Taking God on Vacation

Editorial Note: Today the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel leaves on the youth pilgrimage to Guatemala with a team of two additional adults and eight teens and young adults. Please pray for them in their travels and for safe return at the end of the month. In the meantime, we present a series of guest posts beginning with this one from our newest Deacon, the Rev. Barb Ballenger.

When I was a kid, camping was the family vacation of choice. We had a large Coleman tent that fit five of us like sardines, and a separate awning to create a dining area. My dad had crafted a camp box that held all the camp kitchen essentials, from minute rice to marshmallow forks. To this day the smell of canvas and wood smoke or the taste of Tang can make me feel at least 40 years younger. 

These trips were often long weekends in Ohio state parks; though sometimes they were multi-state excursions of a week or so. They would inevitably include a Sunday and my mom would make sure that we went to church. 

I remember them as a blur of tiny, clapboard rural Catholic churches. The smells would be different from what I was used to, the layout strange, the pews different from the large suburban church we attended at home. Occasionally we would find ourselves at a campground service, seated on cut logs in the amphitheater where we had watched “Charlie the Lonesome Cougar” the night before. 

My mother saw to it that we were a weekly church-going family, and vacation was no exception. Looking back, it was one of the few times we visited other churches, where we got a chance to explore how others marked their Sabbath, sang their songs, or arranged their donuts during coffee hour.  

There is something about summer that changes the feel of church-going. Trips, camps, even just a little time off, can slow things down or break things up when it comes to our Sunday practice. This change of pace can be an opportunity to do some spiritual exploring. For families, visiting other churches during trips can be a conversation starter about faith and religious preferences. What was the same? What was different? What did it feel like to be a visitor? Was I welcome? Did I find God there? These are good insights to bring back to your regular church experience. They are good questions to ask on any Sunday.

If summer vacation offers you the luxury of a quiet morning, consider it an invitation to explore prayer in a new way. Bring a Book of Common Prayer along (or download an app from Apple or Google) and pray morning prayer  with a cup of coffee nearby, or read the psalms to the rhythm of ocean waves or the song of gulls. Even just sitting on a familiar back patio in the presence of a garden box or hanging flowers can extend summer’s invitation to contemplate a God that reveals the divine self through the scents of flowers, the hum of bees, or the distraction of humming bird or mosquito whine. 

This summer, let your time away or your time to yourself be opportunities to rest with the Spirit and delight in the places where God waits for you. When you make it back to St. Martin’s, I’d love to see the pictures. 

Blessings,

The Rev. Barb Ballenger

Deacon and Associate for Spiritual Formation and Care

Editorial: Here are some resources to get you started!

• Find an Episcopal Church near you -- https://www.episcopalchurch.org/find-a-church
• Forward Day by Day - These quarterly booklets offer daily scripture and reflections that fit in a pocket or purse. Copies are available in the back of the church or on the table and in the rack in the Parish House lobby. Donations are welcome. Want an app for that? Download the Forward Day by Day app for your smartphone.
• The Daily Office from the Mission of St. Clare --  https://www.missionstclare.com/english/ -- gives you all you need for the prayers of the Episcopal Daily Office, including songs.
• Listen to Presiding Bishop Michael Curry's Way of Love podcasts, with new episodes posted each Tuesday -- https://wayoflove.episcopalchurch.org/
• Bible Lens app by YouVersion -- Bible Lens “transforms your everyday photos into profound, Biblically-based artistic shareable images.” Take a photo of the places that you are finding God on vacation, and then open them in Bible Lens to see them paired with Bible verses that match!
• Find the Episcopal saint of the day -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_of_saints_(Episcopal_Church)#July

Good News! Christian Primacy is Over

A sermon I heard on a podcast was very helpful to me and I want to share it with you. Good news always wants to be shared.

The preacher - Timothy Keller* of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City - took the first three chapters of the Book of Daniel as his text. This book tells the story of its namesake and his Hebrew companions as they make their way during exile in the sadistic and dangerous kingdom of Babylon.

Keller’s first point is about displacement. The Hebrew elite have been transported to an alien land where they are surrounded by a polytheistic and hedonistic culture. Where before they lived in Jerusalem in a culture that fully supported their religious belief and practice, they have now been stripped of that external reinforcement. They can choose other gods.

Losing cultural primacy is God’s gift to God’s chosen people, says Keller. The challenge to the faithful is to live in a strange land while refusing assimilation or separatism, to remain faithful to the one true God while praying for the city where they find themselves.

Christianity has lost cultural primacy in North America. Thanks be to God! Like Daniel and his companions we find ourselves between the temptation to fully assimilate - putting our faith in all the other gods our consumer culture offers - and the temptation to withdraw into a religious privatism - where our faith is a private matter with no message for the world around us - on the other. Keller believes, and so do I, that the best possible place for folks who want to follow Christ is to be caught in this tension.

The death of the Sabbath is only one symptom of the change that is underway. Church is only one option among many on any given Sunday morning. Leaf blowers and lawn mowers at the Cricket Club intrude on the peace of our 8 a.m. worship. Motorcycles rev and scream past the church on Sunday morning. The culture has lost all reverence for the sabbath.

And this is Good News! Sabbath worship is set free to be what it is, fully counter-cultural, a practice that contravenes the dominant transactional culture around us. To attend worship means making a choice and paying a price. Because there are other things one could be doing with valuable time, worship is what it was meant to be - a sacrifice.

We make a sacrifice of thanksgiving in worship. We come not just to get something out of the “experience” of worship (a very modern notion). We come because we owe this sacrifice of thanksgiving to our great God who has given us everything. We come because we want to give witness to the world that God is love. We come because we want to support our neighbor who worships with us, adding our prayers and presence to encourage each other in faith. We come not only to get, we come to give back.

Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector


*Rev. Keller and I do not agree on all things. Even though I have key disagreements I can still learn from him in other areas like the one I share today. I refuse to join the “cancel culture” which reduces every person to the sum of their worst day or worst opinion and then discards everything else they say or do as tainted. We are all sinners and we have all fallen short! The “cancel culture” principle would leave us in a wasteland of condemned and discarded neighbors.