Author: The Rev. Rebecca Kirkpatrick

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.

As we approach this coming weekend and the days ahead, as a nation, we are asked to remember the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As people of faith, and even more importantly as a community of faith, we cherish his legacy and his vision for our world. In particular, we are called to consider the church’s role in helping to move the world and our lives to more closely embody that vision.

I believe that when Dr. King offered this prayer for the church, likely over sixty years ago, he was praying for us.

Lord, We thank you for your church, founded upon your Word,

that challenges us to do more than sing and pray,

but go out and work as though the very answer to our prayers

depended on us and not upon you.

Help us to realize that humanity was created

to shine like the stars and live on through all eternity.

Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace.

Help us to walk together,

pray together,

sing together,

and live together

until that day when all God’s children

will rejoice in one common band of humanity

in the reign of our Lord and of our God, we pray.

Amen.

His prayer makes it clear that the church is called to work together on issues of justice and compassion, to recognize all people’s full humanity, and to be an agent of transformation in the world. This Sunday, following worship, you are invited to join us in Congregational Hall to participate in an ongoing discussion about what that actually means in both broad strokes and in the day-to-day work of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church.

As we continue to live into the Belonging and Inclusion Statement approved by the Session last spring, you are invited to be a part of helping us implement not just that statement’s goals for our community but the vision that Dr. King continues to challenge us with today.

We are just three weeks from once again hosting the Lower Merion Code Blue Shelter in our building for January. Last year was a transformative experience for our neighbors and our congregation as we welcomed men sleeping outside in our community on the coldest winter nights to stay in the church gym. Hosting again this January will continue to shape who we are as a church and as individuals.

Inevitably, the prospect of staying up all night (or even half the night) as a volunteer at our Code Blue shelter can seem exhausting. I can confirm that it is as someone who volunteered multiple shifts last year. I am unsure when “all-nighters” used to be easy for me, but they aren’t anymore. And yet, the benefit of volunteering at the shelter, at least for me, far outweighs the inconvenience of a lost night of sleep.

I have shared before and will share again here the significance of being able to welcome guests into our own church spaces here– both personally and professionally. For too long, our sense of mission and service has been characterized as something we do elsewhere. We gather in the church parking lot to carpool together to a mission partner in Philly. We meet up at the international terminal at the airport to fly off to and connect with our global partners. Yes, we make over 1,300 casseroles in our very own kitchen each year, but almost none of the 100-plus casserole makers who serve faithfully ever get to greet and serve the neighbors who eat them.

Over the past four years, our Mission Council has been intentionally focused on Bryn Mawr, Lower Merion, or even the Main Line as a fertile field for engagement, learning, and service. The creation of this Code Blue shelter was never in our minds when these local mission conversations began, but it has been the catalyst for changing our mission paradigm one overnight shift at a time.

Each of us who volunteer at the shelter takes on an important responsibility. It is a responsibility beyond offering hospitality, food, and shelter to our guests. It is a responsibility beyond assisting guests when necessary to access the assistance available to them through County services. It is a responsibility beyond ensuring the safety and maintenance of our spaces.

The important responsibility that overshadows all of those others is the weight of being the face, the hands, and the feet of our congregation and Jesus Christ for a world in need, to represent to the community who we are and what we value in loving all of our neighbors, to shift the impression that we are one-dimensionally that “big fancy church on Montgomery Ave.”

This vital work transforms who we are as a church, and the weight of this responsibility carried by all those who step up to be a part of this work also changes who we are. It builds new connections among us. It deepens our experience of faith. It strengthens our identity as members not just of this church community but the community at large.

I know that almost all who volunteered at the shelter last winter are planning to do so again this January. But I want to encourage you, if you didn’t have the chance to volunteer last year, to join us at the training this Sunday at 3:00 p.m. in Congregational Hall. At that gathering we will share the details of hosting the shelter, but also share with one another how we were each transformed through this work.

This week, every year for the past ten years, I have written to the church about the virtue of alternative giving at Christmas. I have told you that the piles of physical gifts in our house have continued to shrink. I have shared how I use gifts given through AGM to teach my friends and family about the mission work of BMPC. I have even confessed how I send fewer and fewer Christmas cards each year, but when I do, they no longer have baby pictures but AGM insert cards stuffed in them. But this year, I want to highlight something completely different regarding the BMPC Advent Gift Market.

First, I want to celebrate what is again an extraordinary and compelling AGM catalog packed with longstanding partners in mission, relevant organizations working to bring compassion and justice in the world, and gifts that support the actual work that BMPC members are doing in mission in our local community. Each gift is represented in a small card you can insert in your Christmas Cards, holiday hostess gifts, and packages wrapped under the tree.

But this year, I also want to share a growing trend we have seen at the Advent Gift Market in the past few years.

While giving to AGM is higher than ever – last year’s donations totaled over $56,000 – the number of people asking for those small “insert” cards essential to the alternative gift process continues to decline.

