The grass withers, the liturgy fades

May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 / Beth Merrill Neel / 5 Comments

Does a prayer have staying power? Does a litany change anything, or anyone?

There are prayers I treasure; I particularly love Cardinal Newman’s “O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen….” When leading worship, I sometimes worry I will forget the Lord’s Prayer right in the middle. I find comfort, before preaching, in saying the words out loud “may the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts…”

Almost every week I write liturgy for the bulletin, usually a call to worship and a prayer of confession, maybe communion liturgy. I spend a fair amount of time on it (and make it available elsewhere on this blog). I enjoy the process; it adds the sense of poetry to my usual to-do list. Some of the stuff I write isn’t half-bad, if I do say so myself.

But occasionally the thought comes: does this make a difference? People get one shot at their part in the call to worship, and then we’re on to the opening hymn. Did a word catch them? Did a phrase redirect their thoughts? Do the words of confession that I put together resonate at all with at least one person in the pews?

Lately I’ve decided that the liturgy – or at least the liturgy in our Presbyterian worship – is momentary. The grass withers, and the liturgy fades, but the word of the Lord will stand forever.

And maybe that’s not bad. A petite-four is a momentary thing; so is a sidewalk drawing. Which is not to say those things aren’t beautiful, brief though they are. If everything were eternal, we’d be overloaded.

Maybe liturgy is like KonMari for worship – something non-essential that is done with once uttered. I think I’m okay with that.

But I’ll write on, not for eternity, but for the moment.

Free concert, Thursday night

April 21, 2016April 21, 2016 / Beth Merrill Neel / 2 Comments

Evidently we’ve been reaching out to our neighbors without meaning to do so. It’s the latest church trend – unintentional evangelism.

Every Thursday, our choir rehearses in our fellowship hall, a large and acoustically great space on the second floor of the education wing. With fifty or sixty singers gathered, the room gets a little stuffy, so we open the windows that face 16th Street and the apartment building across the road.

Last fall, through sheer coincidence, we learned that some of our neighbors gather together in one of the apartments to have a beer or a glass of something and to listen to the choir rehearse.

How great is that?

Now I love our choir, as a group and as individuals, and while there are a few stellar voices in it, there are also plain ol’ regular good voices in it too, but when they come together – magic. That’s the thing about choirs, isn’t it; the sum is greater than the parts. (I love it when math doesn’t work.)

The choir and our music director have been kind enough to let me sing with them for the major work they’re doing in May, pieces of Christopher Tin’s Calling All Dawns. I’m learning to sing in Swahili and Polish and Maori. My brain is very excited about all of this.

I wonder what our neighbors think when they hear us singing strange words like “baba yetu” or “kia hora”. Do they know we are singing a prayer? Do they know we are singing about peace?

I suspect that our neighbors will not show up on Sunday to hear the final product of any rehearsal. I’m okay with that because maybe showing up on Sunday isn’t the point. They do put up with a lot from us – occasional construction, taking up a lot of on street parking on Sunday morning, people showing up for help at strange hours.

Maybe our free Thursday night concerts are one way to thank them for being our neighbors, no strings attached. Peace, friends.

OpenWindowSm

PS: The Portland Gay Men’s Chorus rehearses in the same space on Monday nights – it’s a two-fer!

Liturgy-Time Continuum

February 24, 2016February 24, 2016 / Beth Merrill Neel / 3 Comments

I know how it’s supposed to go: you save the palms from Palm Sunday, maybe stick a few in the Easter bouquet, and then store them for a good ten months until burning them for the next year’s Ash Wednesday service. As I did just a few weeks ago.

The palm leaves were good and dry, as opposed to the year before when we couldn’t find any of the old ones and tried microwave a few leaves off the decorative palm tree in the parlor to dry them out enough so we could burn them into ashes. Some friendly advice: don’t try this at home, at church, or anywhere. It doesn’t work. Besides, your local Catholic supply store will have ashes for you.

