massive interconnected web of life designed by our bountiful Creator, and it is not our place to march into that web and begin moving pieces around, inflicting our will upon it.  Wisdom comes in understanding how we all fit together and therefore thrive. 

            Today the old oak tree still has that enticingly empty space beneath it, but I know better than to try to plant anything there.  On the other hand, ten whole years of observation and pondering later, in a spot with carefully tended soil shaded by the house, the hellebores are lifting their lovely faces to welcome spring.

Grace and Peace,

Beth

2.22/26

Pastor’s Ponderings

“Remember you are dust and to dust you will return.”

These words were spoken millions of times around the world last week, as ashes were applied to foreheads and Christ’s believers gathered for the onset of the season of Lent.  Together on Ash Wednesday and on the first Sunday in Lent we knelt and remembered that we are mortal and our days are numbered. 

Why this annual remembering of our own mortality, these ashes, this whole season of quiet contemplation and repentance? After all, have we not been set free from this death? Does not heaven await?

In the 16^th century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.”

In order to fully live into life as one set free from death, in order to truly be able to live self-sacrificially even to the point of laying down one’s life for a friend, believers must be free from the shackles of fear. A mad rush to Easter Morning without first going past the cross is not as much a celebration “because every day should be Easter Day” as it is a denial of death’s potential grip over us. There is great evidence that Montaigne is right on point – if you were consumed by obsessive fear of snakes and went for treatment, the most likely course of treatment would be exposure to snakes. Same for most everything we obsess about.  Exposure therapy, or “desensitization” is the best way to counter our fears and phobias.

So every Spring when the world around us surges to life, Christians focus on death in order to decrease its fearful power over us. In the capable hands of Lent, death becomes something ordinary and routine, sin something forgiven, and spring something we can throw ourselves into with unfettered, unafraid joy.

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

Grateful to be walking this Lenten journey with you,

Beth

2/16/26

Pastor’s Ponderings

Yesterday we got to read the end of the story.

            Wednesday we turn the page to the next chapter, the one that begins with Jesus “turning his face to Jerusalem” and continues through the last Passover celebration with his closest friends, the horror of the trial, and the brutality of the cross. At the very end the sun will go out, because the Light of the World is going out.

Every year we walk through Lent together as a time of self-examination and repentance. We take this solemn journey not to dwell upon sin and death to the point we are beat down and numbed by it but just the opposite -  to let its reality sink into us so that we can see what it is we have been set free from. It is not a time of self-loathing, it is a time of grace and renewal.  It is not a time to give in to despair, but a time of repolishing our spiritual armor and facing the battle with renewed courage.

But it would not be possible to experience this fully if we did not know how it all ends- to know that after sin comes healing, after death comes life.  We could not face his broken body had we not seen it first shining in its post resurrection splendor, full of light and strength and victory, beckoning us forward to follow him.

So this last chapter before the victorious end, the chapter we call Lent, will call on us to draw deep in the well of living water and plunge into the reality of sin and death, the reality of our own short fallings, the reality of the grief that is a part of being mortal.  Who among us could bear it, would dare to pass with him through the valley of the descending dark, except that we have already seen how the story ends?  Already caught a glimpse of what is coming when we saw him shining in his full resurrection splendor back on the Mount of Transfiguration? 

Lent will officially begin Wednesday.  But yesterday we celebrated a preview of how it all ends – his body shining in resurrection splendor, the Light of the World that death cannot hold and that darkness cannot overcome.  

Grace and Peace as we walk the Lenten road together, 

Beth

2/9/26

Pastor’s Ponderings

Every year during the last two weeks of February you will hear some semblance of the words “Please give generously to Week of Compassion, our Disciples mission and relief fund used all year long wherever disaster strikes or long term recovery from disaster is taking place.”

            You have heard these words again this year.

            Today it occurs to me it is a good idea to pause and remember that these words are words about people, not just famines, hurricanes, and budgets.

            There is a woman in Otavalo, Ecuador named Diana.  Several years ago Diana, in a desperate attempt to lift her family out of poverty, began making and selling ice cream.  With only a few freezers and a limited budget she struggled to meet goals and grow a business.

That’s when your Week of Compassion dollars, in partnership with our Ecuadorian agency partner FEDICE (the Ecumenical Foundation for Development, Integration, Training and Education) awarded a small, low interest loan to Diana. With the loan she was able to buy more freezers and hire other women in her community to work with her.  Slowly and ethically, she grew her business with dignity.  

