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Weekly Update 4/30

WHAT IS GOING ON AT CHURCH –

This Sunday, as every Sunday, Rev. Kim Wells will be at church from 10:30-11:30.  The peace candle is lit, there is quiet music composed and performed and recorded by Music Director Hilton Jones.  Usually 2-4 people are there.  After a time of quiet, concerns are shared and prayers are said.  This Sunday is the first Sunday of the month, so it was requested that communion be available at the church on Sunday morning.  This will be done in the most health conscious way possible given the circumstances.  Please know that you are welcome to drop in and receive communion between 10:30 and 11:30 on Sunday.  Social distancing will be maintained.  Masks encouraged.

Communion Sunday 

The first Sunday of the month is a Communion Sunday.  That means the communion offering will be received.  This offering is used to help people in the church and the community with basic needs such as rent and utility assistance, bus passes, prescriptions, etc.  There has been heavy need for these funds in recent weeks.  Please consider how you can help the community through this offering. Communion will be offered Sunday and this is also an opportunity to make a contribution to the Communion Offering.  These funds are helping people in the congregation and in the community with basic needs in this especially difficult time.  Your donations are making a difference.

Financial Ministry 

This is also a reminder to continue your giving to the church.  While there is no service on Sunday morning, the ministry of the church is continuing and even expanding.  The accessing of materials on the church website and social media has increased during these corona days.  Much of the staff is still in place and finding new ways to serve.  

In addition, the grass still needs to be mowed, the buildings are still being maintained, there is still light usage that requires electricity and water.  Insurance still needs to be paid.  The phone and the internet are still on.  All of this means that there are still bills that need to be paid.  

In conjunction with this situation, the church is not being used by the regular renters at this time, so there is no rental income coming in.  

In addition to regular giving, please consider making an extra offering in this time when the spiritual support, social outreach, and message of hope that are being provided by the church are so important.  One person from the church family has donated a stimulus check.  Many thanks for that inspiration!

One last note:  Deposits at church are being made once or twice a month, not weekly, so there may be a delay in the depositing of checks.  This is to reduce risk for those who are involved in doing the banking.

Pictures of Mothers and More

Music Director Hilton Jones would like to prepare another music video featuring pictures of mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, and those who have been mothering figures.  The LUCC family is invited to submit pictures electronically to hilton.kean.jones@gmail.com.  Pictures are needed by Sunday May 3.  Many thanks for your assistance with this project.

Permaculture Training at Church

While the church is basically closed down, this weekend, the permaculture training class will meet in the Fellowship Hall.  There are fewer than 10 people, they will stay 6 feet apart, and they will sanitize and disinfect.  So if you see cars at church, that is the event that is going on this weekend.

Father Adrian 

During our Christmas celebrations 30 years ago, LUCC had a special guest in our midst from St. Petersburg, Russia.  Father Adrian was the main priest from the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Job, a church that was paired with LUCC in a program that was promoting peace and friendship.  He stayed with members of the church, participated in church activities, became acquainted with life in America, and was interviewed by the local newspapers and TV stations.  He also welcomed groups from St. Petersburg (an Eckerd College student group in 1989; a visit by our pastor, Phil Smith, in 1990; a city delegation in 1991; and a UCC delegation in 1993 headed by Kim Wells) to his Church of St. Job in St. Petersburg, Russia.  He was a man of faith, compassion, and humor, and an excellent example of a cultural ambassador for the Russian Orthodox Church.

It is with sadness that I report that Father Adrian passed away on October 8, 2019, at the age of 82.  Kay and I had visited with him in 2016 in St. Petersburg, Russia, and he was already semi-retired because of poor health.  He remembered well his trip to Florida, and recalled meeting many of our LUCC people, both in Florida and in Russia.   Вечная Память!  Eternal Memory!                                    Bill Parsons

The (NEW IMPROVED) LIST OF FABULOUS LINKS:
Sermon videos: https://lakewooducc.org/category/online-devotional/
Sermon texts: https://lakewooducc.org/category/posts/sermon-texts/
Posts containing music: https://lakewooducc.org/category/posts/music/
For all links, please note “Older Posts” button near bottom of page.    

Corona Sabbath Posts

Each Friday, the church will post a devotional with readings, video from Kim, and music from
Hilton. You are invited to access these at the website and observe the sabbath according to
your schedule over the weekend. There will be a new one posted each week. This week’s post will highlight the Earth Day.

Please use the link below to view last week’s Corona Sabbath Post –
https://lakewooducc.org/2020/04/23/corona-sabbath-6-earth-day/

In addition to the weekly Corona Sabbath devotions on the website every Friday, Hilton is also posting music, mainly hymns, on the website daily. These are also posted on the church’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. You may find links to all the music posts on the website at https://lakewooducc.org/category/posts/music/ — note the “Older Posts” button down the page.

