PeaceBang

Christmas Eve Preparations

I’m making final decisions on our big Christmas Eve production. It’s really fun, and it’s really stressful. You want to make the night magical and beautiful and really, that’s going to happen courtesy of our beautiful New England meetinghouse and lit candles and “Silent Night,” and anything I do or don’t do probably won’t count for much.

Still, you want to touch hearts. You want to squeeze the guts just a little bit. This year, we’re focusing a lot on “Hey, we’re here ALL YEAR! Come back NEXT Sunday, too!”

I remember the years before I was at all interested in, or knowledgeable of, the Bible. I would go to church services now and then and it was all absolutely meaningless to me. No one ever suggested to me that if I wanted to get anything out of this, I would actually have to put some intellectual effort into it. Church was like a magical social club — if you were a member, you’d just “get it,” and your heart would be opened by some great priestly abracadabra, and you could sit there with dewy eyes and feel moved by all this archaic language about begating and prophecying and parable-ing and healing lepers or whatever other crazy biz was going down in that day’s reading.

I sat there stone cold thinking unkind thoughts about the other worshipers because I assumed that they got as little out of the Bible as I did, little snot that I was, and I figured they were just putting in pew time so they could stay in the club.
I actually believed that the emotions that came from the experience were due to a sense of belonging to the church, not from hearing the readings or sharing the liturgy. I thought they were emotionally involved by virtue of being members of a social club together, not by virtue of belonging to God together and having an opportunity to celebrate and explore and question and struggle with that reality together.

So I look out over those dozens upon dozens of unfamiliar faces on Christmas Eve and I just want to say, “Listen, this Luke and Isaiah and carol stuff is going to mean just NOTHING to you if you don’t immerse yourself more often than once a year in this tradition. Not only will the Bible readings for tonight remain pretty meaningless, you will have no community of support for even questioning whether or not you want it to mean anything to you. You will have no community of support and weekly practice to remind you how much you wanted to have a spiritual component to your life, how much you want to stop being angry or feeling helpless or have some balm for whatever other soul sickness you’re suffering from. You cannot get a deep religious life with a drive-by once a year service. Please don’t lay that pressure on us, and don’t set yourself up that way.”

Because of course like most preachers, I do feel the pressure of having such a powerful message on Christmas Eve that they will all come back and become beloved and loving members of our church.

I am doing an Angels theme this year. The secret is, I had a huge CONCEPT about it this summer but I failed to write anything down, so now all I have is this vague memory that there was something quite wonderful and creative I wanted to do with the angels in the birth narratives, and it has all slipped through my Swiss cheese brain.

Happy Day

Happiness is having the guy from Geek Choice retrieve 100% of my lost data!!

And happiness is this new blog, written by a 93-year old Canadian man who will become your very favorite elder blogger in a moment:

http://dontoearth.blogspot.com/

I went out and bought a 1 gig harddrive at Office Max today. I am going to name it Fred. Fred and I will hold hands and whisper sweet nothings in each other’s ears forever and ever. Amen.

When The Heck Is Santa Getting Here?

When The Heck Is Santa Getting Here?
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

The News of the Year in Religion, 2006

We do a Burning Bowl ceremony every new year at my church, and I preach a sermon called “The News of the Year in Religion.”
I used to call it “The Good News of the Year in Religion,” but sometimes I forget to collect heartwarming stories of interfaith good will and harmony, and some years are just too full of scandals and failures on a grand scale that beg for some reflection.

This year I am breaking up the sermon into littler homilies and titling them as follows:

“We Are Family, I Got All My Sisters With Me” — about the election of the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori to the national bishop of the Episcopal Church. I will talk about the tragic rupture of the Anglican communion over the gay issue.

My second bit is called “It’s a Small World After All” and focuses on Pope Benedict’s Muslim controversy. My point there will be more about the stresses and challenges of communication in a global society and not so much about the content of what he said.

My third homily will be about the Ted Haggard scandal and the crisis of leadership in the Christian Coalition. So far, I don’t have a title or exact focus, but I want to talk about the centrality of integrity and wholeness within the Church, the challenge of that, the constant work it requires, etc.

So, readers, what big thrilling story did I miss?Which ones should I retrieve from my bulging folder of clippings? If you were preaching this sermon, what big story in religion would you include, and why?

A Guide To Really Bad Christmas Hymns

The UU Enforcer has a hilarious post up lambasting our current hymnal’s pathetic mangling of traditional Chritmas carols, and providing ridiculously unsingable ones (”Duermete, Lindo” anyone?).

Check it out at http://www.UUEnforcer.blogspot.com.

People, Not Hard Drives

I had a rapturous day yesterday when a wonderful guy came from the Geek Squad and recovered a whole bunch of my old hard drive, including my i-Tunes folder.

Gloom and doom returned this morning when I sat down to do some work and realized that we are still missing the most important set of files of all — the worship files. Augh! I will call him back for another visit and keep my fingers crossed!!

Thanks for all your sweet and helpful comments. It’s been highly stressful and inconvenient.

