RevRobin

I have good news to share.  Really good news.  Because of our faithful giving for the 2016 church budget—and because of God’s providential miracle working—we are pleased to announce the call of our new part-time Minister of Christian Education.  At a called meeting on December 20, the Board approved a unanimous recommendation from the Personnel Committee to bring Rev. Amy Johnson onto our church staff!  She will begin in early January.

Amy comes to us most recently from Central Christian Church in Decatur.  For fourteen years, she served as the Associate Minister at Mackinaw Christian Church where she developed the premier youth program in the Illinois and Wisconsin Region.  Mackinaw consistently sent the most children and youth to church camp and to events like Summit due to Amy’s enthusiasm, organization, and motivational skills.  In fact, Eureka Christian Church sent the most youth to Summit in November, due entirely to Amy’s encouragement.

Amy has many great gifts, but I’d like to highlight three of them.  The first is her passion.  It fills her so completely that it just spills out all over the rest of us.  She ignites any room she is in.  She also knows how to call forth gifts in others.  Amy sees with an intuitive vision.  She has a remarkable way of helping children, youth, and adults become all that God intends for us to be.  In ministry circles, we talk a lot about equipping the saints; Amy knows how to do that.  But the thing I admire most about Amy is how she is able to develop programs that do not rely on her energy, vision, or presence to thrive.  Her work is never Amy-centered; it is Spirit-centered.  It is a great benefit and blessing to the churches she serves.

I am so excited about our future with Amy on our staff.  Truthfully folks, I think we are going to be unstoppable.  Get ready Eureka Christian Church, a new day is coming!  And it’s going to be great!

And she gave birth to her firstborn son,
wrapped him in bands of cloth,
and laid him in a manger
because there was no room for them in the inn.
Luke 2:7

My friends, we are famous.  I know I shouldn’t brag, but it’s a really great story.  One you should know.  On Thanksgiving night, after the turkey, pie, and disappointing football games, I checked my work email.  I know, I know.  I shouldn’t have given in to the temptation to “work” on a holiday.  But I am so glad I did because in my inbox was a marvelous message from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Wessel.  He is the director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution and a frequent columnist for the Wall Street Journal where he worked for 30 years.  He also has a soft spot for Eureka Christian Church.  He and I exchanged emails last year when his mother passed away, so I already knew the connection.

You see, his mother and her family lived in Eureka when she was a teenager.  I’ll let him tell the rest:

Seventy five years ago, a German Jewish teenager, who had been sent to safety in England in 1939 on the Kindertransport, arrived in New York where she was reunited with her parents.  After a brief stay in New York, the three of them travelled across the U.S. by bus to Scattergood, Iowa, where the American Friends Service Committee had turned a school into a hostel for European refugees.

As the Nazi terror spread through Europe, the members of a Disciples of Christ Church in Eureka, Ill, decided to go beyond reading newspaper headlines and prayer.  A delegation from the church drove to Scattergood, interviewed the teenage girl’s parents and offered them a new home in Eureka. And so the family moved into a fully furnished apartment and was welcomed into a community that had rarely known Jews, let along German-born Jews.  The father got a job auditing municipal books in small Illinois towns.  The mother got a job in the Eureka College kitchen.  And the teenager got a free college education there.  That teenager was our mother, Irmgard Rosenzweig Wessel, who died last year at the age of 88.  We grew up hearing stories from our grandmother and our mother about the end of their peaceful, pleasant life in Germany and the beginning of a new and prosperous life in the U.S.

Irm Wessel moved to New Haven in the 1950s, practiced clinical social work for four decades and, with our father, pediatrician Morris Wessel, raised four children in New Haven.  When she visited the Eureka church several years ago, she reminded the good people of the Eureka Christian Church of the generosity of their parents and grandparents and she made a forceful plea for immigration reform.  She never forgot the fear and desperation of being a refugee and a new immigrant, and was a lifelong advocate for those who came to America after she did.

Whenever David Wessel tells the story of his family’s new life in America, he mentions us.  The passage above was included in a presentation he made at an awards ceremony for the Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services in New Haven, Connecticut.  The Thanksgiving email was to let me know that he also mentioned us in an interview for the Philadelphia Inquirer in a story that ran on November 27.

