Author: The Rev. Rebecca Kirkpatrick

This January marks the third year that BMPC has participating in hosting the Lower Merion Code Blue shelter in our Atrium and Gym each night of the month when the real feel outside is 32 degrees or below.

In past years, I would often orient volunteers and then head home to my manse next door, hoping that at least one guest would show up that night to make all of the volunteers’ effort and hours worth it. This year, that has never been a concern.

Each night we have been open, we have had at least three guests, and on at least one night, we have filled every bed. Our connections with the Lower Merion Police have grown stronger, and multiple times a week, they bring guests to stay at the church who, in the past, would have had nowhere to go.

What has not changed this year is the way this project has fostered new relationships and deepened existing ones in our church and community.

Truth be told, volunteering at our Code Blue Shelter is likely one of the quietest and most boring tasks we do in “mission.” For the first shift, there is some activity at the start, and the second shift has a busy last hour of tasks to complete, but mostly it is sitting and keeping watch in the wee hours of the night.

While many of us who work bring computers and books, iPads and neglected work, there is also a part of every shift where volunteers just sit and talk and get to know each other in the quiet of the night. It brings joy to my heart each time I get to introduce members to each other as they start their shifts – often highlighting what I appreciate about each of them, knowing they will find places of connection in the time spent together. This is what it means to be a community.

This year, I have come to especially value the ways that guests and volunteers have connected. Often, a guest will ask about a volunteer they haven’t seen work this year, but who they remember from the past. In the days after a shift, a volunteer will often share with me a part of a guest’s story they learned for the first time.

As we approach our final week of hosting, I encourage anyone who has been considering volunteering at the shelter to grab one of the remaining slots. Not because we need more volunteers to help carry the burden of keeping the shelter open each night (even though that is the case), but because this is what it means to be church and community together.

Sign up for a Code Blue Shift.

Jonathan Sacks was a renowned rabbi, philosopher, theologian, and public intellectual. A gifted teacher and writer, Sacks explored the moral foundations of society, the relationship between faith and modern life, and the power of religious traditions to foster human dignity, responsibility, and hope in a pluralistic world.

In his book the Dignity of Difference, he wrote this,
Men and women were made – so I believe – to serve one another, not just themselves.
We may not survive while others drown;
we may not feast while others starve;
we are not free when others are in servitude;
we are not well when billions languish in disease and premature death.

This is an easy sentiment to appreciate and to affirm as an orientation for how we as individuals and as a church live out our Christian calling to service and our identity as disciples of Jesus Christ.

People in our world are drowning in this moment – not so much literally but figuratively.

There is an overwhelming sense of dread among folks in our community and nation:

One of our mission partners here in Lower Merion reached out to me this week to ask for help in gathering supplies and resources for immigrant women whose husbands have been detained and are struggling to care for their children.

One of the Afghan families BMPC has supported for two years is in crisis as two of the men, and primary wage earners, have been detained despite their faithful compliance with the established legal process of being granted asylum in the United States. The members of our Refugee Support Committee have been working tirelessly to help them return home.

This week, news has been shared widely among Presbyterian circles that Rene Nicole Good, who was killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis last week, was a sister Presbyterian among us who served in her congregations and, as a young adult, was in mission service in Ireland in the early 2000s. Rene’s uncle is a Presbyterian pastor in Nebraska.

What is our calling in a world where things like these are happening, where so many are drowning?

That will be the topic of our conversations this coming Sunday morning at 11:15 in Congregational Hall – what is our community called to do to speak up and speak together in this moment? My hope for our time together is three fold – that it will be a space where we can articulate our grief at the brokenness of the world in this moment, an opportunity to reaffirm many of our historic values and practices as a congregation around justice and advocacy, and especially a chance for us to connect and move forward with new ways to engage and work towards good in the world today.

I hope you will join us.

Our annual Theologian in Residence program, created in honor of David and Ruth Watermulder, is always a highlight of BMPC’s Adult Education programs. Over the past ten years, we have welcomed a wide range of remarkable scholars, and when one looks at the full list of every scholar who has been a part of this endowed lecture series since its inception, it is packed with some of the most influential thinkers, writers, and preachers of this generation. But, I think I can say with confidence and joy that our upcoming weekend with the Rev. Dr. Anna Carter Florence, Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary, is going to be the most fun.