This year I was prepared for the beginning of Lent. On Fat Tuesday I brought my nice, dry, dead palm leaves home and gathered up a metal bowl, some matches, and a pitcher of water (just in case.) I went to the concrete slab out back, put the leaves in the bowl, and dropped the lighted match.

It was so cool, watching the flames lick the leaves, starting off small and almost going out only to burst out. I decided to do it again, and to film it with my trusty phone. It was so much fun I did it a third time, and now have ashes enough to last me for the next decade.

I posted the video of the leaves burning because I found the image mesmerizing, especially in slow motion. And then I got to thinking about Pentecost, because who doesn’t think about Pentecost on Fat Tuesday? There was something holy about the the small tentative flame seeking something to catch fire to, then growing, then growing so much as the breeze picked up that I worried it might get out of control, then dying down, then turning the leaves to mere gray husks that fell apart with a tiny breath.

Do the flames of Pentecost die down by Ash Wednesday? Does the Spirit grow to an alarming rate, only to leave behind the dregs of what she touched eleven months later?

God’s time is not as linear as we might like. There are births in Lent, and flames on Christmas. There is death at Easter, and ash on Pentecost. The whole liturgical calendar is simply a construct, a way to help us remember that God’s Spirit ebbs and flows, or at least our recollection of it does.

Here we are, in the middle of Lent, and the daffodils are already blooming where I live. Easter is so early this year that some of my friends will be putting their lilies out in the snow. Nature has her own timeline, of course, and occasionally she and the liturgical calendar dance in step, only to have a falling out, and we are left with Easter bunnies hopping over snow drifts and the solemnity of Lent marked by audacious daphne and crocuses. Heck, we even sang a few alleluias in worship last week.

Maybe all time and all seasons, natural or human made, are hallowed. Time belongs to God; it is we who made the calendar.

Sometimes we have to let each other fail

January 12, 2016January 12, 2016 / Beth Merrill Neel / 2 Comments

My spouse and I are four and a half years into our adventure of co-pastoring. Will it be our last such adventure? I have no idea. Other married co-pastors have written great things in the last four and a half years, and I am grateful for the wisdom they have shared. As we move further along in this relationship, new and subtle facets of working together emerge, and I think about them, and sometimes share them my husband.

There’s a meeting tomorrow with the city about some of our building issues, and one of our great members is going and said one of us needed to go with him. It’s in an area I’ve been working in. As my husband and I were going over the calendar, he said, “I think both of us should go.” It seemed a reasonable statement.

And then I started wondering. Does he think I can’t manage it? Because it deals with money and property, which are more his areas, does he want to be there? Or really, does he think I can’t manage it? When I told our member that both of us would be there, he said only one of us needed to be. So I told my husband I would go, since this involves a project I’ve been working on. But a larger question looms.

One of the benefits (I think) about having co-pastors is that you get people with complimentary gifts and skills. In a nutshell, he does numbers and I do words. More than fifteen minutes on a financial statement and my head starts to spin. Writing a sermon, or a newsletter article, or an annual report is his idea of hell. You get the picture.

Still, it occurred to me that for the sake of our pastorate – and probably our marriage – sometimes we need to let the other one fail, or not do as great a job, or work in those areas where we’re not as strong. We won’t learn if we always let the other do the heavy lifting, whatever the area of work may be. It may also be a good model for the larger staff or congregation, to explore what it means to be not-gifted at something, to struggle with something, or even to deal with that which is usually tedious or confusing.

Maybe it’s just that none of us can be strong and talented all the time; if we were, we’d be walking around like arrogant snobs. Maybe. Or maybe we would get out of touch with what it means to be ignorant (in the best sense of that word) or an amateur. Maybe it would help us expect less, and encourage more.

So failure is an option.

But so is grace.

