Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ. My year as Moderator of Presbytery ends this weekend at the presbytery meeting at Ghost Ranch when I give a sermon during worship on Sunday and a new moderator is installed. The outgoing Moderator gives a report to presbytery on the past year, and I share parts of it with you, in light of the wars, conflict, division, and pain in our world. The Beloved Community.  It was never quite announced as presbytery’s official vision this year but in everything we did together, the Beloved Community was there.

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Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ, who sought to break the cycles of violence and injustice. These are tough times for growing the Beloved Community. The now week-long war between Hamas and Israel is yet another reminder of humanity’s horrifying inhumanity to each other.  The world is not at a loss for words, everyone seems to have an opinion, but the loudest voices seem bent on exacting more violence where even more people will suffer and be killed. I was in a conversation with a rabbi earlier this week...

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Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ. A blessing of the animals. Renowned Celtic teacher and writer John Philip Newell, who helped us in the formation of our Wednesday Celtic Evensong service, often tells the story of a woman he met during an Iona pilgrimage week.  She was around seventy years of age and over dinner she told John Philip about what happened to her some fifty-five years earlier when she was in church with her family.  A dog wandered into the sanctuary and moseyed up the center aisle and as it got closer to the front of the church it sniffed the air around the altar, then turned around and walked out.

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Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ. “I’m gonna git those injuns!” I regret to say that I spoke those words as a 2 ½ year-old back in 1961 when my family took our first trip west from Ohio to spend a week at Ghost Ranch.  I wore my white cowboy hat, my black cowboy boots, and was ever on the lookout to “git those Injuns.”  I was a product, as most kids were in that era, of a culture of playing cowboys and Indians, shooting toy guns at “bad guys,” and learning about life through the lens of TV Westerns and movies.

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Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ. A sandwich board, a street corner, a beggar on the roadside, a special offering, and a shared ministry. Frier was a middle school classmate of mine at Haven Middle School in Evanston, IL.  We lost touch in high school (there were 5200 students!) but he showed up again in Time Magazine after graduation.  Always a bit outside the box, Frier decided to raise money for college by standing on a street corner in Chicago with a sandwich board around his shoulders asking for money.

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Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ. “To the Glory of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior.” This was written on the final page of a geology test by a college classmate of mine.  We all knew Chris and it didn’t surprise anyone.  I would have probably forgotten many years ago if not for the response from the professor when the test was returned.  At the bottom of the front page he wrote “You and Jesus got a D.”  Ouch.

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Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ, who never stopped talking about love and compassion. We need to plant seeds. I am one generation from the farm.  My mom was the eighth of ten children on a 500-acre farm in central Ohio and she knew every crop by sight.  On car rides through the countryside, we would ask mom what was growing in the fields, and she always had a ready answer.

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Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ, whose stories reach us through all our senses, even smell. It was the smell of honeysuckle on the hills that drew me back. Three summers of my childhood in the 1960s were spent at San Francisco Theological Seminary (SFTS) in San Anselmo, CA, where my dad was pursuing a Doctorate in Sacred Theology, equivalent to a PhD.  My days were filled with...

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This is the final of a six-part series on the Beloved Community.  May we continue to look for it, talk about it, and manifest it in our life together. 

Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places, Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ. Believeland and the Beloved Community. If you’re not from Cleveland, like I am, you may not know that fans of the Browns, Cavaliers, and Guardians are apt to wear t-shirts and jerseys that say Believeland...

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Each Friday through August Pastor Harry will be writing on Growing the Beloved Community to stimulate ideas and discussion on how we might live into this vision.

Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places:

Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ, the new Moses, who welcomed children into his arms.

Moses looked, and his life changed right then and there.

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