“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” – Hebrews 11:1
Oh, for a mechanical God, a God who spins when I pull down the lever, a God who chimes when I haul on the rope, a God whose actions I’d predict infallibly each day.
Oh, for a magical God, a God invoked by sound and tone, a God directed by desire, a God to do my will infallibly each day.
Oh, for a predictable God, a God whose rulings I affirm, a God whose justice I approve, a God whose mercy I… receive infallibly each day.
Ah, but an uncontrollable God, a God creating in profusion, a God with greater grace than mine, this God I humbly worship… quite fallibly… each day.
A poem/prayer based on Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16, the Revised Common Lectionary Gospel Reading for Year C, Proper 14 (19).
Drew liked to tell the story of how we met. My daughter had signed up for a winter event at Silver Lake Conference Center, and I had asked if I could volunteer with the other age group that weekend. Drew and Debby led the group I wanted to work with.
Although it’s always useful to have adult counselors at these events, Drew wasn’t at all sure he wanted to include this unknown “helicopter parent” who might both distract the other group and leave him without a fully engaged counselor. I assume he got enough reassurance from the camp directors because he and Debby welcomed me with no signs of his reluctance.
I confess that I brought my own hesitations. Drew set off all sorts of alarm bells going back to my teenage years. He was tall with a booming voice. He was an athlete. His hair was closely cropped. He led the event with an air of confident authority. He reminded me of too many people I’d had painful relationships with many years before.
And… he was tall. He had a booming voice. He was an athlete, winning a bronze medal in his age group at the US National Fencing Championships in 2016. He did change the length of his hair, but it was never very long. He did carry himself with confident authority.
That weekend also demonstrated the incredible depth of his heart and soul. Drew had trained to be a public school teacher because of his passion for teaching and inspiring young people. He left the classroom because the administrative overhead frustrated him more than he would accept (my father, who worked many years as a public school administrator and teacher, would have sympathized). He poured that commitment to teaching into coaching. He founded a fencing school in Willimantic, Sword in the Scroll, which offered both modern fencing and German broadsword.
When we met, one of the other counselors for the weekend, a college-age student, was nursing some bruises from a mistake in her guard. Drew the coach was both sympathetic, making certain that she wasn’t doing things that would delay her recovery, and also evaluative, helping her understand what she’d done so that she could do it better next time.
It was a good weekend.
I didn’t yet know I’d made a friend.
Some time later the Silver Lake directors asked me to consider becoming a dean for a week-long summer conference. “We’ll set you up with experienced deans,” they said. So in summer 2008 I joined Drew and Debby Page as the third wheel dean for “I Learned it All in Volleyball.” Volleyball, incidentally, is an enthusiasm Drew and I shared. Among the trio, Drew was known as the “alpha dean,” Debby as the “beta dean,” and I was the “omega dean.” It worked so well that we did it again the next summer (and my son Brendan came along as a counselor).
In the meantime, Drew and I had started to spend a lot more time together. At the end of 2008, we offered him the position of Media Assistant for the Connecticut Conference UCC. It was not an easy choice. We had some really solid candidates who offered very different sets of talents and skills. The position was new and none of us really knew what it would become. In the end we settled on Drew because he was not only skilled, he was constantly adding to his skills. He would do so throughout his work with the Connecticut Conference and the Southern New England Conference over the next 13 years.
Drew joined me in a large but rather noisy and visually chaotic office on the “Garden Level” (basement) of United Church Center in Hartford. Noisy? Drew’s desk sat next to three servers and other network appliances whose fan noise varied but never ceased. Visually chaotic? Shelves around the room contained computer equipment, reference manuals, and stacks of storage media. I had a habit of retaining the packing boxes of computers we’d recently purchased in case a defective unit needed to go back. And I had an, um, elastic notion of “recently purchased.”
Drew settled in to maintain mailing lists, postal and electronic. He assisted with feeding various databases. He was a solid copy editor, cleaning up my more awkward constructions (and I’d rather like him to read this piece right now). He took on writing projects for our printed and online publications. His first byline, as far as I can tell, appeared in spring 2009. He stepped behind a video camera at Conference events, and like his boss (me), carried a still camera on his shoulder.
