Friends of the Edgewood Congregation,

We've had several instances over the past few months where folks have received odd messages from what appears to be Pastor Michael. As of this morning, his official "mprucker@fpcedgewood.org" email address has been deleted. So, unless you get a message from his personal gmail account (click on the name in the "from" section so see if the email address is actually him), assume it's fake. You will never get a request for gift cards from Michael!

This week, we welcome back to our pulpit the Rev. Kellie Weekley-Mills. She will preach from the Book of Job and Mark's gospel in a sermon titled "Let Us Cross to the Other Side."

As we've done for the past several weeks, those who feel safe and healthy enough to do so are invited to join us in the sanctuary at 11:00AM following our established safety and distancing protocols. We will broadcast the live stream on our Facebook page in real time, and the edited video will be posted to YouTube by Monday morning.

Here is the bulletin for this week's service for anyone watching on Facebook to follow along with the hymns and responses.

Walk.  Give.  Change the world.

Our community believes in ending hunger. And, in 2020, we will continue to fight against the new challenges of disease and disaster that leave people hungry. Join with us in raising funds to help neighbors near and far get the meals they need this year.



Walkers have reported $4,645 in online and offline gifts!

Find more details here.

2020 Pittsburgh East VIRTUAL CROP Hunger Walk

The CROP Hunger Walk may be Virtual, but the need could not be more real. Join with others from the Pittsburgh East CROP Hunger Walk as together we walk to end hunger and poverty here in the East End of Pittsburgh and around the world! 

You can make your donation online by clicking the button below. Search for the Edgewood team or you can support Judy as an individual walker to make sure the donation counts for FPCE!

It's already time to think about the October newsletter. If you have items you would like to include (good news, bad news, updates, meetings, etc.), please email it to Judy by September 25 so we can work on it to have mailed out and in your homes by October 1.

This article was posted to the Presbyterian Outlook blog yesterday and I think does a nice job of capturing what many of us are feeling about life in general and how we are supposed to continue on in our own lives and as Christians. It is written by JOSHUA MUSSER GRITTER, who co-pastors First Presbyterian Church in Salisbury, North Carolina, with his wife Lara. They watch movies together with their dog Red.

Admittedly it's a little on the long side, but I think worth the read.

See you in worship -- in person or online!

Peace,

Shaun

No more shame, no more fear

September 16, 2020 by Joshua Gritter

For me, middle school was a complete crapshoot.

There were bullies, puberty and that sweeping awkwardness accompanying all social interactions. I am pretty sure middle school is the place where you gain all the painful memories that you go to counseling for in your 30s. Middle school was also the time when I loved the band Creed — not all wounds are created equal.

Beyond the first kiss, first sip of alcohol and unrelenting quest for coolness, there is one moment from those days that I remember with an odd salience. The memory concerns my churlish seventh grade math teacher. He was somewhere between Severus Snape and Attila the Hun. (Well, at least to my young imagination.) Two months after the societal rupturing of 9/11, this teacher stood in front of a group of oddly quiet teenagers and said, “You are who you are when you stand in the road, naked in the middle of the night.” You can guess what came next. That kid who had learned the art of classroom humor as a way to disguise his insecurity about being the smallest kid in the class blurted out, “He said naked!” We all cackled and hummed. In the moment I thought that my math teacher had finally lost his evil marbles. What a weird thing to say!

I’ve thought of this memory several times during this pandemic. You are who you are when you are naked, standing in the road in the middle of the night. Though he was off with his delivery and timing, I think my math teacher was asking the existential question of our days: When everything is stripped away, when the branches of your life are bare and the womb of normalcy barren, who are you? To frame it biblically: When we have hung up our harps in the trees of Babylon, when our couch is drenched in tears, when change erupts and irrupts our sense of self and security, what is left?

This existential question is a deeply theological, pastoral question. I’m involved in several pastor support groups, and have some beloved spiritual friends who are in ministry as well. The common thread weaving through the anxious mosaic of ministry in this time is the fact that everyone is struggling, everyone is suffering in some way. In many ways we spend much of our pastoral energy dealing with the symptoms of this struggle. Our inboxes are filled with the words of angry church members — some say we haven’t opened early enough, some say we’re opening too early, and some haven’t been to church since March (which also hurts our feelings if we’re honest). People fight about masks or no masks, schoolchildren have become objects of liberal vs. conservative debate and all of us feel somewhat stoic after our numbing agents of alcohol and Netflix have ceased to bring joy. Resentment for the people we are called to love creeps in, fatigue disguises itself as righteous indignation and the pulpit becomes a boxing ring. These days it feels as if everything has been stripped away. We are, as an entire society, standing naked in the road in the middle of the night.

I am less interested in the symptoms of societal upheaval than in the underlying currents of our pain. What’s the answer to who are we, really? People aren’t really that passionate about wearing a mask or not, being in schools or not, worshipping in person or not. While these are significant issues, these conversations and debates are rooted in the emotions all human beings share — namely fear and shame. The opposite of love is not hate, it is fear. The opposite of beloved community is not individualism, it is tribalism. The opposite of empathy isn’t selfishness, it is shame.

We don’t feel lonely right now because we aren’t seeing one another, we feel lonely because we are afraid. Fear begets a smaller and smaller world until all that is left is one’s own worldview — a crushing individualism that isolates us from sources of love. Fear asks us to live in an unnuanced world of absolutes — of evil vs. good, black vs. white. This is the world where people post videos on Facebook of people misbehaving at department stores. This is the world where quality of persons is defined by one moment, one mistake, one grave sin — be it a racial epithet, refusal to wear a mask at Costco or a reshare of a ridiculous article from a news agency you despise. Fear doesn’t make us hide from sharing our opinions, rather it makes us more certain that our opinions are the right ones. As a pastor and a person, I see in myself and others a dangerous fear that is tearing us apart, quite literally from the inside out. Theologically the answer to this fear is not screaming “do not be afraid” from the pulpit. Tell afraid people to stop being afraid and all you will get is shame on top of fear, and that combustive combination is a recipe for depression and anxiety.

Perhaps fear’s vaccine is friendship amidst vulnerability. Brené Brown’s awesome book “Dare to Lead” suggests that vulnerability beats the crap out of fear, one shared emotional experience at a time. When I was a child, scared of the creatures of the night and hiding under my covers, my father would kill my fear not by shutting the door and saying “grow up,” but by climbing under the covers with me. “I get scared, too,” he would say. While our church programs are obliterated and our congregants are roaring, maybe we pastors need to practice courage as vulnerability. Maybe then we have a shot at pushing away the fear that stalks us in the middle of the night. This practice begins when we simply listen to our life and ask, “What’s really going on within me?” And though we can’t ever know the answer fully, the psalmist reminds us that God knows us in our inward parts and Paul reminds us that our life is “hidden” in Christ. As long as God is under the covers with me, I’ll make it through the night.

Fear’s best pal is shame. These two hang out together, buy one another drinks at the bar and grow up together like siblings in the same house. Brown says that the difference between shame and guilt is that while guilt says, “I did a bad thing,” shame says, “I am bad.” Guilt questions our moral actions, but shame doubts our inherent dignity. This terrible minion, shame, is haunting our current moment. It is often thought that narcissists are the most self-consumed, self-obsessed among us. But it is likely they are actually the most ashamed among us, because the more shame we feel, the less empathy we can feel for others. It’s commonplace for people to say, “We’re just so politically polarized.” Sure, that’s true. But get to the deeper stuff and you’ll likely find that we are more ashamed than ever. Disunity doesn’t produce shame, shame produces disunity. Shame is like an internal wound-tornado — everything that tries to get close gets spun around and thrown violently away. The tricky part here is that the rhetorical ammo used in arguments these days is shame more than anything else. I am so completely unsurprised when a 75-year-old Southern born white man who grew up poor and from a small town gets angry and rigid when a young liberal from the city tells them on Facebook that they are racist. It’s impossible for shame to beget empathy. If you can name one person who’s been shamed into a worldview change, I’ll give you a hundred bucks.

What are we to do when we are feel ashamed, naked and wondering in the middle of the road at night? Shame’s vaccine is empathy — the judgement-free spirit entering into another’s story of suffering. As much as woke culture hates to admit it, all of us suffer. And yes, certain suffering is bigger and worse than others. Systemic racism is worse than my middle school wounds, but I’m not sure I can become anti-racist without learning to love my own woundedness. It is untrue that because some people suffer worse, the small sufferings of some don’t matter. Paul didn’t say, “Jesus came for those who suffer the most, so who cares about the rest?” He said, “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” In other words, while we were completely lost and covered in shame, God took on the flesh of our human story.

The incarnation is the God of history choosing our story as God’s story, which means more than anything God is an empathetic God. To overcome the alienation we feel from one another, we may have to holster our weaponized shame and dare to believe that everyone – our enemies included – are suffering right now. Brown says there’s no such thing as limited empathy, which means that the more empathy there is in the world, the less shame there is in the world. To those of us who say, “I just can’t make a difference right now,” how does emptying the world of shame sound?