Anna brings a quality of imagination and creativity to her teaching and preaching that is both deeply faithful to the spirit of the Bible, while also breaking open new and innovative ways for us to step into and experience the story of scripture.

In her book Rehearsing Scripture: Discovering God’s Word in Community, she describes the wildness of reading the Bible together:

The biblical text is a wild thing, and it takes us to where the wild things are. When we read scripture and community, we have no idea what will happen or where it will take us, except that wherever it is won’t look like anything we know – it is the wild and free vision of God’s reign, breaking its way in. It is the mother of all waves, carrying us over the known horizon. Maurice Sendak may not have realized he was writing the perfect description of our biblical interpretive task when he wrote his classic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, but he was. Maybe, every time we open our Bibles, we should open our mouths too with a collective roar: “Let the wild rumpus start!”

I hope that you will join us for what might not be a wild weekend of exploring scripture together in community, but what will surely be a weekend of thoughtful and creative interpretations of scripture, joy found in community with one another, and surely a hopeful message of the ways that God’s word still speaks to us today.

Here is the full schedule for the weekend – we hope you see you there!

LIGHT BRUNCH
Saturday, November 8, 9:30 a.m.
Congregational Hall, Ministries Center

LECTURE ONE: ANOTHER LOOK AT SOME (NOTORIOUS) WOMEN:
VASHTI, TAMAR, AND LOT’S WIFE
Saturday, November 8, 10:00 a.m.
Congregational Hall, Ministries Center

PREACHING
Sunday, November 9, 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.
Chapel and Sanctuary

LECTURE TWO: ANOTHER LOOK AT JESUS:GROWING UP, TELLING STORIES, AND WALKING ON WATER
Sunday, November 9, 11:15 a.m.
Congregational Hall, Ministries Center

 

 

 

In the Spring of 2023, the BMPC Session approved a new Statement on Belonging and Inclusion as an outgrowth of the good work of our Anti-Racism Committee over the past several years. If you have not read that statement yet, I encourage you to do so.

One of my favorite sections from that statement addresses the importance of this kind of work being a part of everything we do as a church, not just an isolated priority of one or two committees.

As an outgrowth of our willingness to learn, change, and grow, we commit to ensuring that this work embeds every aspect of our church life from welcome and hospitality to programming and fellowship; from financial, stewardship, and mission decisions to pastoral care and worship life. In all that we do and in all the ways we represent ourselves, the work of diversity and inclusion will be obvious.

To that end, this Sunday afternoon, BMPC church officers, ushers, committee leaders, teachers, staff and volunteers will gather for a training with the Rev. Dr. Cody Sanders of Luther Seminary in Minnesota to be trained on a particular aspect of our work of Belonging and Inclusion – microaggressions.

Microaggressions are brief, everyday exchanges that deliver demeaning messages to people based on their group identity. These exchanges may be verbal, behavioral, or environmental, and they communicate subtle hostility, degradation, or insult directed at someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, class, ability, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. Their power to cause harm comes largely from the fact that perpetrators are usually unaware of them; microaggressions are often expressed unintentionally and without conscious recognition.

Throughout all of our ministries as a church we are constantly welcoming new people, caring for one another, and interacting in ways that have the potential to either convey a deep sense of belonging or to communicate in subtle ways that someone is not welcome here.

I am so grateful that in this moment, this congregation and its leadership are taking seriously the work that must be done to help us live more fully into our values of Belonging and Inclusion.

The great news is, that Dr. Sanders will also be speaking on the topic of Microaggressions this Sunday morning at 11:15 in Congregational Hall. If this aspect of anti-racism work is new to you, or if you are especially interested in learning directly from someone who is a leader in helping churches do this work with integrity, please join us for that conversation this Sunday following worship.

I have been thinking back quite a bit these days to a trip that several of us took in the fall of 2021. Women from BMPC, as well as other congregations, traveled together to St. John in the Virgin Islands to visit historic National Park sites that were originally sugar cane plantations where human beings had been enslaved. These sites were particularly historic because of their proximity to the British Virgin Islands, where slavery was outlawed almost 30 years before being banned in the US.

