“A priest is someone who stands in a place of remarkable vulnerability, and by doing so, invites other people to enter the sacred.”  I am currently reading the book Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity by Rev. Elizabeth M. Edman, and the quote above has been rolling around my brain for awhile.  What Edman is attempting to do in this book is show how the experiences of queer people can offer deep wisdom to the Church, because, as she argues, Christianity has always been a tradition of queerness, of navigating identity and blurring the lines between ideas and concepts that seem inherently separate: life/death, divine/human, unity/diversity.  She draws a number of parallels between the journeys of identity formation that queer people and Christians go through to show how much the Church can learn from the queer community.  The quote above

Last Saturday the CMC Leadership Team had a retreat.  For newer folks, LT is the church board.  An annual board retreat is part of a church structure model we’ve been moving toward in the last couple years.  We’re taking our cues from Dan Hotchkiss’s book Governance and Ministry: Rethinking Board Leadership.  He emphasizes the centrality of 1) setting policy and 2) visioning for a church board. This was a visioning retreat – our attempt to listen for the ways the Spirit is at work among us and direct our collective attention toward a few primary areas.  Practicing awareness!  Melonie Buller wrote a piece about this in the Lamplighter that went out this week.  In short, LT will be guiding the congregation in conversation over next year regarding how we respond to growth, how we might better form leaders among us, and discernment for how we focus our energy beyond our

These past two weeks I’ve had an unusually high amount of conversations with CMC folks who are overwhelmed with their jobs.  Overly busy, swamped, worn down, exhausted, exasperated.  I started noticing a pattern last week, then it kept coming.  This is likely not an unusual condition.  It’s just unusual for it to dominate the content of so many of my own interactions with CMC folks.  So I’m highlighting it here.  Since we are Practicing Awareness during Lent, I’m passing along what has come to my awareness.  In case you thought you were the only one.  Or in case you thought it was mostly your problem rather than a persistent and rampant systemic reality.  As you well know, it most definitely is your problem.  It is most definitely our problem, collectively, as a society. Sometimes it’s just a busy season, with relief in sight.  Sometimes there are do-able steps one can

This morning I attended the Interfaith Justice Table.  It’s a monthly breakfast, convened by Rev. Dan Clark, Ohio Director of Faith in Public Life.    There were about 30 of us – mostly clergy and leaders of various faith driven not for profit advocacy groups.  There were some common commitments that initially drew this group together – especially regarding racial bias and police accountability.  The group has been very supportive of Edith and Sanctuary work.  It has also become a gathering point for various concerns and efforts.  Plus Dan makes a great breakfast casserole. Today’s meeting had a wide variety of reflections, updates, and invitations. Imam Horsed Noah of the Abubakar Assidiq Islamic Center reflected on the shooting at the Al-Noor mosque in New Zealand and the persistence of Islamophobia and white supremacy. Our host, Rev. Eric Brown of Woodland Christian Church talked about his role in the search for an

This Lent season our worship focus is Practicing Awareness.  For our family, this coincides with settling in to a new house.  There’s nothing like moving to raise your awareness.  How many boxes does it take to clean out a closet?  A garage? When you move, just about everything calls for your attention.  How many address change notifications can we do today?  In which box is the tape?  In which drawer did you put the spatula?  Where’s my coat?  Where’s the bathroom?        In new surroundings I feel extra aware.  I’m interested in every new corner.  How many data points a second?  Eleven million (see the sermon link below).  Not much is familiar enough yet that I’ve stopped seeing it, letting it slip into the subconscious. Early last week I had the welcome realization that the day before we had likely reached peak chaos, and that our universe was slowly starting