Christmas Eve at the cemetery

December 21, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 4 Comments

It was such a brief scene as I drove by: a man pulled over on the side of the road, standing on a hillside that was dotted with in-ground gravestones, standing in front of one that was decorated with some red and white flowers – carnations, maybe. I saw him for only a few seconds, and I wondered why he was there, standing on the muddy ground in the rain.

Was that his mother, his wife, his best friend, his brother? Why that moment?

The chiaroscuro of the season always gets to me: life’s way of creating shadows so that the candlelight seems all the more bright; life’s way of creating drama about everyday things, like visiting a cemetery, or pulling over on the side of the road in the rain.

In my first six years of ministry, I conducted a funeral or memorial service every year on December 23rd, or 24th, or 26th. Ruth, age 84. Jean, age 81. Gene, age 78. Faith, age 85. Maybelle, age 79. Bob, age 89. I would often use the texts about Simeon and Anna for those service, old people who died knowing the full consolation of Israel and the promised savior.

But still. Standing at the cemetery on Christmas Eve – it makes your heart break a little, when you get back into your car and “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” is the first thing that comes on the radio, and then some idiot passes you by with a loud blare of his horn because you’ve slowed down, because you can’t really drive very well with the tears flooding your eyes.

A friend of mine let me know I won’t see her on Christmas Eve; it’s a hard time right now, and she didn’t think everyone around her would appreciate her tears. It is bleak, this midwinter, and for us in Portland is has been gray and sodden. There are other people I won’t see at church on Christmas Eve. Some leave town to be with whatever family is still left. Some will be full with a feast and wine, sleeping through our carols and candlelight. And some will just stay home, because all the songs and all the twinkling trees cannot fill the well of sadness that’s taken squatter’s rights in the heart these days. But there are many I will see, there because they have joy to share, or questions they seek answers for, or because they love to sing in the candlelight, or because their Mom made them come, or because this is their community, and of course they’ll be there on Christmas Eve.

A church I used to be a part of has Easter sunrise services at the cemetery every year. I wonder what it would be like to have a Christmas Eve service at the cemetery – too Dickensian, waiting for the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future to show up? Too morbid, like the Zombie Nativity that’s made a few headlines? Or too real – the presence of death even as we celebrate birth?

The mind goes to T.S. Eliot, who often gets the last word with me. From “The Journey of the Magi”

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

And still: a warm Christmas to you, whatever that may mean.

Sighing at the Angel Tree

December 15, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 2 Comments

So our congregation has, for many years, had a Christmastime Angel Tree, in which members purchase requested gifts for families in our local Head Start program. Do not get me wrong: this is great. It’s a way to make the holiday a little merrier for families who (I assume) don’t have a lot of extra disposable income.

And every year, our family waits until the later weeks of the Angel Tree to pick up our cards, because while there are many who want to buy clothes for adorable baby boys and five-year-old girls, other gift recipients are simply not as much fun to shop for. This year we picked up cards for a family with four boys, ages 7 to 18. And off to Fred Meyer I went.

True confession: I do not enjoy shopping of any sort – grocery shopping, clothes shopping, Christmas gift shopping. I just don’t. I like the idea of giving people presents, in theory. I like the idea of the recipient knowing that I care about them or was thinking about them. But going out to the store, at night, in the rain, in the cold: meh. A recent trip to the mall confirmed for me what I’ve suspected for a while now: Hell is Macy’s.

So Monday night, while my kid was at church choir practice and my spouse was at church checking his email, I headed out, Angel Tree cards transcribed into a nice little list. Boy’s undershirts, size medium. Boy’s undershirts, size large. Medium boy’s dress shirt. Large boy’s pajamas. Tennis shoes, size 3.5. It just about broke my heart, knowing that some mom or dad desperately needs basic items for their sons, knowing that the last things those boys probably want Santa to bring them is dumb old clothes.