I’ve started to see the truth of this in my own life. There are times that I could burst from all the pressure we pastors currently feel from our congregants — and from ourselves. But when I get angry, dismissive, tired and petty, I must admit that shame is at work. And I have begun to find, bit by bit, that the more I understand the suffering of my people and the more I befriend my own suffering, the less chance shame has to rule my life.

So, I begin to answer my teacher’s lifelong question: “Who are we when we are naked and standing in the middle of the road at night?” The answer — we are not alone, our suffering matters. As one of the credal statements of our denomination might put it, “In life and in death, in shame and in fear, we belong to our lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

Friends and Family of FPCE,

I'm saddened to share that we've received word that Charles "Chuck" Ganster, companion of Marilyn Lobert and fan of Sunny's piano playing, has passed away. It apparently happened within the past few weeks and was a result of COVID-19. Rick and Pastor Michael have been in touch with Marilyn, who is grieving deeply. Our thoughts and prayers are with Marilyn, and the members of Chuck's family on their loss.

* * * * *

The season after Pentecost in the church year that runs all the way until the beginning of Advent in December is called "Ordinary Time." An article in the most recent issue of Presbyterians Today magazine discusses how in our lives these days, nothing is what would be considered "ordinary." The author offers some suggestions for how to remain hopeful and optimistic in what she refers to as "anything but" ordinary time. I've copied it below (if you click the title, it links to the original article page). I hope you find it meaningful.

See you in church -- in person or online -- on Sunday (or Monday!).

Shaun

A new liturgical season emerges

By Kathleen Long Bostrom | Presbyterians Today

September is usually the month when we settle back into our routines. Beach umbrellas are replaced by school buses speckling the roadway. Parents scramble to get kids out the door to school. Churches, too, gear up for rally days. But not this year.

As 2020 began — and at the first ragged, painful cough — the world found itself navigating an unprecedented journey that introduced phrases such as “sheltering in place” and “social distancing.” By early summer, as communities began emerging from isolation, protests pushed COVID-19 from the limelight. People joined in outrage, horrified by the brutal death of George Floyd, an African American man pinned to the ground pleading for his life. This year has become “The Year of Tragical Thinking” and has ushered in a new season in the liturgical calendar — “Anything But” Ordinary Time.

Traditionally, the season of Ordinary Time runs till the Saturday before the first Sunday of Advent. It is a season to discover God in the daily rhythm of our lives. But daily rhythms seem hard to come by lately, and “Anything But” Ordinary Time has put us on an unending road trip with no detailed timeline letting us know when we’ll be safely home again. What we do have, though, are the lectionary readings from Exodus for September and October that recall another unprecedented trip — the one the Hebrews took from Egypt to Canaan. The Hebrews lived in slavery for 400 years, their identity shattered, their freedom long forgotten. Moses whisks them from the only life they have known and sends them skedaddling into a foreign land where they wander for an entire generation. They are homeless, frightened and threatened, and have no way of knowing when their journey will end. They are only a few miles — and months — into the journey when the people start to whine like a carload of kids on a trip. They even become nostalgic for the “normalcy” of slavery when they reminisce about pots of meat and bread, putting a shining patina on what was in actuality a life of suffering and starvation. Slavery? Normal? Not in God’s eyes.

In this season, we also have World Communion Sunday, which falls on Oct. 4. The emphasis on being united with Christians around the world has particular significance in 2020. The pandemic of COVID-19 has unfurled like an 11th plague, and nobody has been spared the effects. The world seems to have awakened to the blatant inequality between different colors of human beings. And yet we are reminded in the breaking of the bread that Jesus welcomes all people — equally. “This is my body,” Jesus said, not “broken for a few,” but broken for everyone.

We are still on an unending road trip. We’re not there yet, but there is no going back to the way things were, no more than it was possible for the Hebrews to return to Egypt. Ordinary and normal are no more. Maybe it’s time that we embraced that truth. Let us allow “Anything But” Ordinary Time to open our eyes, helping us recognize that nobody is exempt from a pandemic, and that inequality and injustice won’t go away unless we all make that happen. The journey has begun, and we must keep moving forward until we are finally home.

Kathleen Long Bostrom is a retired PC(USA) minister and the author of over 50 books, most of them picture books for children.

Living in ‘Anything But’ Ordinary Time