Friends,

Here we are over half way through the hot summer!  I’m so proud of the good work we have been doing on the Sunday mornings that we write notes to the Protestant residents of the prison where Dick and Brent lead a Monday night nondenominational contemplative fellowship.  While we do not invite penpal relationships, one man wrote back to Clint and expressed his deep spiritual need of Christian connection and appreciation for the note of outreach. Dick and Brent directed us to encourage the people to seek out the Monday night prison fellowship group, which can be very helpful for residents’ spiritual needs.  Such good work is also a boon for our own souls, for God’s word tells us: “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them” (Hebrews 13:3).

This coming Sunday Patty has planned to lead a discussion on how to be our own medical advocates during our 10 AM Hayden Hall potluck fellowship.  In the event that she is not feeling well or is testing positive (her husband Bob has Covid and she is currently quarantined), we will continue our letter writing mission project, and Patty will present during a Sunday in August instead.  So bring note cards and stamps (along with a food item) again just in case.

Also mark on your calendars for the first two Sundays of August, when we can worship together at the Church of the Beatitudes UCC and have lunch afterwards.  For Sunday, August 4 I am thinking Pie and Wine on the NW corner of Tatum and Shea (on our way home).  They seem to be able to accommodate groups and the food is good.  On Sunday, August 11, the Women of Faith group at the COB UCC is sponsoring a potluck and another session of writing letters to prisoners on our massive list.  The COB folks were inspired by the work we are doing at CCOV and want to join with us in the project!  I think we can all help them with what to say, and it will be nice to spent time with our UCC brothers and sisters in Christ.  Be sure to sign up for the potluck event at the COB the week before, or let me know and I will get your name on the list.  I plan to take a substantial salad in my cooler with lots of ice packs.

It won’t be long until we are back in the regular routine of worship again starting September 8!  In the meantime, stay cool!

Peace,

Co-Pastor Sandi

Friends,

After two June Sundays of deep discussion in Hayden Hall and one of letter-writing to prisoners, we had a great time worshipping together at the Church of the Beatitudes UCC in Phoenix on June 23 (and will again on June 30).  Twelve of us were treated to energizing worship, a native flute, and a drum circle in which everyone was invited to participate.  I loved seeing both the Beatitudes congregation and ours enjoined in the same beat!  Our folks liked it so much that they requested a drum circle at CCOV in the fall or winter.  I will do my best to make that happen under the leadership of the same drummer. 

If you haven’t joined us yet in our summer Sundays, you are heartily encouraged to join in the fellowship, mission, worship, and fun.  Last Sunday, after Beatitudes worship, the twelve of us enjoyed a great fellowship lunch together at Postino’s on Central.  This coming Sunday I’ve already made noon reservations at The Windsor, just across from Postino’s.  Please let me know if you are coming, and I will be sure my count is accurate for the restaurant.

One last note: while we have nothing planned for Sunday, July 7, for consistency you might want to worship at the Beatitudes and hear Rev. Dr. Jim Meadows preach.  Jim is a beloved member of the Beatitudes and retired UCC clergy.  Clint and I will be in Estes Park visiting Dick and Shirley Wing for the long Fourth of July Weekend.  I hope you are all having a great summer so far!  

Stay Cool!

Sandi

Friends,

I’m excited about the upcoming baptism of our infant grandson Steven Luke, and we are aiming for his baptism to be at CCOV on Mother’s Day, May 12!  I will baptize him with the prayerful expectation that his parents raise him with Christian values and in a Christian community, which doesn’t have to be ours.  Yes, I will heartily encourage his parents to find a church in their neighborhood, because the burdens we all carry, including in child rearing, are too much for each of us to bear alone.  A good church like ours helps us share and shift the weights we all carry; indeed, it takes a village.  

I knew this well when my own daughter was an infant.  The people of the church supported me when my husband was consumed with Army duties and I was alone living across the country away from family.  The church people supported us, advised us, watched our baby when I had a dentist appointment, and became our new family.  Because of it, we felt less alone in the world.  As our daughter grew, Sunday school teachers, youth pastors, and church friends reinforced and taught the Christian values we endeavored to communicate at home.

Oh, I know.  Young people today often say the same things: “I’ll pass on joining anything,” or “I just don’t believe in organized religion.”  It kind of reminds me of a joke told by the character Rorschach in the graphic novel Watchmen:  A man goes to his doctor and says he’s depressed because life seems harsh and cruel.  He says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain.  His doctor says, “The treatment is simple.  The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight.  Go and see him.  That should pick you up.”  The man bursts into tears and says, “but doctor, I am Pagliacci.”  

The world holds many temporary distractions, but they are only facades.  The clown embodies the facade but knows he needs something real, something deeper to help him in the harshness and cruelty of life.  A good church provides meaningful connection and community, which all of us need.  In church we experience again and again the grand drama of God’s salvation, which beckons us to come out of ourselves, out of our own show, to take a seat at God’s ever-widening table.  It is good to be there for one another in church!  

Grace and Peace, 

Co-Pastor Sandi

Friends,

I write to you on Easter Monday after a wonderful Resurrection Day celebration at CCOV!  A special thanks to Patty Hersh for making the sanctuary and Hayden Hall look so beautiful!  Wasn’t Kat Honsberger and Larry Loeber’s music gorgeous? 

As I reflect on the past winter, I feel such gratitude for all of the good things that have happened at our beloved church.  Plumbing issues were fixed, vigas, lights, and ceiling tiles got replaced, some of our men patched the sidewalk, the women bonded over our Thursday morning discussion group, and we recently received eight new members and celebrated a baptism!  Our February wine-tasting event attracted community people, who joined in and got know us while we all raised money for Healthy Packs, a chosen ministry of our congregation.  Rinse and repeat this for 4 PM on Sunday, April 14—you don’t want to miss Pastor Dick’s next vintages!  I pray for the ongoing resurrection already underway at CCOV to move us powerfully into the future!

And one last thing…Don’t forget to get your (clean) jokes ready for Sunday, April 7 so that we continue our Holy Humor Sunday tradition.  Historically, Christians would reserve the Sunday following Easter to lighten things up—and celebrate the great joke Jesus played on the powers of death and darkness—by telling their own jokes to one another.  Here’s one to stimulate your funny bone:  A kindergarten teacher was walking around observing her classroom of children while they were drawing pictures.  As she got to one little girl, who was working diligently, the teacher asked her what the drawing was.  The little girl answered, “I’m drawing God.”  The teacher paused and said, “But no one knows what God looks like.”  Without looking up from her drawing, the little girl replied, “They will in a minute.”

God, to me, looks a bit like the members of Christ’s body who worship at CCOV, folks serving with remarkable generosity and love.  He is risen indeed!

Grace and Peace,

Co-Pastor Sandi

Friends,

We have had a wonderful winter season at CCOV thus far!  Our campus has seen major improvements, we enjoyed a specular wine tasting/potluck in early February benefitting Healthy Packs, our service this past Sunday celebrated Boy Scout Troop 649 and our long relationship with them; and later the same evening, we held our 19th Evening of Extraordinary Music with over 90 in attendance!  Larry Loeber and his orchestra friends Aaron Requiro, Jenna Daum, and Brian Strawley outdid themselves in their Masterpieces of Enescu and Debussy concert.

We have even more to look forward to as we consecrate council this coming Sunday, March 10.  We warmly welcome Paulann Ricketts and Paul Sneed, who are joining the longtime council members!  Your church leadership is in the process of organizing and planning in advance so that we can broaden our missions to the greater community as well as nurture our congregation.

Besides an expanded council, our congregation is also growing:  On Sunday, March 17, we are receiving up to eight new members as well as celebrating a baptism!  Be sure to attend and extend a warm welcome to our new members.

I would say that “the little church that could” is now “the little church that is…happening!”  My heartfelt gratitude to all of you who serve in so many ways.  Together we can move from solvency to full bloom!

In Christ,

Co-Pastor Sandi

Friends,

You are invited to a special 12 PM Ash Wednesday service at the Church of the Beatitudes UCC at 555 W. Glendale Ave, Phoenix, 85021 (SE corner of Glendale and 7th Aves).  This year Ash Wednesday falls on February 14th, Valentines Day.  Our own Pastor Dick Wing will be leading the noon service, which will feature talented Church of the Beatitudes musicians, a meditative message from Dick, and the imposition of ashes.  Come out to join your UCC brothers and sisters from another congregation for a meaningful worship experience that begins the church season of Lent, which is a preparatory time of forty days before Easter.  The noon service will still allow for your evening Valentine’s Day celebrations!  

Also, mark you calendars now for March 29 at 12 PM for Good Friday worship, also at the Church of the Beatitudes.  We will provide more details about that noontime service in the coming weeks.   

May your Lenten season be blessed,

Co-Pastor Sandi 

Friends,

Here we are in the throes of winter (well, as much as we get winter in the Valley), and already your staff and council are planning for summer!  I wanted to let you know what we are thinking at this point.  Because we had a regular group who enjoyed being together on Sundays last summer—either informally in Hayden Hall or at the Church of the Beatitudes (CoB) in Phoenix followed by exploring mid-town restaurants for lunch—we have decided to repeat this next June-September with a small twist:  During CoB’s pastoral search, Dick and I will continue serving there likely through the entire summer, but we will each take two Sundays in a row (he will come down from Estes Park and remain for a week at a time with bookending weekends so he can preach there).  During those Sundays, I will host a brunch and discussion on a variety of spiritual topics in Hayden Hall.  In other words, we will have a few consecutive Sundays in Hayden Hall with brunch potluck each month and a few consecutive Sundays worshipping at the Beatitudes on Sundays when I preach (and resume our Phoenix restaurant exploration together).  How does that sound?  As the time gets closer, we will give you a schedule of dates.  In the meantime, enjoy the nicer weather which reportedly is coming!

