II
Thessalonians 3:1-13
I
recently heard from Citizen Advocacy, who try to match up people with
disabilities with someone who can be a general buddy for them, help out with
errands sometimes, maybe, but mostly just be friends. They have a new person who loves to fish and
wondered if we had someone who does, too.
We
have a bunch of people signed up to help out with Thanksgiving meals, which is
terrific.
We
can always use more people to cook and serve the meals at St. Peter’s, and in
the new year we may try to offer a monthly community breakfast here on Saturday
mornings.
There’s
room in the choir for a few more voices.
You don’t need to know how to read music, and it really and truly is a
great way to spend Thursday evenings. If
you don’t sing but enjoy making music, talk to Karen Bretzius about the
handbells.
2020
is the year for a youth mission trip and we are looking at Boston the last week
of July. Adult chaperones will have to
be part of the mix. That will be about a
month after Vacation Bible School.
Thanks
to everyone who supported the United Methodist Women’s soup sale this week, to
all the cooks as well as the customers, and to both the bakers and the eaters
of the other goodies.
Just
a quick reminder that donations for Bridge of Hope can be given to Dot Wood by
next Sunday. That’s also the Sunday to
bring donations of canned goods to church for our Harvest Home gift to the
pantry at PACS.
The
Lamborns do a great job with the pill bottle collection, and I think Zellen
Shelton oversees the collection of Campbell’s soup labels (though I’m not sure
of that), but it would make their lives easier if someone else would learn the
ropes; the same with the slide projection, which is really not at all
complicated.
We
have a bunch of people who, in one capacity or another, are looking after an
older relative. If that’s you, and it
would be helpful, we’ve been kicking around the idea of getting together at
some point to swap ideas and war stories.
Speaking
of war stories, this past week we hosted an educational session for the
conference about how the church can be supportive to current-duty military
personnel and their families and to veterans.
I have the information from that available for whomever might want to
look it over.
Oh,
let me see what the text of this sermon is.
Oh, yes:
“We hear that some of you are living in
idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work.
Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do
their work quietly and to earn their own living.” [II
Thessalonians 3:12]
No, that doesn’t sound like what we need to hear
about. How about this:
“Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in
doing what is right.” [II
Thessalonians 3:13]
I actually prefer the older translation, here from the
Revised Standard Version:
“do not be weary in well-doing.”
Don’t be overwhelmed by all the various opportunities
for service. Don’t burn out, which is
easy to do. Have you ever heard of
“compassion fatigue”? It’s real.
If you want to do any
long-term good, you have to realize that you are not going to be able to do it
all. There’s something for everybody,
and everybody should be doing something, but nobody should expect themselves to
do everything. And do not think that
whatever you do, whatever your ministry is, has no lasting value, even when it
seems to leave no mark on the world.
There
was a time in the late 1930s when J.R.R. Tolkien was trying to write The
Lord of the Rings but not getting very far on it. The problem wasn’t writer’s block or
laziness. The problem was that he was a
professor with papers to grade and research to do. He was a father with children to raise and a
husband who understood that marriage means couple-time. He was a Christian who was called upon to
take part in the life of the Church. It
was about then that he wrote a short story called “Leaf by Niggle”[1] and I am going to read a
few sections from it.
“Niggle was a painter.
Not a very successful one, partly because he had many other things to
do. Most of these things he thought were
a nuisance; but he did them fairly well, when he could not get out of them:
which (in his opinion) was far too often.
…he was kindhearted, in a way.
You know the sort of kind heart: it made him uncomfortable more than it
made him do anything; and even when he did anything, it did not prevent him
from grumbling, losing his temper, and swearing (mostly to himself). All the same, it did land him in a good many
odd jobs for his neighbour, Mr. Parish, a man with a lame leg. Occasionally he even helped people farther
off, if they came and asked him to. …
He had a large number of pictures on hand; most of
them were too large and ambitious for his skill. He was the sort of painter who can paint
leaves better than trees. He used to
spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen,
and the glistening dewdrops on its edges.
Yet he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the same
style, and all of them different.”
Here I need to summarize a little. He tries to work on this painting, and it
gets to be so big he has to work on it in a shed outside the house, but Mr.
Parish keeps bugging him an needs to borrow his ladder all the time, and Niggle
doesn’t get anywhere close to where he wants to be with his painting when he
suddenly is forced to leave everything and go on a long trip. The story gets a little dreamlike at this
point. He’s picked up by a mysterious
driver, put onto a train, left at a station someplace he has never been but at
the same time recognizes. He finds his
bicycle right there and starts riding, and after awhile, writes Tolkien,
“… A great green shadow came between him and the
sun. Niggle looked up, and fell off his
bicycle.
Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was
alive, its leaves opening, it branches growing and bending in the wind that
Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted
his arms and opened them wide.
‘It’s a gift!’ he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the
result; but he was using the word quite literally.
He went on looking at the Tree. All the leaves he had
ever laboured at were there, as he had imagined them rather than as he had made
them; and there were many others that had only budded in his mind, and many
that might have budded, if only he had had time. …Some of the most beautiful –
and the most characteristic, the most perfect examples of the Niggle style –
were seen to have been produced in collaboration with Mr. Parish: there was no
other way of putting it.”
Before
the story goes much further, there are birds singing in the Tree, and Niggle
can see a mountain that he had painted in the background off in the
distance. Moreover, Niggle realizes that
the Tree he had worked on, his Tree, was just one Tree in a whole forest of
Trees. Apparently, a lot more had been
going on, and was still going on, than he realized. The small brushstrokes he had tended to had
much larger effect than he knew, and were part of some far larger work than he
could comprehend, even when he had somehow landed in the middle of it.
Or maybe it had been
around him the whole time. The gift was
that he got to see it.
“Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in well-doing.”
[II
Thessalonians 3:13]
And, by the way, the Bell Tree will be going up in the
narthex next week.
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