Image by Timothy Eberly

Wintering & Sabbath

Dear Beloveds of ORUCC,

I love the cold crisp winter days, but with the fire blazing inside, I admit that I did not venture outside in the hovering around 0 temperatures. Did you go outside yesterday? We northerners embrace winter by saying things like, “there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing!” We know the importance for our mental health of getting some fresh air and some sunlight as often as we can, even in the coldest temperatures. Elver Park, close to our church, sports lit cross-country ski trails and beautiful ice-skating rinks with reasonable rental prices for gear. We live in a winter wonderland! But it is okay if sometimes we just want to rest inside as slowing down is part of winter too.

In her book Wintering: The Power of Rest in Difficult Times, Katherine May embraces winter, and uses it as a metaphor for hard times. Whatever difficult times may befall you this season individually, not to mention our collective trials, May would help frame the season as winter which is “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.” She talks of her own struggles with a disease, her husband’s temporary sickness and her 6-year-old refusing to go back to school all happening at the same time.

She shares some wisdom that our Judeo-Christian tradition would call practices of sabbath. Hers, as many of ours, was not a sabbath of her own choosing. She didn’t set this time aside for self-care or family vacation, this wasn’t the beauty of retirement or a welcomed break, but the difficult times that befell her like the season of winter, and all she could do was accept the wisdom of embracing and getting through winter.

By hibernating, healing, re-grouping, and embracing the dark and the cold, we are wintering. “Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it is essential,” she writes. May is critical of a culture where we are “endlessly cheerleading ourselves into positivity while erasing the dirty underside of real life…The subtext of these messages is clear: Misery is not an option.” She knows the cold has healing powers, and that we shouldn’t buck up, but embrace the wisdom of the winter we are in.

As a community, we can encourage each other to embrace winters we are in by supporting each other in the unfashionable slowing down, resting, restoring, praying. We can support each other by collectively embracing the practices of restoring and healing, the spaciousness that comes from not knowing and being uncomfortably and beautifully human. Katherine May says, “Some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those we have wintered.”

Sabbath is an ancient practice which God in the Hebrew Bible says “to keep holy.” Present even in the 10 Commandments, sabbath rest is a primal and primary rule of being. To cease from doing and simply to be, to reside with God. This does not mean we ignore important issues and places the world needs our actions. It simply means we also recognize that our worth does not come from how productive we are, how much we can earn, how we fill our day with doing. Our worth and value is innate, and in moments of sabbath or seasons of winter, we can come in close contact with a God who resides in the gift of rest, of sleep, of pause, of knowing God is with us in the stillness.

As we are pausing in-person worship for January, I am especially conscious of how beautifully we are embracing this disappointment. We know the hospitals in Dane County are full, and we know a value of ours is caring for the whole and the most vulnerable. We know that healthcare workers are overtaxed, not just from witnessing and working through COVID, but through the failings of the medical system which need to be dramatically transformed. Slowing down and witnessing these things is so important. In Greek, apocalypse means “revealing.” A lot is bubbling up culturally and being revealed, and we are witnessing ways the pandemic unveils parts of “normal” society we were living with that simply aren’t working for the whole. Teachers and healthcare workers are patching band-aids on the individuals hurt from the inequalities in our systems. We are paying attention, we are noticing. Winter gives us pause to collect ourselves and wonder, how will we live in response?

I think a gift the church can offer society is the permission to rest, to know that even the most urgent issues are enhanced and strengthened when the people leading and participating are whole, are rested, and know that their inherent worth comes from being not doing. Slowing down, noticing, hibernating, honoring the rhythms of nature and the rhythms of being human, enhance our collective well-being, even in deep winters of our lives. Knowing God is in the natural world, we can take cues, and slow our nervous system to the rhythms of nature. In winter we recognize the stillness, how the world around us becomes more internal. How can we nourish our interiority? How can we become a soft spot in our culture as a church, where we provide the warmth of community and companionship in the winters of our lives?

I am feeling deeply hopeful and encouraged about our 2022 year as ORUCC. We have incredible leadership in place who we will vote in during our Feb 6th 11:30 Annual Meeting. We have clarity around some shared priorities this year, for celebrating and appreciating the youth & children’s programming and visioning for the future, for our continued and evolving commitments to justice and spiritual vitality. We are learning not to be defined by COVID, but to be nimble, adaptable, to have a sense of humor and to persist in other and new ways.

May God bless you in your moments of resting, of being, of residing in the stillness of winter and the expansiveness of God’s love.

Epiphany Love,

Pastor Julia

Image from NASA

Image by Greg Rakozy

Epiphany

The Christ-Light Born Within

Dear Ones,

Greetings to you post the 12 days of Christmas, which is not just a song about my true love giving me lots of birds, but a real element of the liturgical calendar. The holidays were magical and messy for the Burkey Cooperriders with our 1 year old, with the enchantment of Christmas tree lights in the early dawn and broken ornaments which she soon discovered aren’t a “bah!” (ball). Reverie is walking now officially. My cousin told me with a laugh, “I am sorry for your loss.” With movement comes great joy and accidents! Carolyn Carlson of ORUCC gave us sage advice once, “Don’t rush her walking. She will only walk for about 3 days. Then she will run!”

