Home On Christmas Eve

by Rev. Eric Folkerth

 It’s hard to believe that it really has been two full years since we have been together on Christmas Eve. Friday night that changes as we have two in-person worship services. (You can find information about them elsewhere in the newsletter.)  

Our theme throughout this advent season has been “Coming Home.“

“Home“ is such a complicated concept in our lives right now. Many of us will be “going home” to see family members for the very first time in a very long time. Many of the rest of us will not and will spend another Christmas alone. Some of us have large and loving multi-generational families that we cherish. Others of us have painful or conflicted relationships with ours.

And that’s not even counting our worries over the new Omicron variant. I am already hearing that it is playing havoc with some people‘s Christmas plans… Including my own family’s.

So, there’s a lot on our minds, isn’t there?

We have tried our best to plan for a Christmas Eve that will be as safe as possible. We will require people to wear masks. We will sit at a social distance as we have been for some months now. And we will continue to strongly urge people to use the contactless bulletin. Finally, of course, as we have for many months now, we will strongly urge unvaccinated persons to simply stay home.

It’s been a debate among many of our lay leaders and staff as to just how many people will show up on Christmas Eve. For some weeks we have been slightly concerned that we might have a larger crowd than would be safe. My strong hunch is that the news of the raging Omicron variant will now keep some people away in an abundance of self-selected caution. Even still, we expect that we will have a good many visitors with us on Friday evening.

There is one specific thing that you could do to help us be as welcoming as possible for our guests. That would be: to sit in the two “transepts“ of the sanctuary.

These are the two cross sections of seating. (The left transept is where the handbell tables are generally set up. We have taken those down temporarily to create seating for Christmas Eve.)

If you will do this small thing, it will certainly help our guests be able to find a seat more easily and quickly and simultaneously give us the best chance to be safely spread out throughout the sanctuary. Thank you for considering this.

The final thing to remind ourselves about “coming home“ is that within the Christmas story itself the concept of “home” is also complicated.

Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus are not at their home for his birth. Instead, they have been forced by the power of the government, the power of empire, to travel a great distance. They are, quite literally, migrants at the moment of Jesus‘ birth. Even more, as you know, they are not in a regular inn or hotel. They are in a stable. Jesus‘s first crib is a cow trough.

It’s stark imagery, but it reminds us that “home“ is always a malleable and changing concept. And I hope it gives you all some hope and comfort about your situation this Christmas.

Those of us who live alone create beautiful God-filled homes.
Same-sex couples create beautiful God-filled homes.
Divorced families create beautiful God-filled homes.
“Traditional families“ create beautiful God-filled homes.

The point being, the story of Christmas itself helps us understand the complex incarnational nature of our own homes.

God is present with you this Christmas. It cannot be otherwise. However you will celebrate it, however much your plans come to fruition, or are thrown off the rails, God will be there.

Thanks be to God for the wonder of Christmas and God‘s presence among us today. 

See you in person or online Friday evening.

And Christmas Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love to you all.

Eric Folkerth

The Feel of Home

by Rev. Eric Folkerth

The new Beatles film, “Get Back” has led me down a rabbit hole of learning more about Paul McCartney and his late-Beatle years. I just finished a very long biography of him, and was moved by one small story.

At the height of his popularity as a Beatle in 1967, Paul decided to buy a large mansion outside of London. His first real home.

He hired one of Britain’s more esteemed and trendy decorators to redo the entire place top to bottom. The decorator met the future “Sir Paul” to try and get an idea of what Paul wanted in a home.

The counter-culture is at its height. The decorator assumed Paul would want modernists furniture and art….bold designs that reflected the bold and modern times. (And the house most certainly ended up with lots of this…)

But Paul McCartney had one bit of very strange instruction for his interior decorator. He said he wanted the house to feel like the kind of house that has fresh cabbage wafting up from the basement.

That’s right…cabbage.
The vegetable.

What in the bloody WHAT….?!

What’s going on here? Some crazy drug fueled fog?

Not at all.

Once upon a time, way before Beatlemania, before anyone else knew his name, little boy Paul McCartney was raised by a single father in a small, modest Liverpool house. 

