THE VOICE
November,
2009
This year November bridges
the old and new liturgical years.
Traditionally the last Sunday of Ordinary Time is celebrated as Reign of
Christ Sunday, which for 2009 falls on the 22nd of this month. A new liturgical year begins with the First
Sunday of Advent, the 29th.
In the church we spend this month looking forward.
November begins with a Sunday
this year, and we will begin our stewardship campaign that very day. For three Sundays we will reflect upon
paintings by the artist He Qi. On the 1st
we will reflect on how we are ‘Called to Follow’ Christ in the world. On the 8th we will look at how we
are ‘Challenged to Grow’ in our walk with Christ. On the 15th we will celebrate being
‘Sent to Serve’ with Christ as we consecrate our pledges in worship.
After worship on the 1st
Pastor Lee will hold a New Member Exploration Class. Please speak to Pastor Lee about this, or
just show up to find out more.
On the 2nd we will
begin a nine-week class on “Experiencing Ecological Christianity.” The class will meet in the sanctuary from 7
to 9 on Monday evenings. Details can be
found in the Board of Christian Education’s article elsewhere in this issue of The
Voice.
On the 8th we will
lift up to God the teachers in our congregation, those who lead classes here in
the church and those who teach in our local schools. That service will include a commissioning of
those teachers wherein we promise them our prayers and support as they follow
their calling to form the future by forming young minds.
After worship that day the
Hospitality Guild will hold a potluck meal under the ramada. The first time the Hospitality Guild held one
of these dinners after church it was a great success. Let’s make sure this one is even better!
As stated above, the 15th
will be our Consecration Sunday for this year’s stewardship education program.
Continuing throughout the
month our Boards will meet as scheduled, as will the Council and other
organizations and activities. Please
check the calendar to see all those things you don’t want to miss!
See you in church!
Alternative Gift Giving
Board of Christian
Outreach
Once again the Board of Christian Outreach is coming to you with a different way of giving. This is not new. We have done it for the past several years. But we would like to encourage you to keep on giving.
We will be having a “Heifer” display during the month of November for
you to make selections on the gifts you will give to family and friends. Christmas
is a good time to begin but remember there are other times in the year that you
may also want to give a gift. The gift catalogs have many items besides the
animals, trees, insects and seeds. So
plan to stop by the display in November and begin to make your selections.
Thank you for your past interest in this way of giving.
Church Women United
Thank you to all those who
brought items for the Christmas in September ingathering -- toys, books, etc.
-- and to those who gave cash donations.
Gifts were distributed to the House of Neighborly Service, Pima County
Adult Detention Center (for the children of inmates), and Tucson City Fire
Stations.
Love offerings were divided
among The Reading Seed, La Paloma Family Services, and the Pima County Adult
Detention Center. There was a great
attendance. We want to thank Jean Brady who delivered our toys, books, etc. to
the celebration at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church.
The “Revitalize 05” meeting at the Westside Police Center was very informative. Beth Walkup led a panel composed of a representative from the Arizona Historical Society, Director of La Paloma, and a representative from the City Council who all spoke to the efforts to change the direction that this area had been going in. La Paloma headquarters is located at the corner of Fairview and Miracle Mile. The Gospel Rescue Mission is on Miracle Mile not far from the Police Center, which is located on the corner of Flowing Wells and Miracle Mile. Ghost Ranch Lodge will become low-income housing for the elderly. However, not wanting to make this area a row of social services, there are plans to encourage the growth of small businesses and housing such as Habitat Homes. After the meeting, we were treated to an extended tour of the police center, which was very interesting.
2009 World Community Day
Piecing Earth Together
Church Women United will have a 2009 World
Community Day Peace & Justice Focus:
Women working together to be good stewards of the gifts of the earth, on
Saturday, November 7th, from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., at
Northminster Presbyterian Church, East Fort Lowell at Tucson Boulevard. You can witness the Northminster Quilting
Group at work, hear “The Creation” from God’s Trombones, raise your voice in
gratitude for God’s creation, and reflect on our impact on creation.
An offering in support of Church Women United will
be taken.
How then shall we be the church?
Let us be the church boldly
and with open eyes and minds.
(Okay, I’m going to be
talking about theology here, and it’s a real treat for me to do that without
having to use any of those words I had to use in seminary like hermeneutics or
realized eschatology. This will
be in just plain English.)
Whenever people discuss the
relationship between religious faith and science, the example of Galileo and
the Catholic Church comes up. Galileo
was ‘pressured’ by the Vatican to recant his writings that the earth moved
around the sun (actually, since this happened during the Inquisition, ‘forced’
is more accurate). That example is used
to illustrate just how backward the church was at that time and aren’t we much
more enlightened than that?
Are we? How many of us give thought to the affect new
discoveries in the sciences may have on our faith? How many of us pay much attention to those
new discoveries anyway, aside from hearing about some of them on the nightly
news? We might even ask ourselves why we
should even pay any attention to them at all.
Our faith is our faith and won’t change because some scientist comes up
with a new theory of something-or-other.
But therein lies the
issue. The practice of theology can be
described in simple terms in two ways.
First, theologians strive to say the least wrong thing about God. Our language and understanding will always be
inadequate to properly comprehend the nature and activities of God, so we
strive to find words that get as close as we can while retaining the humility
that they will never do a complete job.
Second, theology is all about
reconciling two things – specific and general revelation. Our scriptures give us specific revelation, a
witness to the workings of God in specific times and places with specific
outcomes. Our experience of the presence
and character of God in our daily lives in the creation gives us general
revelation. We see some of God’s nature
in how the world works, the beauty and regularity of the sunrise and sunset and
the surprise of life evolving and transforming itself. Over the centuries efforts to reconcile these
two types of revelation have lead to some interesting systems of thought,
systems that had to change as our understanding of the universe changed. Think of how the church’s thinking about
humanity’s place in the universe had to change when the earth was no longer
considered the center of that universe.
Which brings us to the ‘new
sciences,’ fields like quantum mechanics and chaos theory. These fields of study demonstrate that the
universe is much more complicated and elegant than simple cause and
effect. The implications of these
discoveries are profound and serious, even if we don’t use quantum mechanics
when we change spark plugs in a car. So
how do these discoveries affect our faith, especially the role of humanity in
the creation?
I invite you to grapple with
that question and find some answers in our “Experiencing Ecological
Christianity” class. Details about the
class can be found in the Board of Christian Education article in this month’s The
Voice, but as you consider joining the class I would like you to ask
yourself the following question. With
issues like environmental degradation, habitat loss, species extinction and
climate change swirling around us today, what is my understanding of what our
faith tells us about humanity’s role in the creation today?
Let us all commit to learning
to be the church boldly, openly, and faithfully in the face of new knowledge
and new challenges!
Pastor Lee
P. S. Now that the temperatures have gone down some
and we don’t have to run the air conditioning in the office during the
afternoon, I will be resuming office hours here at church on Mondays. During the summer I had worked from home on
Mondays (Mary works Tuesday through Friday mornings so we saved utility costs
over the summer by not having to cool the office one day out of the week).
BOARD
OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION
