December 2021 – Wicomico Presbyterian Church

Home – Part 2

Luke 2:41-52 I have some clear memories of losing a child in the mall or the grocery store or the park – you name it. I don’t really think I am especially careless. It’s the children. Unless you tie them on a string or lock them in a room with you, it’s really hard to keep track of children. Because children are careless. Young children are careless about wandering off because they don’t yet understand the consequences – that they may not find their way back. They don’t understand the possibility of being separated from the ones who care for them. Children are so careless about getting themselves lost. My sister Katie was especially careless, always wandering after anything that caught her eye. My mother once lost Katie in the mall and frantically ran around looking for her. Eventually she found her way to a department store security office. My […]

Home – Part 1

John 1:1-14 If you go into a busy, crowded place this time of the year, you are likely to hear one word buzzing through the air: home. People asking each other, “Are you going home for Christmas?” “Will you be home for the holidays?” “Are your kids all coming home?” Home. Home. Home. The word seems to be everywhere. Everyone talking about home. Every year at this time, we think about home, we want to be home. We associate home with Christmas. Yet, in a time when our ability to travel anywhere is severely hindered by a pandemic, going home is hard. In a time when gathering with others is subject, always, to our best understanding of a changing situation, changing rules, tests and vaccinations; when our efforts to gather together and be home are fraught with anxiety on top of all the usual emotions; we ask ourselves what does […]

Advent 4: A Room for Love

Micah 5:2-5a Luke 1: 39-55 About 15 years ago there was a woman driving home from work in Chicago and, driving through an underpass, she saw a vision of the virgin Mary on the wall. And thus was born Our Lady of the Underpass, a place of pilgrimage, where the faithful bring flowers and candles to a little altar they have set up. In the underpass. Have you ever driven in Chicago? The thought of supplicants kneeling before the shrine while traffic whizzes by, inches away from their bodies – terrifying. Yet, it’s a reminder that the image of Mary is extremely powerful for the church, particularly the Roman Catholic church. She is venerated because she was chosen by God to bear God’s son in her body. She is called, in Greek, Theotokos, which means God-bearer. She is holiest among women because she was chosen to be the vessel of God’s […]

Advent 3: Enough

Isaiah 12: 2-6 Luke 3: 7-18 The moment you have been waiting for all year: John the Baptist, the cranky prophet, here to tell us it’s the end of the world as we know it. Cheers. I don’t often think about the end of the world. Hardly ever by choice. But when I do think about it, I start to think about what I would miss. Do you ever think about those things? I would miss a good seafood dinner and a nice wine to go with it. I would miss the taste of good chocolate. There are so many good tastes I would miss. I would miss the sound of music. Not necessarily the Julie Andrews movie, although that’s nice, but just hearing music, making music. Playing quiet instrumental music on the speakers while I work, listening to Norah Jones sing while I cook dinner, singing hymns on Sunday. […]

Advent 2: A Place at the Table

Baruch 5: 1-5 Philippians 1:3-11 When I was a child, we lived in a crowded house. I had three sisters, and my grandmother lived with us for much of my childhood, as well. And there was about a year when we had someone else living with us too. My mother brought a young woman into our home who was struggling with grief. I was too young to understand the circumstances; I just knew that Marie was broken, fragile. Still, she was a beloved big sister to me and my sisters. I remember, too, gaggles of young Filipina women in our house. Back in the 1960s the U.S. opened immigration and many nurses came into the country from the Philippines, to meet the need at the time. The hospital where my mother worked hired a lot of them. When my mother looked at these nurses she saw girls who were lonely […]