He’d done some of these pieces in other parts of his life before, but he learned new things incredibly fast, as well as combining these skills in ways that really served the ministry we were doing. Drew’s ideas rose from a deep understanding of what we were trying to accomplish, what benefit we were trying to bring to the people of the conference. We didn’t try everything he thought of. Not everything we tried worked. A couple things that I thought worked well took more time than we had for them – I really regret the video reporting we couldn’t do.
We gave Drew more hours. Drew took those hours and turned them into precious gifts.
We shared an office. I remember one spring when we had a very heavy workload. We were preparing for a spring meeting of the Conference. We were also filming and editing 32 brief videos in which Silver Lake deans invited young people to their conferences. Each one lasted a minutes, but – there were 32 of them!
The two of us recorded them together during a gathering of the deans. He’d film one group while I filmed another. When we were back to the office, Drew sat down at his computer and forged through those recordings, reviewing each take (there was always more than one), adding transitions, fixing the audio as best he could, and putting in the titles. It was hours of work – and he did it so well that Silver Lake has continued to do much the same in the eight years since.
Sharing an office isn’t just about work. You learn things about office mates that you don’t learn about the folks who work down the hall. When Drew was preparing for competition at the national level (this was before 2016), he changed his diet and work habits – by which I mean, he made sure to move around more and avoid stiffening up at the desk. When he suffered increasing shoulder pain from an old injury – and when that injury was aggravated – I was one of his companions in the journey to heal.
And then we started going out to lunch.
I have… irregular meal habits. I frequently skip lunch entirely. Drew, a much more careful person around health and diet, did not. It might be light, but he made sure his body was being properly sustained.
But then once or twice a week we’d go out to lunch along with Emily (then Hale) McKenna (who may have got this started in the first place). There were several places we enjoyed in that immediate West End neighborhood. We’d take the opportunity of workers everywhere to gripe about our workloads (I was formally Drew’s boss, remember), but mostly we talked about the important things outside of the working life of the church. We talked about music and kids and dreams. We told stories about our pasts and imagined things for our future.
In the office we were partners and collaborators. At the table we were friends.
I can’t remember more than a fraction of the stories. I can’t remember more than a portion of the dreams. What I remember was the assurance of friendship, or companionship, of faith in one another as well as in God.
Friends at a table – Drew is just behind me.
When I left the Connecticut Conference and moved to Hawai’i, Drew told me that he’d committed to making only three phone calls to ask me about a problem. Those calls, by the way, were more than fair. I’d left a working system, but I’d left a system that, for the most part, I’d built. There were a lot of things that, despite my best efforts to document them as I was leaving, I was probably the only one who knew. I expected that Drew would have to make more than three calls despite his best efforts and intentions.
He only made two.
In February 2020 Drew received a diagnosis of colon cancer. He went through radiation and surgery, writing about them quite frankly in his blog, Drew’s 2 Cents – and he did it during a global pandemic. He had a reassuring season, but in January of this year learned that the cancer had spread to lungs and lymph nodes. Though there were treatment options, none would have much impact on the course of the disease, and all would reduce his ability to enjoy the life he had. He chose to enjoy that life.
“In otherwise,” he wrote, “dream of the things you want to do, enjoy the life right in front of you, and try like hell to be good to other people. If you have the skill, knowledge, or talent to impact other’s lives, do it. If you have the opportunity to witness something amazing, don’t hesitate. And don’t underestimate what can amaze.”
Last week I wrote a song for Drew, performing it during my weekly live stream. Its formal title is “To the Banks of the River Jordan,” but truthfully it’s Drew’s Song to me. About four hours after I sang it, Drew went from our care to God’s.
When I heard Drew had died, my prayers were not suitable for human ears. God may be excused for not listening for a while. They weren’t coherent. I was not blaming anyone, not God or a person or even that demon “Cancer.” I was just blistering the metaphorical air with my hurt.
It didn’t take too long for me to be mad at the world. “Why aren’t you stopping?” I shouted (silently). “My friend has died! Stop! Just STOP!”
Neither the world, nor I (to be honest), stopped. When has it? When, to be honest, have I?