That is because an increasing number of members of our congregation and our larger community are using the Advent Gift Market to make generous charitable donations at the end of the year. The donors with whom I have spoken share how much they value using the AGM catalog to learn about the church’s priorities and partnerships in mission and as a guide for their end-of-year charitable donations.

I couldn’t be more thrilled with this development. To me, it is a sign that, in addition to folks giving generously through their pledges and offerings throughout the year to support the wide work of our congregation in the community and the world, when members look to give beyond the church, they still look to the church to help them connect with often small but vital organizations making a difference in a hurting world.

I encourage you to shop this Sunday and throughout Advent, keeping in mind this “alternative” way of giving through the Advent Gift Market. The opening event will take place in Congregational Hall this Sunday following worship, where Councils, Committees, and even representatives from partner organizations will be available to chat. However, you can also shop online today at www.BrynMawrAGM.com.

I will never stop being moved by this congregation’s generosity. It is a privilege to help create resources that support you all in your generosity. I hope that this year’s AGM catalog will encourage you to be more generous than ever this Christmas season.

One of my favorite new fall traditions here at BMPC is our big September food drive. Modeled after our longstanding annual Souper Bowl of Caring collection that takes place in February, we all have the opportunity in the fall to fill the Narthex on a Sunday morning with donations of non-perishable items that are whisked away to our local food pantries supporting them in supporting their communities.

This summer, the church has been phenomenal in bringing in non-perishable items each week as our local pantries here in Lower Merion have had the number of guests double this season.

This Sunday, September 22, all the donations you bring to church will be taken a little further away to four of our sister Presbyterian Churches who run food pantries out of their buildings.

West Kensington Ministry started a food program during the pandemic as the community’s needs, especially those of newly arrived immigrant families, became clear.

New River Presbyterian Church in West Philadelphia runs one of the smallest pantries we support. It is available to folks in their neighborhood with nowhere else to turn for that bag of groceries that will get them through the week.

Deacon Grace Marable founded and continues to run the pantry out of Bethel Presbyterian Church in North Philadelphia. The pantry gives away food to around 600 people per month and receives its most significant financial and food donations from BMPC.

TM Thomas Presbyterian Church serves a hot meal to around 200 people each month, and when they have the resources, they always send guests away with a bag of non-perishables to take home with them.

Each bag of food, cereal box, can of soup, and tin of tuna brought to church this Sunday will make a difference in the lives of families connected to our partners. We are deeply grateful for your generosity and your ongoing commitment to fighting hunger in Greater Philadelphia.

Recommended donations include cold cereals, spaghetti sauce, canned meals, soups (particularly hearty ones), peanut butter, jelly, canned tuna and chicken, canned fruit or vegetables, canned beans, applesauce, dry pasta, macaroni and cheese, crackers, instant oatmeal (packets), granola bars, and single-serving snacks.

We are more than halfway through our summer preaching series, All Creatures Great and Small, which highlights the animals in scripture that shape the biblical story. As we have moved through the summer, I often find myself pointing out to my colleagues the places where these same animals that appear in our sermons also appear in our stained-glass windows here at the church.

You might be surprised how many animals you can find in our widows, from the Sanctuary to the Chapel. A careful observer can find the animals that populate the Bible, but also a wide variety of animals never mentioned in scripture.

Between the windows depicting Psalm 23 in the east transept and the Good Shepherd Tiffany window in the Chapel, there are more sheep and lambs that can be counted.

In the Sanctuary, you can find the ram God provided Abraham at the sacrifice of Isaac, the fatted calf shared in celebration of the return of the Prodigal Son, the donkey upon which the Good Samaritan places the wounded man as he takes him back to his inn to recover. In a small corner of the Resurrection window, you will find the animals from Peter’s vision in Jaffa lowered down as if on a sheet declared by God to no longer be “unclean.”

Of course, in the windows depicting the creation story in Genesis, there are all kinds of birds, fish and whales, deer and jaguars, and that one problematic snake. Daniel’s lions are in the chapel. Windows celebrating the history of global mission, including both elephants and reindeer, are a little harder to spot. The St. Francis windows in the Narthex of the Chapel include butterflies, a wolf, rabbits, and squirrels. I know many of you consider the church mouse in the Fine Arts window to be the most charming of all our creatures.

My absolute favorite is the dogs. There is one biblical dog – located in the parable window, which tells the story of Lazarus, who sat begging at the gate of a rich man every day where dogs would lick his wounds. But the other two dogs are in the chapel – and they are both with children. In the “home” window of the Chapel, two children, surrounded by the words “kindness, sympathy, affection” and their faithful dog, care for a new litter of puppies.

This Sunday’s featured animal, the mother hen that Jesus evokes in his lament over the city of Jerusalem, is not found anywhere in our windows, but there are just as many birds throughout, maybe more than sheep. In fact, the most prominent animal in all our windows is the dove, which represents the Holy Spirit. This Sunday, as we explore what exactly Jesus was trying to convey when he compared himself to that mother bird, we will continue to celebrate the ways that the presence of God, the glory of God’s creation, and our relationships and care for one another are illuminated by the creatures of the earth.