Peace,

Co-Pastor Sandi 

Friends,

Merry Christmas!  I can still say that for the twelve days of Christmas, which end on January 6 (Epiphany).  I hope you all had wonderful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations with friends and family.  Many blessings as you head into the New Year! 

Last week, as I prepared for Christmas, I particularly enjoyed Richard Rohr’s daily meditations, which are delivered to my inbox each morning.  His subject for the week was the Incarnation—Spirit becoming human, light filling matter—apt Christmas themes.  As I ruminated on these, my mind took me back 44 years to my old high school physics class.  The teacher had designed the nine-month course around solving the mystery of what light is.  We went through the standard wave and particle models, and by the end of the year, students were slowly led to the conclusion that light is both a particle and a wave: Quantum mechanics tells us that light atoms behave like waves until you are watching them, upon which they behave like particles.  What a mind-bending paradox!  If you can explain how that happens, well, a Nobel Prize is probably waiting for you.  My theological background though tells me this all has something to do with the mysteries of consciousness and God.  

Richard Rohr says, “We do have to make room for such a mystery, because right now there is ‘no room in the inn.’  We see things pretty much in their materiality, but we don’t see the light shining through.  We don’t see the incarnate spirit that is hidden inside of everything material.”  I’ve come to see that the Christmas season is all about slowing down and admitting paradox and mystery into our preoccupations with materiality.  Incarnation means even more than God becoming Jesus; it means that God has always come and is always coming into the physical, material universe.  Rohr concludes his December 17, 2023 meditation with a statement I found absolutely stunning: “We’re always waiting to see Spirit revealing itself through matter.  We’re always waiting for matter to become a new form in which Spirit is revealed.  Whenever that happens, we’re celebrating Christmas.”  Indeed, it takes faith to believe that there is more on the light spectrum than the particles of the material world that we can see with our eyes.  May the Epiphany season before us be a time to grasp that we are embedded in a far larger reality than we think. Life and the cosmos which sustains it are made by God and infused with holy light.  As such, all who exist and our material world deserve our love, nurture, and respect.

Happy New Year!

Co-Pastor Sandi

Friends,

On Sunday afternoon and evening we had a wonderful time together decorating our lovely sanctuary and enjoying chilis with fixins’ as well as breads and desserts.  It was a good time of fellowship and idea sharing for the future and direction of our church.  One thing we all agreed upon was that we are truly a great place for folks to come for a sense of familial connection and welcome.  We all know we have something good here and all feel it!  The question always remains:  How do we get the word out?  Marketing and advertising are expensive, and the little we’ve tried hasn’t gotten us anywhere.  Our best bet is personally reaching out to our unchurched friends and neighbors and offering to bring them along on Sundays.  Advent is a particularly beautiful time to invite folks—especially with our now-decorated sanctuary and Larry’s upcoming Evening of Extraordinary Music on Dec. 17, as well as our Christmas Eve morning and evening services.  Whom can you tell about our church?  Who needs a sense of community, connection, and mission that we are eager to offer?  I have a feeling that there are far more in our neighborhoods than we think.  

Blessings on your Advent season!

Co-Pastor Sandi

Friends,

Rabbi Sheila Weinberg of the Jewish community of Amherst in MA writes the following:

Two peoples, one land,

Three faiths, one root,

One earth, one mother,

One sky, one beginning, one future, one destiny.

One broken heart,

One God.

We pray to You: 

Grant us a vision of unity.

My we see the many in the one and the one in the many.

May you, Life of All the Worlds,

Source of All Amazing Differences

Help us to see clearly.

Guide us gently and firmly toward each other,

Toward peace.  Amen. 

I know we are all broken-hearted over events in the Middle East.  We can only pray and work for peace in our own spheres of influence, always realizing that our own peace is intimately bound up with the peace of those around us.  When our neighbors live in sickness and poverty, the boiling point eventually comes, and whole cities are plunged into chaos.  And so we erect walls, but walls are often angrily breached.  Sharing, equality, and cooperation all address the root of the problems we face and are what our love of God looks like when consciously applied.  Let us therefore pray and love where we are, with all that we are.  

Prayerfully,

Co-Pastor Sandi