Drew was far more than my experience of him. We were co-workers and friends. Drew was also a husband. It was a joy to witness his relationship with Debby. He was a father, and over the years the only thing that grew faster than Duncan and Dani was his love for them. He was a teacher and coach, and I had only a glimpse of that. He was a musician, and oddly enough the two of us didn’t make much music together, though we played the same gig once.
In the end, what can I say but this: He was my friend, and I have rarely made a better choice than to enter this friendship. Now he is gone, and I am deeply sad. The memories remain in their precious fragility, but more than that the love endures, and will endure beyond the end of time.
To you and I, an ‘amakihi nest doesn’t look that big. It’s sort of an irregular ball shape – it doesn’t look exactly like an egg, but you might possibly think, “Oh. It does look a little bit like an ‘amakihi egg, only larger.”
It might be large, but it’s still not large for us. Most ‘amakihi nests are a little bit larger than a softball. Made of grasses and twigs, they’ve got a bit of a cup shaped top to hold the two or three eggs.
A mother-to-be was pretty anxious about getting her nest ready for the eggs that she’d be laying. Her husband, sad to say, didn’t help much. Or at all. That’s not uncommon among the ‘amakihi of this island. He would bring materials and he would stay nearby to encourage her, but she did the selection and the weaving of all the grasses and twigs and fern leaves. It was her first nest, and she was absolutely determined that there would be no problems for her eggs. It was going to be safe and warm and dry.
So she started with the basic structure, and it widened out as the nest grew higher. When she got near the top, she began to form the rim around the little bowl shape where the eggs would lay. That’s when she got… worried about things.
“What if the eggs roll out?” she asked her husband when the nest seemed finished.
He looked at it carefully and said, “I don’t think it would. It looks like the nest I was hatched in.”
“I think they’d roll out,” she said.
“Do you want to make the sides higher?” he said.
“I do,” she said, and she set about it. This in turn made the nest start to expand outward because the sides had to be supported underneath. And they kept going up.
“I think that looks good,” her husband ventured one day. “I don’t think they’ll roll out of that.”
“But what if the hatchlings fall out?” she asked. “They can climb, right?”
The husband wasn’t sure.
“Higher,” she said, and the nest kept getting bigger.
The day came when she had to stop building because she had eggs to lay and it was time. She looked at them proudly resting at the bottom of the cup in the nest. “There,” she said. “You’re safe and I’ll keep you warm.”
Her husband looked down at her. He seemed far away. “Um. How is this going to work?” he asked.
“How is what going to work?”
“How are we going to feed the chicks?”
Her nest had become an oversized softball with a narrow hole in the top that led down into it – quite a long way for a small bird like an ‘amakihi. It was actually so far that if he strained his neck down and she strained her neck up they couldn’t actually touch.
“How are you going to get out to eat?” he asked.
The sides were going to be an effort to climb. She’d struggled, in fact, to get to the bottom to lay her eggs.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that we’re going to have make some changes.” She looked at the eggs below her. “That is, can you make the changes?”
“Just tell me what to do,” he said.
“Let’s start by pulling away the top – at least until I can see out,” she said. And that’s what they did – until the nest that was built for ultimate safety was actually fit to use.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Story
In the recording above, the story is told from memory of this text. It is rather different.
“Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.’ But he said to him, ‘Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?'” – Luke 12:13-14
Greedy? Never! Jesus, you misunderstand! Of course I come to you for aid in seeking justice for myself (and for my sisters, too, of course, which goes without my even mentioning their needs to you). You are a Teacher, you a specialist in Law, in virtue, and in righteousness. Who better to give me advice, or (better) act for me in dealing with my brother, or declaring in my favor (that would be the best).
But greedy? No! Oh, Jesus, you are just so wrong. It’s just the justice of the thing. I did as much (and more, much more) than he, my older brother, did. We both were active on the land, but he, it must be said, just doesn’t have the feel for farming, doesn’t have the skill to know which crops to plant and plants to tend. Left solely in his hands, our patrimony withers on the vine. (Why yes, there’s grapes upon the land. How did you know?)