Daily Corona Prayer

https://lakewooducc.org/2020/03/20/lucc-corona-daily-prayer/

Connecting

In an effort to stay connected as a congregation, a text version of the Corona Sabbath posts is being sent in the mail to those in the church family that are not regular users of the Internet.  The church is also sending a paper version of the Weekly Update to those who may appreciate keeping in touch that way.   Additional Zoom gatherings are also being planned. 

Labyrinth Walks

Labyrinth Walks are being held as scheduled on Wednesday mornings at 9:00.  We feel given current information and restrictions that it is safe to hold this activity. It involves less than 10 people, it is outside, and the people can be at least 6 feet apart. Bring your own chair and wear a mask if you wish.

Subscribe to Website

This would be a good time to subscribe to the church website. As a subscriber, everything that is posted on the website will be sent to your email.

There’s now a new way to subscribe to posts from the church website by email. On any page of the website, look down the page for “Follow Blog via Email.” If you subscribed before, you’ll need to subscribe again with this new button. Notice, it’s right above the Paypal “Donate” button! 

If you would like assistance with this, please contact the Church Office.

Help Offered

Several people from the congregation have offered to help others as needed. If you need
something from the grocery store or help with an errand or some other kind of assistance,
please contact the Church Office. There are those who are ready and willing.

Music Ministry

About Hilton’s music. . . If you would enjoy hearing Hilton play more Irish folk songs, you can
listen for free at either https://hiltonjones.bandcamp.com/album/irish-
tunes or https://soundcloud.com/hilton-kean-jones/sets/irish-tunes .

May Birthdays: Mark Gibson 5/2, Angela Wells-Bean 5/7, Emily Gibson 5/8, Julian Micheal Ricciardi 5/9, Colleen Coughenour 5/11, Jen DeGroot 5/12, Christy Martin 5/15, Bill Parsons 5/16, Danielle Hintz 5/25, Someone missing? Contact the church office with birthday information.

Circle of Concern: JoAnn Reid, Dee Dee and Lynn Young and family, William Owen, Wilbur Reid, Martha Lamar, Jen Degroot, Carolyn Moore, Ann Quinn, Maggie Brizendine, and Ann Rogers. All healthcare workers and essential workers. All those suffering from COVID-19.

Please keep LUCC member, Olivia Gibson, in your prayers. She is a nurse on a COVID-19 unit in a local hospital. We are grateful for her ministry!

Recent Posts:

Weekly Update: If you are involved with an activity or event that you would like to share with the LUCC family, please send the information to the Church Office by Tuesday since the Update usually is sent out on Wednesday.

Text Version of Earth Sunday Zoom Reflection

I’d like to share with you a quote from John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, who lived in the 1700’s:

“I believe in my heart that faith in Jesus Christ can and will lead us beyond an exclusive concern for the well-being of other human beings to the broader concern for the well-being of the birds in our backyards, the fish in our rivers, and every living creature on the face of the earth.”

I would love to believe what Wesley says. I would love for the millions of Christians the world
over to have compassion not only for other people but also for the natural world which supports the life of our species. But sadly, Wesley’s hopes have not been realized.

It seems we are still stuck on the first part of Wesley’s statement – that faith in Jesus Christ
would lead us to have concern for each other and for our species.

While there seems to be concern for a person who has fallen on hard times, there seems to be less concern for humanity as a whole and for the economic systems and social arrangements and biased thinking that cause much of the suffering experienced by individual people in our world today. As Dom Helder Camara, a bishop in Brazil, put it, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”

Christianity seems to have fostered concern for individual people on a case by case basis but not so much for humanity as a species.

The climate crisis is a case in point. Humanity as a species needs nature to support our lives; to make it possible for us to flourish and thrive, to breathe, and to eat. Harming the ecosystem of the planet means harming our species. Hurting Earth hurts people. So, if we had true concern for humanity as a whole, we would have more concern for the planet. We don’t even seem to have that “exclusive concern for the well-being of other human beings” that Wesley mentions.

So, Wesley’s aspirations don’t seem to be coming true. Faith in Jesus Christ does not seem to be leading us from concern for humanity to concern for nature.

St. Francis of Assisi had a different approach than Wesley. He lived well before Wesley from
1181-1226. He said, “If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”

That seems to be closer to our actual experience. Little concern for the environment
accompanied by little concern for humanity.

I saw this post on NextDoor recently: “This past March we had zero school shootings. The first time since 2002, I hear. Stay safe everyone.” No school shootings. Well, the schools were closed. How sad is that? We have to close the schools to stop the shootings? Clearly, there is not enough regard for the value of life, human or otherwise, in our culture, despite all the churches.

