This Sunday after the 10am service the undercroft will be set up in preparation for the fair and items currently stored in the garage at the Outreach Building will be moved to the undercroft. Please plan to stay a little longer after coffee hour to help. On Monday, June 9 donations may be brought in  to be sorted and priced.

On June 22 there is a single 9AM worship service followed by an "everything Lutheran" forum led by Mark U. Edwards, Jr.

 

Mark U. Edwards, Jr., became Professor of the History of Christianity at HDS in 1987, after teaching at Wellesley College and Purdue University. He was at HDS until July 1994, when he became the ninth president of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. In 2000 Edwards stepped down from the St. Olaf presidency and moved to New Hampshire. He returned to HDS in May 2003. Edwards has written four books and numerous articles on Martin Luther and the German Reformation. The most recent book, entitled Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (University of California Press, 1994; reprint, Fortress Press, 2005), deals with the West's first "mass media campaign" and Luther's pivotal role as both subject and object in the struggle for the hearts and minds of sixteenth-century Christians. When at St. Olaf, Edwards turned his research interests toward religious perspectives in American higher education. In addition to chapters and articles on this topic, he has published Religion on Our Campuses: A Professor's Guide to Communities, Conflicts, and Promising Conversations (Palgrave, 2006), which asks faculty to ponder the appropriate role of religion on campus. He is now at work on "Academic Culture and Religion (Or Why Faculty Have Problems with Religion)," which explores the development of academic culture in America and its conflicted relationship with religion, especially Christianity. Edwards has taught introductory courses in computer science at Wellesley and Purdue and has developed three commercial software programs, including ForComment, a pioneer "groupware" product that was designated one of the best products of 1987 by PC Magazine. 

"Danny" Florence and Carol Pearson are extending their stay in Florida due to a procedure that Danny needs on June 18th. If anyone would like to send a card or note, please do so to 508 - 44th Avenue E-H7, Bradenton, FL 34203. Thank you.

Beloved parishioner Fenton Friend passed away Sunday 5/25. A service is being planned at All Saints' on Friday, August 15th at 11 a.m. (Note change in date)

The excitement is mounting for our celebration of Pentecost Sunday together! Adding to brilliant flame colors and extraordinary Scriptural events, the music offered will involve our new keyboard "down front", utilizing a variety of sounds for our worship.  Join us in a West Indian "Lord's Prayer", with conga drums and tambourines adding to the joy. Revisit the Irish choral anthem "Come My Way, My Truth, My Life" as the choir shares from the front, and the keyboard adds flute and strings.  Start those hands clapping when we sing all together "Ev'ry Time I Feel The Spirit".... Let's celebrate our gracious, powerful Holy Spirit with "pizzazz"!  

 

In closing, I share a powerful Pentecost blessing from arguably my favorite contemporary artist/poet/writer.  Visit Jan Richardson at www.thepaintedprayerbook.com if she inspires you as well.

 

Soli Deo Gloria!

Holly

 

This Grace That Scorches Us
A Blessing for Pentecost Day

 

Here's one thing
you must understand
about this blessing:
it is not
for you alone.

 

It is stubborn
about this;
do not even try
to lay hold of it
if you are by yourself,
thinking you can carry it
on your own.

 

To bear this blessing,
you must first take yourself
to a place where everyone
does not look like you
or think like you,
a place where they do not
believe precisely as you believe,
where their thoughts
and ideas and gestures
are not exact echoes
of your own.

 

Bring your sorrow. Bring your grief.
Bring your fear. Bring your weariness,
your pain, your disgust at how broken
the world is, how fractured,
how fragmented
by its fighting, its wars,
its hungers, its penchant for power,
its ceaseless repetition
of the history it refuses
to rise above.

 

I will not tell you
this blessing will fix all that.

 

But in the place
where you have gathered,
wait.
Watch.
Listen.
Lay aside your inability
to be surprised,
your resistance to what you
do not understand.

 

See then whether this blessing
turns to flame on your tongue,
sets you to speaking
what you cannot fathom

 

or opens your ear
to a language
beyond your imagining
that comes as a knowing
in your bones
a clarity
in your heart
that tells you

 

this is the reason
we were made,
for this ache
that finally opens us,

 

for this struggle, this grace
that scorches us
toward one another
and into
the blazing day.

 

 

The funeral service for Eleanor Jones, mother of Brock Jones, will be held here on Saturday, June 7th at 11 am.