And – quietly into your ear, O Teacher of the Law, he hasn’t really been the best of men. He stays up late. Well, I do, too, but I still rise before the dawn and he comes stumbling out just as the sunbeams gleam. It’s not a major difference, sure, but which of us should have the double portion, would you say? The one born first, or me, the one who’s first to greet the day?
So Jesus, I don’t need a lecture on the sin of greed, nor echoes of another ancient Teacher (“the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”) when I’m arguing quite clearly and with concrete proofs my brother, though he’s mostly fine, is not equipped to fairly manage this estate, and I, in humble duty, must step forward, and in justice, ask you to decide for me.
What are you saying now?
Didn’t I tell you I do not need to hear a story about greed?
A poem/prayer based on Luke 12:13-21, the Revised Common Lectionary Gospel Reading for Year C, Proper 13 (18).
First one leads, then one follows One aids, and one seeks aid. In the story of friendship You and I have made. But you’ve taken the lead this season And I cannot keep pace To the banks of the River Jordan, To your crossing place.
[Chorus 1]
There’s a time for work and progress, There’s a time for rest and play, But this time to say farewell to you: I’d have asked for a later day.
[Verse 2]
We shared in joys and sorrows. We put our hands to the plow. There were times of heartfelt sharing: May they comfort us now. As you walk to the bank of Jordan, As you near your crossing time, My tears flow with reason, My grief has so many rhymes.
[Chorus 2]
There’s a time to plant and nourish, There’s a time to harvest and store, But I’m lost in this time of farewell. I’d have asked for a little time more.
[Verse 3]
Bright days and thunder sounding, Our minds at work to shape words Telling others’ stories as sweetly As ever a story was heard. As you make your crossing of Jordan, Don’t linger, my friend, for me. You can lay aside life’s burden. In the crossing, my friend, you’re free.
You can lay aside life’s burden. In the crossing, be free.
[Chorus 3]
There’s a time to live and to flourish, There’s a time to shed life’s shell. Though I could have asked for later, my friend: Aloha o’e – fare well.
The young noio was hungry pretty much all the time. That’s not all that uncommon for a young noio, of course. He was growing very fast, going from just a little thing at hatching to about the size and weight of an adult in three weeks. At three weeks’ end he weighed six and a half times what he’d weighed when he broke the shell of his egg.
So he ate. A lot.
You and I wouldn’t find his diet very appetizing, but he certainly thrived on it. His parents would fish in the ocean, slurping down the fish and squid into their bellies. Then they’d go back to the nest, where they’d open their beaks and he’d poke his beak into their mouths. And then, well, the food would return.
Yeah, I know. Yuck. I’m glad we don’t do it that way, either.
To the young noio, however, this was how it was done. This was the way to eat. This was tasty (I know, yuck) and nutritious and, more than anything else, it was really successful. I mean. Imagine eating enough in three weeks to grow six times your size. That’s impressive.
It still took some time for the feathers to grow out and for his wing muscles to develop, so he took his first flight when he was six weeks old. The first flight was a little ragged, but he soon got better. He loved being out in the air, and zooming low over the sea, and coming back to the nest.
For some weeks, though, his parents continued to feed him. I know. Yuck. But he had to develop his flying skills before he could develop his food-finding skills. Noio don’t dive into the water to catch food. They fly low over the surface and pluck it from the water.
It turns out that for this young noio, that was a problem. He had no problems with the flying skills. But his first reaction to seeing a school of fish in the water below was… Yuck.
“That’s what we eat,” said mother.
“You have got to be kidding,” said her son. “That’s disgusting. Is there anything else?”
“Well,” she said, “there’s muhe’e (that’s squid). Shall we try those?”
I know. Squid. Yuck. As it happens, the young noio agreed with us.
“That’s even worse!” he said. “I can’t believe I have to spend the rest of my life eating these disgusting things!” He wouldn’t even try to catch one in his beak.
Mother and father both tried to persuade him that he should at least try these things, that they really were tasty, and that he’d been eating them without knowing it since he hatched (I know, yuck), but he was not persuaded. He kept feeding the way he’d always known (yuck) and wouldn’t even consider catching a fish.
