From The Deacon's Bench

  WEEDS As I write this, I am able to look out my window and see part of my neighbors’ house.   There is a planting bed running the full length of their house.   I see day lilies and iris plants and then… a giant crabgrass plant.    Oh, the horror, I’m thinking to myself, the neighbors are attempting to sell that house so that weed has to go!!!   If a potential buyer sees that weed, they are going to question the desirability of the entire house and use that as an excuse to offer a much lower price. Suddenly, I started to think about holy scripture, especially this: Jesus Explains the Parable of the Weeds 36  Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.”  37  He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man;  38  the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children...

What is normal?   What is the “new normal”? What will the future normal be? These are the kinds of questions that fill my mind these days.   It seems that no sooner do I come up with an answer, things change, and I realize that my answer is no longer relevant. Just like so many of you, my life has changed significantly over the years.   Some of those changes were good, some were not good, but most of those changes were due to my actions and the choices that I made. Right now, my biggest fear is not what I might do, or the choices that I might make but it is the choices that what my fellow humans might make or the things that they may not do.   They might not use a face mask or covering, they may venture into non social distancing events and stay there socializing, contract the Covid-19 virus and by continuing this behavior pass the virus along.   I have always been proud to be an American.   There have been times when I was not proud of some of the...

       For the past several months, like so many of you I have had quite a bit of time on my hands due to the Covid-19 lock down.   I have spent many hours viewing news programming almost every day.   With all that is currently going on in our country and in the world, seeing the way some folks are behaving, and hearing the words that are being said to and about others, I couldn't get this idea out of my head..... What Would Jesus Do?  Those thoughts brought back some memories.   In the 1990's, my wife Sarah and I were very involved with the youth ministry of our parish.  At one point, we used what was an extremely popular tool at that time, the W.W.J.D. curriculum and bracelets.  The letters stood for "What Would Jesus Do" and the core teaching was to make choices and decisions in one's life based upon what Jesus taught and exemplified in His life. I must admit, that at the time, while I was aware of the movement's 19...

Challenge I don’t know about you, but I feel challenged every day and as the days go by the challenge becomes greater.   It seems like a bad dream, and then I sleep more and when I wake up there are fewer reports of good news and even more negative reports than the day before. As I write this, the number of deaths due to Covid-19 in the USA has topped one hundred thousand.   So, in just over four months this staggering number of deaths has occurred.   Guidelines for safety were released weeks after the first case was discovered and it took even longer to implement them.   All health care authorities agreed that social distancing was necessary and is a basic preventative measure.   There were other measures such as face coverings additional hand washing and cleaning of surfaces. Yet, more and more, I hear and read about individuals who feel it is “their God given right” to behave however they wish.   I’m really not sure what God those indiv...

CHURCH I would venture to guess, that for most people who are playing a word association game and the word church comes up they would give clues about a church building.   When we say, “I’m going to church”, most of us will picture in our mind a particular building.   However, for the first 250 years Christians did not gather for worship in buildings called churches or buildings built only for the purpose of worship.   They met in small groups in homes.   It would be almost 1,000 years before buildings resembling what we think of as churches would begin to be built. Fast forward another 1,000 years and we are once again gathering in small groups in houses for the purpose of worship.   However, there is a new twist to these small group worship experiences.   The members of these small groups are staying in their own homes and are using electronic devices to gather together.   In addition, those who are gathering are coordinating telephone or w...

Psalms and Palms…Social Distancing…Trying to Cope…Holy Week 2020 As I sit down to write this, I can’t remember any time in my life when I was not in a church building celebrating Palm Sunday.   In addition, I also came to realize that I never fully connected with what the palms represented. Every year we were handed or picked up a semi-dried-up brownish palm frond.   Some would sit in the pews making crosses out of that palm, some would put it in their prayer book like a bookmark.   Most would take palm fronds home and place them on a shelf or fireplace mantel and save them until the Priest would announce that last year’s palms should be brought in to be burned to make ashes for the Ash Wednesday services. Fast forward to the year 2020.   We did not gather in church buildings this Palm Sunday.   Those of us who are on the internet were able to “view” or in some cases participate in virtual worship.   Instead of palms, some of us followed this ...

COMMUNITY With the current situation in our world and its’ effect on us, I could not get the idea of community out of my mind.   I did some research and found that there are 2,450+ synonyms for community. In addition, within our own faith community (under “normal” circumstances) we come together and worship in community and we share a commun ity meal (the Eucharist) which we call Holy Commun ion. As we face the current known and unknown dangers that this virus causes, we are unable to physically come together as a community.   That doesn’t mean that we are not a community, it means that our community has temporarily been “reformed” and will come together virtually through online resources and for those who are not connected to the virtual world, we will come together by use of the telephone and the written word. Currently, Father Terry is using the church Facebook page to “broadcast” prayer services.   Our Bishop will be celebrating “virtual” Sunday Euch...