If we’re going to be famous, I’m glad it is for this reason.  Hospitality is a core Christian discipline; it is vital to our faith.  May we continue to burn with an undying commitment to welcome the stranger in our midst.  For in so doing, as we ought to know, we also welcome the Christ.

On Sunday, April 26, we are going to do something new.  In celebration of Earth Stewardship Sunday, we will participate in a “blessing of the garden soils.”  Everyone is invited to bring a cup or other similar container of your garden soil to worship with you.  (I’m actually hoping a few worms hitch a ride too!  That would make it a blessing of the soils and the animals all rolled into one!)  During our prayer time that Sunday in both services, we will share in this special service of blessing.

This is actually an ancient Christian tradition, dating back to the fifth century.  In more liturgical circles, it’s called Rogation Days, from the Latin word rogare which means “to ask.”  Farmers have long asked for God’s blessing upon their fields and crops during Rogation Days.  In British Anglican tradition, “the community would process around the perimeter of the parish with banners and bells, marking the boundaries of property at memorable trees or other landmarks” (from www.episcopalrelief.org).

Within the Anglican tradition in recent years, there has been a movement to redefine Rogation Days:

Instead of setting up boundaries around their gardens (and their hearts), participants are encouraged to break down the boundaries of purely self-centered concerns.  In the biblical tradition of using gardening imagery as a teaching tool for spiritual growth, communities are led in praying for their harvest as a means of sharing with those in need both locally and around the world—and in growing toward the full stature of Christ (from www.episcopalrelief.org).

This is what we will do on April 26.  We will ask for God’s blessing upon our vegetable and flower gardens.  At the same time, we will ask God to give us eyes to see and hearts to feel so that we might share our bounty with those in need.  In the meantime, this “Seed Sowing Psalm” by Fr. Ed Hays is a good one for us all (from Psalms for Zero Gravity):

Divine Mystery, assist me to be a wise gardener,
who, with great care, will sow only good seeds this day,
those deeds and attitudes that truly will give you glory.

If by habit, sloth or accident, I might sow an evil seed,
in haste, before it takes root, may I pluck it up at once,
lest it grow an evil harvest.

Every word, deed and hidden thought
is a seed whose DNA insures a fruit unfolding to ripe maturity
that someday will be my life-harvest returned to me.

May it be, O Holy One, a harvest of Life.

We are doing something new for Holy Week this year at Eureka Christian Church.  Actually, it is something very, very old.  The Easter Vigil is the oldest intact worship service in the Christian faith.  It dates from around the year 250.  Think about that.  Before the emperor Constantine converted to make Christianity “legal,” before even the twenty-seven books that we know as the New Testament were settled on as sacred scripture, the Christian community gathered on Holy Saturday for this extraordinary experience.  This is an ancient worship service.  It is timeless.

In the earliest days, the Easter Vigil was an all-night affair.  The community would gather on Saturday night and worship until the dawning of Easter Day.  In between was a service in four parts.  The Service of Light begins the Easter Vigil, as we light the great Paschal fire to proclaim that our God has power over even the darkest darkness.  The Service of the Word is next with a retelling of our salvation history from Genesis to the empty tomb.  The Service of Water follows, which is when the early church baptized new believers.  And the Easter Vigil concludes with the Service of the Table, as we break bread and share the cup together.

Our Easter Vigil will be from 9:00 PM until 10:30 PM on Holy Saturday, April 4.  Because this is our first year to experience this worship service, we have modified it.  Instead of the traditional 12 readings from the Old Testament, we will hear only four.  But these will be enough for us to realize once again what amazing and wondrous things God has done for us.  Depending on the response from you, we may expand the Easter Vigil in the coming years to include all 12 readings.  (And if we do, you will discover that there is nothing quite like taking communion as your first act of Easter Day, just after midnight.  But we’ll save that experience for another year!)

I have heard many people say that Christmas Eve is their favorite service of the Christian year.  It is just so sensory and mysterious.  And the story itself is just so powerful.  I think this is what captivates us about Christmas Eve.  Well, let me say from personal experience that the Easter Vigil is just as mysterious, just as captivating, just as powerful.  It is a service like no other.  I do hope you will consider being part of it.  Rediscover the Easter Vigil this Holy Week at Eureka Christian Church.