There were a few fun things on the list – a twin bed set (way out of our price range.) Boat Legos. Boat Legos? I called my husband from the toy aisle. “It says Boat Legos. Would Pirate Legos count?” I spent twenty minutes in the children’s shoe section. There were no size 3.5 boys tennis shoes. There were 4’s, and 5’s. Nike, and Adidas. $50 a pair. $50 a pair? For the youngest kid, so they can’t be passed down? That’s a lot of money for shoes the kid will grow out of. But maybe there is nothing worse than wearing hand-me-down boy’s tennis shoes. And $50 – that’s just a couple of lunches out for our family. The size 4 Nikes went into the basket.

I will be the first to admit I overthink things, including the Angel Tree gifts. I spent more on the gifts for these four boys than I spent on my husband and child, and that feels about right. I worry that I misread the size requests, that Pirate Legos are not the same thing as Boat Legos, that these kids will open presents they did not want and realize, once again, on Christmas morning, that they do not have as many choices as other kids. They won’t get the brand new Play Station 17, or whatever number it’s up to. They’ll get undershirts and pajamas, which may or may not fit. But maybe it will bring Mom a smile.

What I wish I could do for my Angel Tree family is know them, and find out how Head Start was for them, and see what I can do to help them have more choices at Christmas and all year. But like the Santa who fills the Christmas stockings, the angels of the tree are anonymous. Maybe it’s better that way.

But still… I wish them a Merry Christmas. And I wish they could have a merrier one.

Preaching: What’s the point?

November 9, 2015November 12, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 5 Comments

Often on a Sunday afternoon, after I’ve changed out of my church clothes into jeans and a sweatshirt, after I’ve had a wee nap in the comfy chair, after I’ve unwound from All Things Sunday Morning, a creeping doubt comes into my head: what difference does a sermon make? I’m not fishing for compliments here. I’m pretty realistic about my sermons and I, like everyone else, I am an above average preacher.

About ten years ago I let go of worrying that every sermon I preached had to be Wonderful and Inspiring. I’d learned that a lot happens between my lips and the congregation’s communal ears, that people hear things I never said and don’t hear things I thought I said quite plainly. Silly old Holy Spirit, interceding with sighs too deep for our words.

I’ve preached sermons that teach (I hope); sermons that lead (I hope). I’ve preached and heard sermons that are challenging and inspirational and sermons that are sheer poetry. I have also preached my fair share of dogs but always try, in the advice of my preaching professor, to walk those dogs proudly. A lot of us preachers spend a lot of time at our craft, and a good quarter of our time is spent planning worship, writing liturgy, coordinating music with the musicians, and writing the weekly sermon. Some weeks it feels positively prodigal to spend so much time on something that will only play out in a hour. But like a drama or a symphony, the preparation is as much as the performance.

Lately, though, I’ve wondered if it makes a difference, if good, faithful people don’t hear a decent sermon and then go home and go about life as usual. When I do a sermon series, how does that help when less than half the folks are there to hear the whole series? And really, if every sermon is exhorting people to go out and be faithful in some way, might that not lead to some spiritual schizophrenia? Fifty-two ways you can be faithful in today’s world? Maybe three ways would be enough, and we could dispense with the sermon altogether for the other forty-eight Sundays.

The world is a mess. A big fat mess. People are dying from cancer. Children are drowning as they flee with their parents in search of a safer home. Religious extremists of all faiths give God and God’s followers a really bad name. We imprison people for the crime of being poor. Black lives matter and people don’t get it. How on earth could one 10-20 minute sermon make a dent in the mess?

It can’t. Fifty-two sermons can’t make a dent. Ten thousand sermons can’t.

But fifty-two people can make a dent. Ten thousand people can make a dent. Maybe that’s the part I forgot.

As the congregation settles in on Sunday morning, I think about all the hidden pain people bring in with them – irreconcilable differences, living paycheck to paycheck, enduring treatment, shredding away from loneliness or addiction or ostracism. Worry about kids. Worry about parents. Worry about friends. Secrets and lies and shame. But I also think about the strength they bring in – perseverance, presence, advocacy, grace, hospitality, hope.

So maybe if for one hour a week, these wounded wonders come in and are soothed by music or a prayer or even a sermon, maybe it was worth it. Maybe if something I or another says in a sermon helps them to hang on for one more week, or gives them that kick in the proverbial pants, maybe if that tricky Holy Spirit intercedes and whispers something perfect that they then attribute to the preacher, maybe then there is a point to preaching.

Or three points and a poem. But hopefully not that.

The Terrible Beauty

November 1, 2015November 4, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 1 Comment

Halloween is done, thank God. I am so over that holiday. This year we carved exactly one pumpkin, and I let the real spiders decorate inside and out.

Actually, Halloween was over for me after fifth grade. That year, near Houston where I grew up, a father was found guilty of killing his son by lacing his Pixie Stix with cyanide. The next year I broke my foot, and that was that.

Maybe part of the reason I’m glad Halloween is over is because I really, really, really love All Saints Day. It’s right up there with Christmas and Easter for me, only better, because there are fewer expectations.

But this year, in the middle of the service – after I had preached but before we began to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, after we had sung “For All the Saints” and named our beloved dead – in the middle of the service as the choir sang an extraordinary anthem, I thought to myself

This is a terrible thing to do to people.

The choir was singing “Entreat Me Not to Leave You” by Dan Forrest. (You can listen to a different choir sing it here.) I was thinking about all the people I have loved who have left me in death, and I did not have the literal opportunity to tell them not to go, not to die, not to succumb to the cancer or the internal injuries or old age. I got so sad, and had to do that pastor thing of disengaging emotionally so I could stand up and do the next thing.

Celebrating All Saints is a terrible beauty. Terrible in that all that pain and grief and rage is unleashed again. Terrible that it’s done publicly. Terrible that we don’t all stand up and stomp around and insist that God stop all the tragic deaths.

But then it’s so God-damned beautiful too. The golden shining of those souls. The memories. Naming the names. Affirming the hope that they are not gone forever. Not being alone in our grief. Really beautiful music. Holy communion.

The best analogy I can find is wiggling a loose tooth. It hurts, but it’s a good hurt. Today I think All Saints is that way, the worship service at any rate. It hurts, remembering those people who have gone from us. But it’s a good hurt, because we had them for a while, and now we have each other, and that will do.

My husband and daughter, years ago, at Yellowstone, walking toward a wide sky.

Skipping church

August 23, 2015September 13, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 3 Comments

It’s Sunday morning and I am home and we’re not going to church today. We are on vacation, enjoying one of our six Sundays a year not in church, but I’m feeling a little naughty and a little guilty about the whole thing. The truth is, we could go to church – if not the church we serve, then another church. A church of another denomination, in our neighborhood, whose pastor we admire. A church served by one of our Presbyterian colleagues whom we never get to hear preach. The hipster church down the road which brings in millenials in droves, for reasons we simply cannot fathom.

But no, we’re staying home this morning. We might go to brunch – isn’t that what people who don’t go to church do on Sunday mornings? We could drink coffee and read the Sunday paper, but I’m the only one who drinks coffee and we cancelled the paper until tomorrow, thinking our vacation would last one more day than it actually did. Instead, I was up at six (why?????) and the others are sleeping in.

Here’s the thing: pastors (and other church professionals) need a break from church and from Sunday morning worship. If I were to go to my own congregation this morning, and sit somewhere in the sanctuary, it would be hard for me to let go and just worship. If there were a mistake in the bulletin, I would see it. If the sound system was wonky, I would notice it. I would have to work hard to worship and not to critique, and that’s not fair to those who are leading worship today, or to myself.