While his parents were out fishing for themselves (and for him) and trying to think of something they could do, tutu came by. His grandmother had been very pleased and proud of him, and her daughter had asked her advice. She came right to the point.
“So you think your parents are lying to you?” she asked.
“Lying?” he said.
“So you think they’d offer you bad food when you’re hungry?” she asked.
“Bad food?” he said.
“So you think they don’t know how to show you what is good?” she asked.
He was silent.
“Have they done this before?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Of course not.”
“Then why would they do it now?”
He said nothing.
“Fly with me,” said tutu noio.
When his parents got back to the nest, they found grandmother and grandson returned from his first successful fishing trip.
“I should have realized you wouldn’t lie to me,” he told them. “Now I know that you didn’t.”
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Story
When recorded, I was delivering the story from a memory of this text – which means they’re not the same. It is distinctive, however, for including the coining of the word, “tentacally,” which sadly, isn’t in the prepared text.
“For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” – Luke 11:10
I’m knocking, Jesus. I can’t say the door is opening. I can’t say my search is finding anything. I can’t say my asking is receiving very much at all.
But…
I can hear you knocking, Jesus. I wonder if your asking is receiving very much from me? I wonder if your search is finding anything from me? I wonder if my heart’s door is opening to you?
Knock, knock.
A poem/prayer based on Luke 11:1-13, the Revised Common Lectionary Gospel Reading for Year C, Proper 12 (17).
The ‘apapane are known for their cheerful songs. Walk around in the ohi’a forests of Hawai’i Island and you will hear them. They produce all kinds of sounds, combining them together into a range of calls and melodies that make the forest ring.
But there was one ‘apapane that never learned to sing, and it happened in this way.
As young human beings, you learn a lot of things in schools, right? It’s somewhat the same for many kinds of fish, of course. A lot of them spend nearly their entire lifetime in schools, so they’re probably the best educated of the world’s creatures, don’t you think?
The ‘apapane don’t have schools. They have flocks, of course, and they have families. They learn to sing in choruses.
The year’s fledgling singers came together with one of the senior singers to form a new ‘apapane chorus and learn the basic melodies and sounds of ‘apapane song. They were excited and they were enthusiastic. Many of them had learned things from their parents and older family members, and they wanted to sing more and better and louder songs.
One ‘apapane turned up with so much eagerness that it just went running over. “Aren’t you excited?” he asked his fellow youngsters. “I’m really excited. What do you think they’ll teach us?”
The ‘apapane he asked opened her beak to answer the question, but he went right on to say something else to another bird that had just joined them. “I think singing is just the best part of being an ‘apapane. It’s like flying, but with your voice. Don’t you think so?”
The new ‘apapane started to reply, but before he got out a peep the excited ‘apapane had turned back to the first bird and continued, “I’m really looking forward to those really high sweeping calls. You know the ones? I’m sure you do. Do you think the instructor will know them? How could she not? Do you know who she is? Has she arrived yet?”
And it went on.
The instructor turned up and, for a moment, there was silence as she spoke to the new choristers. “Welcome, friends,” she said. “We’re here to learn the art of ‘apapane music. I hope you’ll all enjoy this. Let’s start with…”
“Oh, I will definitely enjoy this!” piped up our eager fledgling. “And so will he. And her. And that one over there. Are you going to teach us with the Kilauea method or do you use the Maui variant? Are there any specialty classes? How about song composition? And what about…?”
And it went on.
The instructor and the other students waited for a while to see if he would stop on his own. And… he didn’t. He just went on. Eventually the chorus teacher shrugged her feathers and went on to demonstrate some basic calls, and then some trills, and then some melodies. As the chorus grew in strength and confidence, there was this constant undercurrent of… well.
“I’ve been really interested in flycatching technique, you know? Sometimes that can improve the voice, right? And the different nectars produce different songs, I’m sure. I’d volunteer for that experiment. But really it’s the classic songs that impress me. Do they impress you? Of course they do, you’re here to teach them. Which one will you start with? I think it would be the Pali song, but perhaps you like the rising notes of the Pu’u Trill.”
And it went on. He never stopped. As a result, he never actually learned to sing.
