Pine Island Pastor Musings

It is snowing as I write.  What a winter wonderland our landscape is with snow lying heavy on every shrub and tree branch.  I love it. "White Christmas" is a movie classic shown over and over again each Christmas.  For those of us who live in the northern hemisphere and northern latitudes like Michigan, snow for Christmas is a given.  Every year the first cold blasts of winter pick up warm water from Lake Michigan and cover our homes and landscape with snow creating a winter wonderland this time of year.  For Michiganders, Christmas with no snow just doesn't feel right.  Later on we complain as winter lingers on and on into March, even April and sometimes dare I say it, May.  But all seems right with November/December snow.  The legend of Santa Claus traveling from the north pole on his sleigh pulled by reindeer assumes a snowy winter Christmas.  It is a Northern Hemisphere based legend. All of this got turned upside down for my wife Eile...

It feels like the world is coming undone: mass shootings, sexual harassments and assaults, opioid crisis, refugees seeking safety, partisan ranker, political corruption, social/economic disparity,  climate change knocking at our door with hurricanes, extreme storms, droughts and fires! Don McLean described it well back in my youth in his song "American Pie." "Bad news on the doorstep.  I can't take one more step."   So it seems when listening to the "breaking news" of the moment. Of the span of human history, we have just a few decades of global communication and awareness.  We live in a global village.  Our psyches have little experience bearing the onslaught of negativity.  The shoulders of my psyche are too thin to carry the weight of the world's pain.  Nor likely is the psyche of anyone else.  Yet, we are now connected with the global village news with all its tales of woe.  While more and more forfeit participation in church or communi...

Our Cameroon families are a strength of the Pine Island Church.  They brighten our spirits and enrich our worship and fellowship with their children and youth, their singing, their smiles, their traditional foods.  They are grieving the strife in their homeland.  Recently school children were abducted and then released. To learn more about this situation, I'm sharing below a letter from the Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson II, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, PC(USA), and a link to a reuters news article. Sisters and Brothers, I urgently call you to prayer for our partners and friends in Cameroon, a nation still wrestling with the impact of past division by colonial powers into French-speaking and English-speaking regions. Concerns among English-speaking citizens that they are treated as second-class citizens in this majority French-speaking nation have spawned separatist movements. Clashes between separatists and government forces have left many dead. Most recently a...

On my sabbatical a few years ago I visited a mega church for worship in the region.  The lack of ritual at worship struck me.   They opened with praise music which was nicely performed, but unsingable for a visitor, musically oriented as I am.  I got the idea I really wasn't intended to sing, but to be a passive listener.  There was a welcome and announcements and a time a greeting other worshipers, then a message from the preacher, which was piped into the sanctuary by video from the larger auditorium.   After which the leader in the room said, "That’s it for today.   See you next week."  A signal to go.     I left feeling empty.   There was no call to worship, no prayer invoking God, no corporate prayer of confession or personal confession, no words of assurance of God's forgiveness in Jesus, no sung response, no passing of the peace of Christ, no corporate reading of scripture.  Scripture was incorpor...