Month: November 2023

When I was a child, my church in Pittsburgh always hosted a little “shop” on a Saturday morning in December where children of the congregation could come and buy small items for everyone on their Christmas list. Some items were donated by church members and others from a local wholesaler who traded in dollar store items. I am sure the day will come in the future when I clean out my parents’ home and I find all of the switchblade combs and costume cocktail rings that I bought for them over the years. Even though the gifts weren’t significant, there was a significance in teaching me what it means to give gifts at Christmas.

When our son Owen was little (and even when he wasn’t all that little), I would typically take him to our local Ten Thousand Villages to buy gifts for his grandparents and friends. In the same spirit, we approached our shopping as a way to talk about why we celebrate Christmas by giving gifts, what it means to pick something out that will feel meaningful to the people we love, and how we shop in responsible ways.

In recent years, even now that Owen is technically an adult, we use the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church Advent Gift Market Catalogue in the same way. We make a list of the people for whom we are shopping each year and consider which of the often over 17 organizations represented in the Market would be meaningful for the people in our lives.

During 2020 in particular, the AGM catalogue was a great way to reach out to family and friends when we couldn’t be together. That year through AGM, we sent folks books donated to the West Philadelphia Alliance for Children. One of my mother’s friends, very likely someone who had walked me through that little shop at church 40 years ago, reached out to say how grateful she was for such a thoughtful gift. It was such an easy gesture on our part, but was so meaningful to her.

This year we once again have a catalogue full of the life of mission and ministry supported by this congregation. I hope that those of you who have made AGM an important part of your gift giving each year will once again support our partners locally and around the world. I hope that those of you who have never given a gift through AGM will choose this year to give a gift that will have meaning not just to your recipient, but to the organizations whose work continues year round.

You can start shopping as early as this Sunday, November 12th, when the online shopping site at www.BrynMawrAGM.com goes live. Online orders are typically ready in a few days.

But I also strongly encourage you to join us for our opening celebration on Sunday, November 19th when representatives from our committees, Boards and Councils will have more information about each of our partner organizations. In person shopping will also begin that day.

In this moment when we all are seeking ways to make an impact, the Advent Gift Market is once again the perfect way to have a meaningful giving season.

A number of years ago, a woman named Sara Miles wrote a memoir called Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion. It was about her experience of coming to faith. She had grown up in a family of atheists. But she was a journalist who was by nature curious, so one Sunday morning when she was walking by a church in San Francisco, she went in and sat down to see what was going on in a worship service. It was a church that practiced open communion, and she found herself transformed by receiving the sacrament. She shared her experience saying, “I think what I discovered in that moment when I put the bread in my mouth and was so blown away by the reality of Jesus was that the requirement for faith turned out not to be believing in a doctrine, or knowing how to behave in a church, or being the right kind of person, or being raised correctly, or repeating the rituals. The requirement for faith seemed to be hunger. It was the hunger that I had always had and the willingness to be fed by something I didn’t understand.”

God created us as beings who need to be fed, who have yearnings that emanate from within us that inform us of our need. Our hunger tells us we need physical food. But we also have a hunger to feel connected with others, to be in communion with them because God made us to be relational beings. To have needs is not a bad thing if there is plenty available to meet those needs. When we come to a dinner table with our stomachs already full, we might enjoy just a taste of a delicious dish. But when our hunger is met with something delectable, particularly in the company of those we love, it is fulfilling in more than just the physical sense.

This first Sunday in November is when we observe All Saints’ day. During our 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. worship services, we will, with grateful remembrance, name those from our congregation who have died in the past year. Our once-a-month Evening Worship at 5:00 p.m. that is geared for all ages will focus on the sacrament of communion. During our congregation’s 150th anniversary celebration, we have been aware that we stand on the shoulders of people of faith who preceded us. In a mystical way, we are still in communion with them. In the Apostles’ Creed, we affirm our believe in the communion of saints. That term is not limited just to those who have been beatified by a particular part of the church like St. Francis of Assisi or St. Teresa of Calcutta. We’ve known other people that get referred to as saints because they are so generous with their time and assets or because they are extraordinarily patient around difficult people. But what the word ‘saints’ refers to as used in scripture and in the Apostles’ Creed includes all people throughout time who have been made holy by Christ’s redemptive work. That includes people with plenty of spiritual inadequacies like you and me. It also includes those who have preceded us in earlier generations.

We hunger for bread, for connection with God, and for connection with other people of faith, here and beyond. I want to share with you imagery of the afterlife. I’m not sure of its source. In this image hell is portrayed as people being eternally seated at a great banquet table of sumptuous foods, yet none of them are able to bend their elbows, so they can’t indulge themselves of the tantalizing feast. Heaven is portrayed in much the same way. There is a great banquet table filled with delectable delights. Here too, the people are unable to bend their elbows. Yet because they understand that they can feed each other, the banquet becomes heavenly.

Come this Sunday to have multiple hungers addressed in hopes that the Last Supper becomes the Lasting Supper. And for those whose old-fashioned clocks don’t automatically reset, remember to ‘fall back an hour.’