Now, I know that not everyone is always interested in learning new things. I know that not everyone gets excited about learning to sing, or fly, or skip, or cook, or do any one of the many things that make up our lives. But there is something to learn from the ‘apapane that never learned to sing. The first step in learning is to stop talking for a moment and listen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Story
The story as told is different from the story as written. You’ll probably notice that if you listen.
Photo of an ‘apapane – one who learned to sing, as much as we can tell – by Eric Anderson.
“[Martha] had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.” – Luke 10:38-42
I’m listening, Jesus. Can’t you hear me listening?
I’m listening while I’m working. See how hard I’m working. All alone I’m working. Don’t you care? I’m working.
And I’m listening while I’m working. Have no fear about that, now. I’m listening.
I’m working because there’s work. So much need, so much work. Who else is working? Don’t you care I’m working?
Still listening; still working. Don’t worry about listening. I am listening.
The needs, they keep shifting. Some things I’ve done aren’t working. I’ll try something new. Don’t you care to share something new?
Let me get this done while I’m listening. Speak your peace, Jesus. I’m listening.
Yes, I’m listening, Jesus.
Can’t you hear me listening?
A poem/prayer based on Luke 10:38-42, the Revised Common Lectionary Gospel Reading for Year C, Proper 11 (16).
The story of Mary and Martha has often been used to praise contemplative spirituality and criticize engagement with others. I think that’s a misleading reading. Jesus commented on Martha’s worry and distraction, not her activity. What distinguished the two women was that Mary listened. Someone with a spirituality of involvement can be an active listener to Jesus, and a contemplative can certainly listen to self rather than to Christ.
The photo is of a fresco depicting Mary, Martha, and Jesus in Martha’s house. The fresco is in the St. Lazarus Roman Catholic Church in al-Eizariah (Biblical Bethany). Photo by Fallaner – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72990656.
Mynas have a reputation. It’s a reputation that most of us wouldn’t want to have. They’re known for their loudness, and their squabbling, and their arguments, and their really loud arguments. Basically, they’re known for being petty, noisy, and aggressive. Not the reputation you’d like to have.
You will notice that attending church and listening to stories and songs and sermons isn’t on that list of things mynas are known for. But there was a myna who liked to perch near a church here on Hawai’i Island, and he actually stayed quiet to listen. He liked the stories that Jesus told.
One of his favorites was the story of the Good Samaritan. I’m sure you know it: after a man was beaten up by robbers, the person who came to help was not somebody the poor man knew, or one of the people that you’d expect to help. It was a Samaritan, somebody that you’d have thought would be among the attackers, not the helpers. It was the Samaritan that cleaned the man up, put bandages on him, brought him to a safe place where he could rest and recover, and paid an innkeeper to take care of him.
But who, wondered the myna, was a Samaritan in the bird world of Hawai’i Island? Who would you expect to make bad things worse? Who would surprise you if they turned around and helped? Who, by making things better, just might change the world around them?
Just then a cat came by. The myna perched on a branch above it, and instead of launching into a warning call, greeted the cat with a friendly chirp. Then he told the cat all about the Good Samaritan, about somebody who needed help getting help from the most unlikely somebody else.
“What do you think?” said the myna to the cat. “Could you be like the Samaritan? Could you help a bird instead of trying to catch it?”
The cat, I must say, was rather confused, but also intrigued. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I can see how that would make a big difference in the world, if I and my fellow cats started being helpful instead of being hunters.”
“I know somebody else who could be a Good Samaritan,” piped up another voice. It was a saffron finch who was perched in dense foliage of the same bush as the myna. Neither the cat nor the myna had noticed her.
“Who else could be a Good Samaritan?” asked the myna.
“You can,” said the saffron finch. “You know how you screech at us sometimes? You could stop doing that.”
“Now that I think of it,” said the cat, “there’s a few dogs that could definitely learn something from the Good Samaritan.”
“I guess,” said the myna slowly, “that nearly any of us could be the one who needs help. And I guess that nearly any of us could be the one who, against all expectation, is the one to bring help.
“We can all be a Good Samaritan.”
by Eric Anderson
Unfortunately, there was a technical error and the worship service of July 10, 2022, was not recorded.
ordainedgeek 