And Paul’s father, Jim McCartney, was a masterful gardener. Every year, Jim McCartney would take the tiny plots of dirt…just a few feet…behind their home, and turn it into verdant gardens brimming with fresh vegetables and…of course…cabbage.

As Paul McCartney prepared to move into his own mansion, he wanted *that* feel of home…fresh cabbage that reminded him of that safe home his Father had once made for him.
He wanted his new home to remind him of his most sacred home of childhood.

You identify with this, yes?

I would bet that in your home…this very week…you have put out some Christmas decorations. I would bet that some of them are quite old…and maybe belonged to your parents and grandparents. Or maybe you bought them when your children were young…or maybe you remember your parents buying them for you.

In my case, we put up this little table top display of three Santas…they’re about six inches high…and made of felt like you’d find in a Kindergarten classroom.

The Santas are a small rock group. They actually look like they could be the early Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show…playing drums, guitar….and, very strangely, French Horn. (Who knows…)

The point is that I have a memory of that display being up either in my house or my parent’s house for every year of my life.

It brings me great comfort and memory to see it every year.
It reminds me of home all the way back to my very beginning.

When we feel truly connected to God, it should feel like that sense of home.
It should feel like a safe place…a comforting place….a place where we are known and that we have always known….and where we FEEL known.

Thanks be to God that we at Kessler Park believe that ALL are welcome in God’s home.
All human beings —regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or economic circumstances— deserve the Hope, Peace, Love and Joy of this holy season.

Maybe some of you just don’t feel that sense of home at Church. Maybe it’s been months since you’ve visited us at Kessler Park.

Please know that you are most welcome to “come home” this Christmas. We are planning some beautiful in-person Christmas Eve services this year that should help remind you of God’s spiritual home inside your heart.

However confusing your path may feel…however unsure the year 2022 seems at this moment…know that God leaves the home light on for us.

This Christmas, God welcomes you home to a place that God has always had waiting for you.

Come celebrate God’s Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love with all the Kessler Park family.

Grace and Peace,

Eric Folkerth

Come Home to Hope

by Rev. Eric Folkerth

Our Advent theme this year is: “Coming Home.”

We mean this in every way we can…

Coming home to God…
Coming home to ourselves…
Coming home to each other…
Coming home to church…

We’re making plans for Christmas Eve to be a “come home” moment for us all as we celebrate in person at both 5 and 7 pm.

Planning has been hard to do these past few years. Every time we make a plan, it feels like we are all Charlie Brown and that the world is Lucy - always pulling the ball away at the last minute.

We’ve made so many hopeful plans that have, so many times, had to be revised and changed.

It becomes dizzying and disorienting, really. Hard to find “Hope” and trust when so much feels in flux.

Nevertheless, we lit a candle of Hope this past Sunday anyway. We dared to speak words of a hopeful future for ourselves and for our world. This crazy work is our calling during Advent. We are called to speak to Hope in times when disorienting dizziness still reigns supreme.

I am reminded of the words of Cyprian, the Christian saint who lived in the year 250 AD. Cyprian lived in a time of horrible pestilence. We would call it a “global pandemic,” but they didn’t have those words back then.

It was bad. And at its height, five thousand people a day were dying in the City of Rome.

Cyprian decided that this was evidence the world was coming to an end. It wasn’t, of course. But it’s very easy to see how he might have come to that conclusion.

In my view, Cyprian let the horror of what was right in front of him obscure the true message of Hope that God invites us to embrace.

Hope, as Paul so eloquently said, is “belief in things unseen.” We trust in God’s Spirit that moves in and through all things, that is closer to us than we are to ourselves, to continue to be present with us during times when it feels like all is ending.

I’m fascinated that doctors sometimes tell folks with car sickness, “Look out at the horizon…don’t focus on the immediate turns and twists around you…but look as far out to the horizon as you can…”

Focusing on the whole picture and not our up-close dizziness can sometimes calm our stomachs in a car.

It’s also the *spiritual* dynamic with Hope. We look to our spiritual horizon, not just what’s physically in front of us right now.

Hope is beyond what is happening in the moment. Hope is far beyond the bumps and bruises of any current day. Hope fixes our gaze on the horizon and trusts that Peace, Love, and Joy are still possible.

Come home this Advent and trust again in the horizon of God’s hope for you, for our church, and for our world.

Eric