We truly loved sharing the Advent season journey and Christmas with you, our ORUCC family. I hope you found moments of joy and celebration as you welcomed the Christ-light born anew into your heart and life.

Epiphany Themes Continue

January 6th marks the end of Christmas and the day of Epiphany, and this year we are making a big deal out of the Epiphany story at ORUCC. We were so grateful to hear Pastor Ken preach on Epiphany last week- thank you Ken! We are centering on the Matthew 2:2–12 scripture twice and celebrating Epiphany on January 2nd and January 9th, where the wise ones follow the star to meet baby Jesus and bring gifts from foreign lands, of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Secondly, the themes of guidance, vision, stars, birth, Christ-light within, seeing signs and bringing gifts will carry us into some of our next steps as a community. We will seek vision and guidance as we plan for our future together, create a budget, continue to work with our transition team and leadership team to make sure our staff transitions continue to move smoothly and are guided by abundance.

We will seek vision and guidance as we continue to live into our mission statement of being spiritually alive, joyfully inclusive and committed to justice in 2022. We strive to carry the Christ-light even and especially as we face cultural uncertainty, division and our own internal transitions. I am committed to making our common-life and shared pursuits as life-giving as possible as well as Spirit centered, as we seek to humbly walk in the path of Jesus.

Preached at UCC National Setting

I had the honor of co-preaching virtually with The Rev. Dr. Chris Davies for the national UCC setting for Epiphany, where she asked me to share about Epiphany from a woman’s perspective with the idea of Mary being postpartum when the Magi arrive. On Sunday I will share this message with you over ZOOM for our 10 am service. Chris is pregnant and expecting a child any day now and lives in Cleveland, OH, where she is serves as the Team Leader for Faith Education, Innovation, and Formation at the National Setting of the United Church of Christ. Affectionately called Faith INFO, the team’s purpose is to equip congregations with the proclamation of the liberating love of the Gospel.  Chris works with The Rev. Traci Blackmon, who is the Executive Minister of Justice & Witness Ministries of The United Church.

The Magi, by He Qi

Deep Divisions, The Light of Christ, Even so

January 6th in our nation marks a day we remember with concern and outrage. Hearing words from our faith leaders UCC 2021 Insurrection Letter at the UCC is salve and holds us in community in our outrage. We remember where we were when we heard the news or turned on the TV. A day now marked with a strange sense of being gaslit- why are some claiming the extreme images of the insurrection were photoshopped? How will we move forward with a nation so deeply divided? We don’t know, and we sit with the heaviness of our times, still seeking to bear the Christ-light. We think about nurturing the light of Christ within us during this context, another Epiphany theme, and we breathe deeply into the truth of the present moment and of the presence of God that we do know. How will we share the light of Christ in our world?

Racial Justice in January

During January at ORUCC, we are following the lead of some local community organizers to elevate themes of Racial Justice in worship. Our leader of the Immigration Justice Team Ruthanne Landsness was slated to preach on January 9th, but will preach at another time about her experience on the US-Mexico border with the organization Casa Alitas. Our leader of the Racial Justice Team Pam Oliver will plan to preach January 16th about racial Justice, informed by her years of research and organizing and teaching in the field at UW. It’s a joy for me to witness and appreciate some of these voices within ORUCC who guide us in our justice work. 

COVID Response

It was with a heavy heart that we canceled our all-church retreat this year, due to the high community transmission of the COVID omicron variant. While we do trust our mitigation systems for worship, we have shifted to virtual worship for this Sunday Jan. 9th at 10am to a ZOOM context, due to potential COVID exposures for many of the worship leaders. Our COVID response team will meet over ZOOM Sunday Jan. 9th at 1pm to discuss any further measures.

Guidance and Vision

Another Epiphany theme is seeking vision and guidance. Using a method of one-one-one interviews and then coming together to share as a group, we are planning to employ the strategies of Appreciative Inquiry and to discover and map the “positive core” of our ORUCC Children & Youth programming. Although a big portion of this was planned for the all-church retreat, rest assured that we will still find a time and place to do this appreciating and visioning together, just not on the timeline we originally envisioned. Like the wise ones of Epiphany, we will look for signs and track our timing and direction and vision with care. 

May the light of Christ soar in your being, as you embrace the cold of winter. Receive this gift and offering of a breath prayer to fan the fire of Christ within you.

Breath Prayer from Isaiah 60 & John 1

Breathing in: Arise

Breathing out: Shine

Breathing in: your light is come

Breathing out: and the Glory

Breathing in: of God

Breathing out: Rises upon you

Breathing in: The light shines in the darkness,

Breathing out: and the darkness has not overcome it.

Epiphany Love,

Pastor Julia

Image from NASA