It was so good to be in church this morning. For some reason, everyone was in high sassy form and coming out with one hilarious crack after the next. One of my congregants is building a house in California on his son’s property, and is preparing to move out there. This makes me excessively sad, so I tried not to be jubilant when he said that there was some kind of building delay. I said I was sorry, and he said with a smile but totally deadpan,”It’s okay. I’m going to drink to excess.”

I know this isn’t funny if you have substance abuse issues or you’re a very politically correct type, but if you knew this man and knew how perpetually elegant and gracious and sober and appropriate he is, you would have doubled over like I did.

Santa made a visit to coffee hour and gave me a big hug, and my DRE’s youngest daughter kept throwing her arms around my waist. Someone brought a beautiful 12-day old baby for us to marvel at, and someone else brought her mom, a friendly soul who looks a lot like my grandmother. A few children sang a beautiful song about Peace, backed up by three gentle and lovely female adult choir members, and a newcomer mother whose son is in Iraq made the acquaintance of another couple of military moms, and they’re going to look after her.

So being in church was a balm to my computer-weary soul, and I just didn’t care about the bloody harddrive.

Yesterday I got a beautiful letter from artist Janet McKenzie thanking me for saying nice things in a sermon about her painting “Jesus of the People.” She sent me a calendar and a note card with more of her art on it, and basically made me cry. I said it before and I’ll say it again, Google is a wonderful thing.

http://www.janetmckenzie.com/joppage1.html

Despite all the computer stupidity, I just have to say in my best Jimmy Stewart voice, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Grieving

I woke up early this morning and started making a mental list of all the work I had lost.

Worst of all is the tremendous amount of work I had done compiling quotes and stories by theme for my Worship files. My chest aches just thinking about it. Hours and hours of organizing, cutting and pasting.

Worship will take a lot longer to prepare now, as I’ve also lost my Offering stories (I had a rich collection of funny anecdotes and original words on stewardship themes), Opening Words and Chalice Lightings, Benedictions, Prayers.

I’ve lost funerals and all special services done in the past two years. All Christmas Eves, Easters, holidays and holy days.

What was I thinking in forgetting or failing to back up these most crucial of files? How could I have been so DUMB???? And careless of my own work?

I’ll tell you what I was thinking: Every time I popped a CD in the drive to save sermons and worship services, I would think to myself, “Oh, I know I just saved those the last time. They’re not much updated, so I won’t bother this time.”

I failed to save them even after spending three full days in July perfecting these files. My stomach churns just thinking about it. Thank the gods I saved all my academic work and files from teaching my class. I would be lying on the floor in the fetal position right now if I had lost all of that, too.

I think to myself, man, I’m walking around feeling shot in the gut — what’s it like when your church gets destroyed in a fire, or when your home is swept away in a flood, or when your laptop is stolen from the back seat of your car and you have absolutely no hope whatsoever of even having the Geek Squad look at your hard drive and recover data? WORSE.

I’m trying not to add insult to injury by beating myself up for being a whimp.

The Geek Squad is coming in the morning. We’ll see if they work any magic.

Warranty

Hi friends,

My hard drive is under warranty, so Dell’s sending out a new one.

No word yet as to whether there will be any kind of resurrection experience of old data from the dead drive. Hey, but Sunday is St. Lazarus’ Day — maybe I should have my PC doc try it THEN?
Is it too late in the week to start a novena cycle?

P.S. Dell tells me that I have a super Burn You Up battery in my computer that is being recalled. If you have a Dell, you might want to look into this. We would be very sad if you spontaneously combusted along with your life’s work. Be careful out there!

Hard Drive Death

PeaceBang’s computer died the death this morning.

The hard drive seems to be gone.

PeaceBang has had a rocky relationship with her Dell Inspiron since the beginning. She is thinking she run back into the arms of Mac.

Mac doesn’t have so many viruses and problems, and is generally snazzier and more fun.

This is pretty terrible. Everything is backed up except for the exam and paper due in the morning. And Christmas Eve’s liturgy. All my PB files are on CD’s, as are 99% of my sermons, doctoral work, and correspondence. My i-Pod is updated as of last night, and photos are all saved and uploaded to Snapfish.

Ach. What can you do?

Bits of Scripture

Today in class we did a wonderful thing as part of a Communion Service.

Our professors asked us all to bring a short Scripture passage and to prepare about 45 seconds of explanation as to why it is important to us.

In lieu of a homily, people jumped in as the Spirit moved them and read their selections. It was just great. We had Micah and Jeremiah, and Corinthians, Ephesians, Romans. Matthew, Luke, John, The Book of Esther, the Song of Songs. Genesis. One of the Psalms.

I hadn’t realized until then that I have fallen in love with Scripture in the past few years. Hearing all those bits and pieces was like making out with God. My heart fluttered like a besotted fool.

I still feel a little dopey about it, and am going to go to bed early with the Good Book.

There must be a Mae West or Sophie Tucker joke in there somewhere, but I can’t think of it!

Anyway, it was a great exercise and you should steal it all the time.