I hope you’ve stayed warm over this past week. I’m glad that people stayed home and safe last Sunday, when it was so cold – but I have to say I was also pleasantly surprised at the number of people who did attend worship in person.
Because we expected low attendance, we rescheduled the dialogue sermon I had planned with my friend Logan Robertson for this coming Sunday instead. Logan is the Pastor at After Hours, an innovative United Methodist ministry begun by the Rev. Jerry Herships.
It’s hard to believe that the holidays are behind us. But now we’re setting off on a new year, and I hope that you’ve had some time to think about 2024 and what’s coming in the next 12 months.
This week, I’ll send out a final letter to close out the 2025 pledge campaign for our operating budget. If you haven’t pledged your financial support to our ministry yet, I hope you’ll consider doing so.
After all the planning and gift shopping and holiday frenzy, I hope that you are enjoying a delightful day with loved ones. Gayla and I will be with family today.
This week’s letter is short, and its message is simple: thank you. On the church staff, we try to plan our programming about six months ahead. That means we have our first Christmas conversations in July or August. A little at a time over the ensuing months, we put our Advent and Christmas preparations in place. But none of it would be possible without your kindness and commitment to our shared ministry.
If you’ve read much American history, you might have heard about what’s called the Brooks-Sumner incident of 1856. On May 22nd of that year, about five years before the civil war started, U.S. Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a pro-slavery Democrat, walked into the Senate Chamber with two of his friends, fellow South Carolina Congressman Laurence Keitt and Virginia Representative Henry Edmundson.
So tomorrow is the last day of the 12 days of Christmas. After months of preparation, months of consumerist frenzy, months of economists holding their breath to see what Christmas retail numbers would tell us, after weeks of Advent, the celebration of Christmas Eve and Day, family gatherings, gift exchanges, cards, travel, trees, decorations up, decorations down, after all of that, Christmas is at an end. I don’t know about you, but I could use a nap.
Does anyone remember the controversy around the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. that was dedicated in Washington D.C. in August of 2011? Actually, I guess there were two controversies. One was that one of the inscription on the monument was supposed to be a quotation from King, but when they unveiled the statue, the quote was actually something King didn’t say
I grew up in a small Methodist church, and I guess my basic Biblical knowledge was about average for a churchgoing kid raised in the 1970s and early 80s. I knew most of the greatest hits, the Bible stories every kid learns in Sunday School: the two creation stories in Genesis, the story of Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Moses and the Exodus, the birth of Jesus, stuff like that.
Do you ever think about how we depend on other people, usually without realizing it or even knowing them? I arrived at church today because for the most part, everybody on the road this morning as I drove over here was obeying traffic laws. (There was that one guy who ran through the stoplight after it changed, but I guess we’ve all kind of come to expect that. I am a little hazy about why he would need to do that before 7:00 on a Sunday morning, but hey, who am I to judge?)