Standing on the beach at the former plantation, this group of white and black women stood together, prayed in memory of the men and women who lost their lives in that place, especially those who jumped into the water hoping to swim to freedom, gave thanks for the ways that the world has changed since those days, and asked that each of us might be transformed by the things that we saw and experienced together.

The impetus for the trip was the way that the National Park staff had used their time and energy during the lock downs of the pandemic to both update the interpretation materials for the site that better described the experience of enslaved people in that site, and to add it to the National Park’s Network to Freedom listing identifying sites on the Underground Railroad.

I was moved, all of us were, by the way that the staff talked to us about their responsibility to tell the truth about that place and the ways that telling the stories of the enslaved people there was a small measure of repair to the inhumanity of slavery.

I think of this trip and experience each time I read news of the attempts in these days to remove these kinds of interpretive tools and stories from National Park sites and historic locations around the country.

Many might consider this a political issue outside the realm of our purview as a church or as people of faith. But in most ways, it is deeply connected to our history, present, and future as Christians in the United States. Not just because of the ways that Christianity, the Bible, and the church were used to justify slavery; the fact that Presbyterians more often than not declined to stand up against slavery when it really mattered; and the ways that we have collectively failed to be accountable for the lasting impact of these historical roots in our culture and communities today, but simply because what we believe as Presbyterians about confession and forgiveness.

Each time we gather in worship, we begin our liturgy with an act of confession. Some people find this incredibly off-putting and maybe even tedious. Still, its placement at the start of worship is very intentional, positioned so that every time we hear scripture read and proclaimed, we are reminded of the ways that we and the world are broken and the truth that through Christ, forgiveness and repair are promised and fulfilled. The echoes of our forgiveness still ring in our ears before any part of scripture is spoken.

We practice this act of spiritual repair each week, so that when we step into a broken world, we are not caught off guard or offended by the need for this same kind of liturgy of confession and repair in our community and national life.

As we do that work, may this prayer of forgiveness from Cole Arthur Riley’s book, Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human, be a part of each of our comings and goings this summer as we travel the breadth and beauty of this land:

Let your soul receive this rest: God seeks to mend the brokenhearted, provide for the economically oppressed, honor the aging, and protect the vulnerable.

Receive forgiveness for the injustices you’ve participated in and be purged of those that still reside in your own heart.

Find renewal in the divine, that we would welcome healing as it knocks.

That we would reintegrate every part of us that this world has tried to cleave apart, claiming the dignity of our bodies daily.

As you receive this mercy, let it hold you and keep you, that your hope for liberation would be reborn each morning. Amen.

This Sunday, we look forward to welcoming 19 young people into adult membership in the life of our congregation. They have worked over the past year in Confirmation class to gain a deeper understanding of the history and basic tenets of the Christian faith, as well as what it means to be an active part of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church.

It has been a great privilege for me to have spent this past year as their teacher. It gave me the opportunity to return to the Confirmation classroom, which had been a significant part of my ministry during my first call in South Bend, Indiana. It also allowed me to reclaim the joy in ministry that comes with teaching a young person the things that are most essential about not just who we are as disciples of Jesus Christ, but in particular, what it means to be a Presbyterian.

I always say, and I will remind us all of this again on Sunday, that my primary goal in any Confirmation class is NOT to teach adherence to a particular set of beliefs or to even test a student’s level of knowledge of the Bible or theology. The goal of Confirmation for me is teaching students how to ask and answer questions – to reflect on how the church has done that in the past, how we do it as BMPC, and how they will do it throughout their entire life of faith.

It was once a tradition that Confirmation students were taught through the use of a catechism – a predetermined set of questions and answers that were to be memorized to teach the essentials of the faith. The problem with this as the sole teaching tool is that it doesn’t always help us learn to ask the new questions that every person and church faces in a changing world, or to know how to find new answers.

We also spend time in Confirmation Class reflecting on another kind of question – the questions that are asked and answered when any of us makes a public profession of faith and commits ourselves to the life of the church. Helping these students be comfortable and confident in their answers has also been a focus of our year.

Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world? I do.

Who is your Lord and Savior? Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.

Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his word and showing his love? I will.

Will you devote yourself to the church’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers? I will.

We as a church will also be asked a question this Sunday about our continued commitment to these students, but I would hope that hearing the questions put before them and listening to their joyful answers will be an important moment for all of us.