         Around the same time Diana started making ice cream, another woman in Ecuador, Abigail, was also struggling to make ends meet.  She too was supplied a small loan from Week of Compassion and FEDICE, a loan which allowed her to act on her dream of opening a pharmacy.  Today Abigail in her thriving pharmacy provides her community with medicine and essentials, offers financial services…and sells ice cream.  Diana’s ice cream.

            Let us never forget we are called to be salt and light in the world.

Grace and peace,

Beth

1/12/26

Pastor’s Ponderings

In the first chapter of Romans the great Apostle writes if we have walked through the glory of God’s creation and observed carefully what we have seen, we have no excuse for not knowing God - for God’s power and divine nature “have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” 

Before the age of enlightenment, many Christian theologians spoke of the “Two Books of God”: the Book of the Word (Scripture) and the Book of Creation (the natural world created by God). The Book of the Word reveals God’s divine plan for the world and God’s guiding actions within the world; the Book of Creation reveals God’s being and power.  

Following the enlightenment the Book of Creation fell to the wayside.  After all, “enlightened” people understand the colors of a sunset are simply the result of the different lengths of the sun’s refracted rays, and the gifts of the earth are simply resources of which money is to be made.

But what if our “enlightenment” is actually our spiritual blindness, our inability to perceive deeper truths hidden in the vast mysteries of creation?  What if our arrogance as the top predators on the food chain has caused us to miss how deeply interwoven our lives are within the interconnectedness of creation? Paul also writes that in Christ, God is about the process of reconciling the world to himself and calls us to be agents of that reconciliation (II Corinthians 5:17f). Revelation makes clear that the world being reconciled includes all of creation, as every creature sings its praise (Revelation 5:13),  the destroyers of earth are destroyed (11:18), and Eden is restored with the tree of life at its center and the river flowing from the throne to again nourish all the world (22:1-2).

This week is the ten-year anniversary of Marty’s and my move to our home on Crantock Road. When we left the suburbs for this largely forgotten tract of land that had been both overcultivated and used as a dumping site for a brick mason’s leftover materials, our hope was to answer the call to be minsters of reconciliation by assisting this land and all its lifeforms in healing and renewed fertility. We believed we were restoring the land to health – but interesting enough, after ten wonderful years of attempting to read the Book of Creation and discern God’s eternal power and divine nature through the land we steward, we have come to realize that the land is also restoring us.

Grace and peace,

Beth

12/29/25

Pastor’s Ponderings

One year when Marty and I were still newlyweds living in the parsonage across from the Hookerton Christian Church, we snuck out on Christmas Eve night to ring the church bell at exactly midnight. Our neighbor, Lucille Suggs, heard the bell and told us later she got up to see if something was on fire… only to see her two young neighbors running back across the road giggling like children.

Who knows who else in that tiny little village that night heard the distant sound of a ringing church bell announcing the miracle of Christmas - children listening for Santa Claus, adults turning in their sleep.  Perhaps they roused just enough to later wonder if it was real or if they dreamed the sound, or even if it was  “church bells beyond the stars heard,” that lovely line from George Herbert’s “Prayer (I).”*

This is the time of year when we remember Alfred Tennyson’s words about bells:

“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, loud bells, and let him die.”

And one of my favorite poets (and preachers!) Malcolm Guite writes this blessing of the bells:

“‘Begin again’ they sing, ‘again begin’,

A ring and a rhythm answered from within.”

Happy New Year, my friends far and near,

Beth

12/22/25

Pastor’s Ponderings

The heavens parted and the very essence of God came down the pathway of light in order to dwell inside human flesh. But not just to dwell with us as in “well here we are, I am one of you now” but to forge the connection that would allow us to become more like God and less like ourselves. As C. S. Lewis was fond of saying “The Son of God became man to enable men to become Sons of God” – or to bring his 1950’s speech up to date “The Son of God became human in order that humans may become Children of God.”

The purpose of the downward motion was to raise us up.  To meet us where we are but not let us stay here.  To begin our transformation away from the distortion caused by sin into the clarity of the truth. To teach us how to love through the very act of loving us.

And so now we come to kneel together at the manger. And as we go down on our knees we sense at the very same moment we are being lifted up. 

Deserving?  Not hardly.

Humbled?  Definitely.

Grateful?  Eternally so.

Merry Christmas dear friends,

Beth