Pastor's Notes

Gary N. McCluskey, Pastor 

Better hurry up and get any Thanksgiving decorations now! Need a new table cloth for the festive family occasion? Well, if it is to have cornucopias, turkeys or something announcing the day, you had better hurry. Have those old pilgrim salt and pepper shakers seen their last days? Again, head to the store now as they won’t stock many and they will soon be shoved aside for the rest of the Christmas decorations not yet on display in the store. 

Yes, Thanksgiving does not receive its proper attention. I have heard many students and parishioners over the years say it was actually their favorite holiday of the year. Yet overall consumer behavior would betray such claims by our culture as a whole.

Yet fear not, followers of Jesus. Here we have Thanksgiving twice weekly for most weeks. We name it communion, Sacrament of the Altar, the Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist. It is, each time we gather, come, receive, and go forth a meal of thanksgiving. I recall as a child reading at the beginning of our communion worship in the 1958 Service Book and Hymnal  The Great Thanksgiving. I wondered if it was for Thanksgiving, why were we doing it in, say, July? Only when I went to seminary did I discover the word Eucharist was Greek for “thanksgiving”.  Only then did I begin to develop an understanding of this meal as gift, us as needy recipients, and the “menu” as nourishment for faith and life. Truly something over which to be thankful.

Growing up my home congregation only “did” communion twice monthly. After all, one would not want to wear it out, would one? When I returned on break I began to miss this meal those other Sundays. It was then I began to develop an appreciation of thanksgiving toward what I had previously experienced as a simple ritual.  Regular reception of Holy Communion did not wear it out. After all, isn’t constant use one of the reasons the Lord’s Prayer remains so meaningful to us? 

Enjoy your Thanksgiving gathering and meal. Continue to gather here around this family table with this family of God in Thanksgiving for this meal and for all of God’s gifts to us. When traveling share in gratitude with others from the family of God wherever they may be. And when you may find yourself in worship that does not celebrate communion every week, give thanks for the longing inside that wishes it was not so. Even longing and absence can stir up a bit of gratitude in us. 

Happy Thanksgiving…..this November 28 & each time we gather around the table of Jesus. Each time! 

Pastor’s Notes
Gary N. McCluskey, Pastor

We miss it this year. The gospel text from Matthew concerning Herod’s order to slaughter children under the age of two who lived in and near Bethlehem. It was, according to Matthew, Herod’s attempt to destroy the possible rival to his throne about whom the wise men told him.

Many years this is the gospel text the Sunday following Christmas. It is assigned for the First Sunday of Christmas. Merry Christmas indeed!?! It is bad enough that many years we sit in church following Christmas and the poinsettias are a bit droopy, the light is not the warm glow of candlelight, and the entire feeling and attitude is different. No more looking forward. No more expectation or preparing. It’s over. And here comes January feeling like one long Monday.

I wonder, however, if in it’s strange and horrifying way, this is where the rubber of the message of Christmas hits the asphalt of life? The incarnate one gets an immediate lesson that in life no one is immune from the difficult hurdles and dead ends that life can put in our path. Even one sent from God must deal with them. This time Jesus and his family escaped to Egypt. We who know the entire story know eventually Jesus comes to a time when he is unable to escape. Life eventually gets Jesus, too.

Author, poet, and speaker, Maya Angelou wrote a book titled, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. She says the whose wings are clipped, feet bound, and restricted to a small cage sings songs of freedom, songs of hope, and songs of things unknown.

We who follow Jesus and proclaim him to be Savior of the world know that much of what makes the Good News of Jesus good is that in Jesus God has not come to be a spectator. Nor is God simply a fan to cheer from the sidelines or stands. What makes this news good is that God comes as one involved. God comes as one of us to be with us and to be one of us. God comes to face the very painful things we may face. The caged bird may sing songs of freedom, songs of things unknown, and songs of hope. in our very uncertain times we can sing. We can sing in harmony and in unison. We are not alone. There is nothing we can face that the God who comes in Jesus has not faced.

We cannot laugh at the Herods of the world nor dismiss them. The horror they cause is real.

Yet neither the Herods of the world nor their horror need define us or define life. Caged birds do sing. Followers of a God among us can as well. Happy New Year? Happy New Year!

A Message from Gary N. McCluskey, pastor

How easily we accept things when all is well with us. How critically we evaluate the same when troubled.  When life is well, life appears to make sense.  And if it does not make sense we can, at least, live more easily with its confusion. When life is heavy, confusion seems our partner.

Here comes Lent. For some of us it comes just when we are feeling pretty good. Dang! A downer to burst our bubble. For others it comes as one more burden to place in our basket of life. Just what we (don’t) need!

Lent actually arrives not to bring us down nor to weigh more heavily upon already laden shoulders.  It comes to bring focus. Good times and bad can turn us onto ourselves, albeit in different ways. Lent says “Lift your gaze”.  When we lift that gaze we are called to look upon another: Jesus. We are called to look upward….to a cross. Lent arrives to teach us through this gaze. Its teaching is that all life needs grounding. When full of ourselves, life needs the grounding that reminds us there is more to life than us. When we are low, the grounding teaches us we cannot rise alone. 

Once when working with a liturgical design artist, he pointed out that all crosses he carved were firmly planted. There were none hanging from ceilings or walls seemingly suspended in time and space. They were connected to earth and connected to life and to our world….to us. They were not the image of flying superhero but the image of one well-grounded. Perhaps that can be a good image for you and I this Lent. If life is well……wonderful!  Now we are called to step outside of ourselves and our world to share some of that goodness with another. If we are sinking, we need to cast our line to something grounded. Lent above all reminds us it is not simply we as individuals who have fallen short. All of humanity has. Lent reminds us, Jesus did not die simply about me, but about all God’s children. We are in this life together.  We are better together. Lent’s arrival unites us in our common humanity. It unites us in our uncommon God.