At this moment, we won’t just help them reaffirm their Baptisms, but we will all ask ourselves these questions as well; we will reaffirm our own faith and our own commitment to the life of the church in the world.

Mostly, I hope that this Sunday we will all reaffirm our commitment to asking and answering new questions of ourselves and one another as we seek to be the Body of Christ together.

Last April, a group of us from BMPC marked Earth Day standing on a beach in the Callao district of Lima, Peru. We stood hand in hand with residents and activists, who showed us the pollution still apparent—both by sight and touch—from the 2022 Repsol oil spill, which dumped over 10,000 barrels of crude oil into the ocean. Despite the government’s claims that the water and the beach are clean, these men and women continue to advocate for their own health and safety and the health of the earth.

We traveled there as a part of our relationship with Joining Hands Peru, an international faith-based organization created by the Presbyterian Church (USA) to equip and support activists in Peru and congregations in the U.S. to advocate and care for God’s creation. We work closely with JHP because, as a congregation, we have committed to working towards environmental justice for all people, especially vulnerable and marginal communities.

Because Earth Day falls so close to Easter this year, we are marking our commitment to these values and this work earlier in the month.

This Sunday morning, April 6, I hope that you will join us for a presentation by writer and naturalist Mike Weilbacher as he shares a presentation following worship, specifically on the growing issue of microplastics found everywhere, from the bottom of the ocean to our bloodstream.

Of course, on Monday evening, April 7, we are very excited to welcome Dr. Michael Mann, a renowned climate scientist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As always, the event will take place at 7:00 p.m. in the Sanctuary and will be available to livestream from our website.

Mann writes in his book Our Fragile Moment, “The greatest threat to meaningful climate action today is no longer denial, but despair and doomism, premised on the flawed notion that it is too late to do anything.” There was an element in our trip to Peru last year that could have easily led us to despair and especially to have led the local activists we spent our week with to despair.

If our Lenten work and the Easter promise teach us anything, even in the face of such opposition, neglect, and misinformation, it is that hope outlasts our despair, that community combats isolation, and that life has a boundless potential to restore even in the face of death and doom.

It reminds me of the first verse of my favorite Easter hymn – Now the green blade rises from the buried grave, wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain; love lives again, that with the dead has been; love has come again like wheat arising green.

As we walk these last days of Lent toward the promise of resurrection, may we also celebrate our calling and responsibility to care for God’s creation.

We are all likely aware that beloved Children’s television pioneer Fred Rogers was actually a Presbyterian pastor. Ordained to his television “ministry” in 1963, he was not just a national television personality but also a local celebrity in Presbyterian circles in Pittsburgh, where I grew up. What you may not be aware of is that today, March 20, is Mr. Rogers Day—or technically, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” Day.

Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood was such a significant soundtrack in the background of my growing up in Pittsburgh that a childhood friend of mine (who himself also became a Presbyterian pastor) used to joke around with me long into our late teens by singing one of Fred’s many songs of affirmation when I was feeling low:

It’s you I like,

It’s not the things you wear,

It’s not the way you do your hair,

But it’s you I like.

The way you are right now,

The way down deep inside you.

Not the things that hide you,

Not your toys,

They’re just beside you.

But it’s you I like.

Every part of you.

Your skin, your eyes, your feelings

Whether old or new.

I hope that you’ll remember,

Even when you’re feeling blue.

That it’s you I like,

It’s you yourself

It’s you.

It’s you I like.

While it strikes all the right cords of nostalgic sentimentality in me to remember Fred Rogers each year in March, it is more important to recognize a day deeply rooted in his incredibly faithful ministry of welcoming and being a neighbor.

This Sunday, as we continue in our Lenten series in the parables, we will reflect on one of the most iconic in all of scripture – The Good Samaritan. It is essential when we read this ancient story of a man left alone and vulnerable, rescued and restored by an outsider, that Jesus told this story in response to a question that we are called to ask every day – Who is my neighbor?

In this particular moment in our community and nation, we need to be asking this question even more intentionally—asking it of ourselves and our local community, our national leaders, our faith leaders, and even the people with whom we disagree.

The most essential element of how we are called to live our Christian faith is not how we care for ourselves or our family but how we care for the most vulnerable in the world—our neighbor.

May we be compelled by Fred Roger’s consistent message of love, compassion, and generosity as we navigate these days.