And for me, it is hard to do a one-off at another congregation. It’s hard to go to a brand new church whose traditions are not your own. Did I sit in “someone’s” pew? Do we kneel, come forward, stand up, sit down, fight fight fight? If I sing the alto line to the hymn, will I get funny looks? Will my child be bored to tears, or invited to leave to go God knows where for a Bible lesson, juice, and animal crackers? Will the sermon move me or annoy me, or worse, bore me? Will I be welcomed or ignored?

In the twenty-two years since I’ve been ordained, the most I have not gone to church is three weeks in a row, and that was when my daughter was first born. Did I miss it? I was so overwhelmed by my newborn, and breast feeding, and exhaustion, and healing from a C-section, that worship was the last thing on my mind. But that fourth week, I couldn’t wait to take our daughter to church for the first time. She was cooed over and held and I was loved and cared for. We were home.

This morning we are home at our home. The spouse and the kid are still asleep, and the dog just woke up and is sitting on my lap. The morning coffee has been consumed. I might make scones. I might read. I might do laundry. I won’t go outside, because the smoke from the fires east of us is looming over all the city and it’s nothing short of gross outside.

I won’t go to church today; I’ll take the rare sabbath a pastor gets. I’ll remember that I am not in charge of worship, nor solely responsible for it, nor the only one who does it right. I will say a prayer – for my colleague who is on her own this morning; for the firefighters who are so brave and tireless; for those whose health and homes are affected by this fire. I’ll say a prayer of thanks for this morning off, for vacation, for my family and my dog.

And then I’ll go make scones.

“May I speak with you…”, part 2

June 30, 2015June 30, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / Leave a comment

Yesterday’s post about my visit from Joy was read by many, at least in terms of my stats. I appreciate the comments, likes, and shares. Today I received a message from a minister colleague in another part of the state a few hours away. Joy had visited her, too, a few weeks ago, and my friend had a similar experience of listening to her and helping her out. I am grateful she let me know.

And then I checked to see if I felt that thing I sometimes feel when I’ve helped a complete stranger: did I feel as though I had been duped, taken advantage of, conned?

In every church I have served, people come to church to ask for help, some in truly desperate situations and some looking for a handout. I believe in handouts, to a point; I think sometimes what a person most needs is $20 to buy what they want. But I also know that sometimes I have helped someone who then tells all his friends who also come seeking help. Or in one town where I worked, I listened to a guy poor out his soul about his family being innocent bystanders victimized by a crime, only to learn a a few weeks later that another pastor in town had heard the same story from the same guy the year before.

After twenty or so years of pastoring, I’ve decided I would rather err on the side of kindness, knowing that some of the people I help are really not all that desperate. So with regards to Joy, did I feel duped?

No.

Anytime I hear a stranger tell me his or her story and then ask me for help, I know that person might not be telling me the truth or even the whole truth. I know people take advantage of the kindness of churches and pastors and church secretaries. I also know that sometimes a church is one of the few places where someone will be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their truthfulness.

My parents were both born in the 1930’s and their early childhoods were marked by the Great Depression. Neither grew up in families that were neither destitute nor wealthy; my grandfathers were both employed and my grandmothers ran their households with great efficiency. My dad was one of three children, my mom one of six. My mother remembers that whenever someone would come to the door looking for food, my grandmother would give that person something – a sandwich, an apple, toast with jelly. My grandfather worked in construction, and if a day laborer was needed, my grandmother would mention that to the person at the door.

To be kind is to risk being taken advantage of. To be generous is to choose to use resources for one thing and not for another. As a pastor, I have a sense that the time I have and the resources I offer are not solely mine; they are part of the congregation as well, and I want to be a good steward of their gifts. And sometimes I act on behalf of the congregation to live out the commands that Jesus gave.

So I don’t know if my Joy will come your way, or when another Joy will present herself to you. I don’t know what you will decide to do. I don’t know how you will make your decision. But maybe we all need a little Joy in our lives, for so many reasons.

Hold Fast to What Is Good

A blog and some art and some liturgy

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