So here is my hope for this Earth Day Week. It’s a twist on Wesley with an eye to St. Francis. My hope is that our growing reverence for the natural world will help us increase our sense of reverence for human life. That our love for the Earth and for nature will increase our love for our very own species. That’s my aspiration this 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Amen.

Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee

joyful joyfulWhen we were much, much, much younger my sister and I would slap-dash our way through the 4-hands transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies, collapsing in giggles whenever one or the other of us would beat the other to the end of a movement!

So, out of that memory springs the approach for this final Earth Day hymn-a-day marathon: Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee. #4 in the New Century Hymnal. Here’s a representative text: https://hymnary.org/text/joyful_joyful_we_adore_thee.

But — back to the symphonies, 4-hands — before the hymn itself, there’s two fragments from the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony from which this famous hymn is drawn: first, the little Turkish march theme in which you can hear the famous hymn melody lurking but not entirely exposed, then the main theme as it first appears with the melody in augmentation in the upper voices with a rumbling stream of eighth notes in the lower voices. Both those fragments are from a 4-hands edition of the 9th symphony, with me playing both parts since Lucy, my sister, is in Hawaii and I’m in Florida.

After those two fragments, then comes the hymn as we know it but with me improvising a 4-hands version as if Lucy and I were doing it. “4-hands” means literally, four hands, or two people with two hands each, playing on the same piano. The literature for piano, 4-hands is very, very extensive and is considered much more important that literature for 2 pianos! It’s a medium I love. It’s VERY social and a lot of fun. I often require composition students to write in it when learning to write for orchestra because it teaches them to not mask the counterpoint of the different voices.

The picture above is Lucy and I playing some 4-hands music at Lakewood UCC way back in 2013.

This Is My Father’s World

hkj at pianoAt Lakewood UCC we’re very concerned that the words to our prayers, hymns, and anthems all use inclusive language for humanity and expansive language for God. That’s a deep statement, and if you ponder it for a bit — inclusive language for humanity…expansive language for God — you might glimpse how our language for humanity in the past may have been exclusionary and our language for God, restricting. I asked Rev. Wells for suggestions for hymns during this week when we’re celebrating Earth Day. This Is My Father’s World was one of her suggestions! When I queried her about the patriarchal language of the title, her response was, as always, enlightened and compassionate. Here’s what she said, “Many of us grew up singing This Is My Father’s World and know it. Yes, it uses masculine language for God, but we do our best. Don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Or become legalistic.” It’s great working for someone who really thinks things through.

Here’s words to the hymn so you can sing along: https://hymnary.org/text/this_is_my_fathers_world_and_to_my.

This is a simple rendition, just piano and a string pad. It’s what I would have heard at night as a child as almost every night my mother (violin) and father (piano) would play together in the front room while I feel asleep on the couch. I assume they treated my sister to the same pleasure, but I don’t remember as she’s about 10 years older than me. They favored a romantic style of rubato, improvisational playing of the Fritz Kreisler sort. Guess that accounts for my eclectic tastes.

Corona Sabbath 6 Earth Day

unnamedThese weeks when we cannot gather in person for Sunday worship, Lakewood United Church of Christ is providing brief weekly sabbath programs for you to listen to on your own or with those you live with. They will be posted on Friday so that you can schedule your sabbath time to suit your schedule and your spiritual inclinations. We hope these programs are of spiritual support to you in these difficult times.

There is a poem, a scripture reading and a brief meditation by Pastor Kim Wells followed by music offered by Music Director Hilton Kean Jones. Following the video and music, there is a photo montage of pictures of nature taken by the LUCC church family.

Find a quiet place, inside or outside. Light a candle. Perhaps have something present that represents nature for you. Breathe. Be present.

You may begin by offering these words:

The creation is quite like a spacious and splendid house, provided and filled with the most abundant furnishings. Everything in it tells us of God.
–John Calvin, 1509-1564

When you are ready, start the video below.

(For text for above video click HERE.)

As you listen to the music video from Hilton which follows, you are invited to pay attention to the thoughts and feelings and reflections that arise for you. The music video features photos of nature taken by members of the Lakewood Church family offered in honor of Earth Day.

(opening titles begin in silence – for best audio, headphones or external computer speakers are recommended)

After viewing the videos, you are invited to offer the following closing –

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. . . I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
–Ann Frank, 1929-1945

Breathe. Extinguish your candle and engage whatever may come with a sense of peace and a desire to serve.

LAKEWOOD UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST

The mission of Lakewood United Church of Christ, as part of the Church Universal, is to:

  • Celebrate the presence and power of God in our lives and in our world;
  • Offer the hospitality and inclusive love of Christ to all people;
  • Work for God’s peace and justice throughout creation.