PINE STREET POST
April 3rd, 2022
A Weekly Newsletter from Pine Street Church
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A Word from Andrew... Learning from Darkness, Upcoming Art Exhibit, and Holy Week Wisdom...
In her book titled, "Learning to Walk in the Dark," author and priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.”
The interaction and instruction of the light and dark moods of our lives find a living pattern through the rhythms of Jesus' life.
This is what makes Holy Week such a sacred journey. A week from today will be Palm Sunday. And thus we’ll begin the journey of Holy Week in-person for the first time in three years.
What Holy Week reveals in general themes is a deepening into the sacred rhythms of what Christians call the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It is basically the process of dying and rising. Death and new life.
Mother earth teaches this well by accepting seasons as part of the rhythms of our natural world (summer, fall, winter, spring). Human nature tends to resist such emotional and spiritual seasons of our own lives. And yet we are part of nature, too. We have our own deaths and risings.
Today in worship, I'll be talking with the curator of our Off Broadway Art Gallery, Waverly Matthews, about the wisdom these patterns can teach us about life, healing, and faith. We will also hear more about our next art exhibit titled, Worlds Unseen: Mystery and Metamorphosis , that opens on Maundy Thursday, April 14.
I hope to see you in-person or online this morning at 10am MST.
Just me,
Andrew
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Holy Week 2022
Palm Sunday
On Sunday, April 10, at 10am, we will be partnering with All Souls Church for a special joint service to celebrate Palm Sunday! There will be a worship time in the basement for kids ages birth to 5th grade after the children’s blessing. This service will begin our sacred rhythms of Holy Week. While walking alongside the All Souls community, we will journey together through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and an Easter celebration.
Maundy Thursday
On Thursday, April 14th, at 5:30 pm we'll be gathering to celebrate Maundy Thursday with a shared meal, community reading and conversation in the Fellowship Hall. This will be a beautiful gathering to remember Christ’s last meal with his disciples and the call to us all to “love another”. After a long season of not being able to share meals together, please make it a priority to find your seat at the table, break bread, and simply be together. Invite your friends and family to the table and the story. Please CLICK HERE to RSVP.
After our Maundy Thursday shared meal all are invited to travel upstairs to the Off Broadway Gallery for a very special exhibit event. Worlds Unseen - Mystery and Metamorphosis in the Art of Annie Dowdell explores the intimate relationship between the darkness and the light, between life and death, and the mystery and majesty of their interconnectedness. An Artists Reception is open from 6-9pm and a Panel Discussion featuring experts in the field of fungal medicine will take place in the sanctuary at 7pm.
Good Friday
Please join us at 12p.m. on Friday, April 15th, for a Good Friday simple afternoon completive service in the Sanctuary. Together will be reflecting on the human experience of suffering, death, and sacrificial love. After the short service feel free to use the sanctuary for a time of silence and reflection.
Good Friday Musical Meditation
On this Friday April 15th, at 7pm, after a two year hiatus, we are grateful to be able to return to this meaningful tradition of a hybrid concert/worship service, where the musicians of Pine Street Church perform an entire album chosen from the “secular” ranks. The experience is framed with narration that considers the music and lyrics through a lens of the story of the season, the Passiontide. This year’s album is Johnny Cash’s “American IV: When the Man Comes Around”. The last album released during his lifetime. The songs on the album are mostly cover songs curated by Johnny to give voice to his innermost spiritual calms and tumults as he approached the end of his life. This is a great opportunity to invite friends and family who might not be comfortable attending more traditional church services, and is always a deeply meaningful experience on this most high of holy days.
Easter Sunday
Christ has Risen!
Please join us on Sunday April 17th at 10am as we celebrate the journey of resurrection. Together with All Souls Church, we will welcome the gift of new life, new beginnings, and new hope. We hope to see you all this Easter for a family inclusive service! And please plan to stay afterward, for refreshments, egg hunt, and hugs. Friends, families, visitors and neighbors are all invited to share food and celebrate together!
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Fireside Chats With The Moderator
We apologize for technical difficulties in operating our April 1st Fireside Chat. Look out for a make up date to be announced soon! Thank you for your understanding.
The purpose of the Fireside Chats is to provide an informal opportunity for members and friends to hear an update on the positions and actions taken of the Leadership Council from the moderator, and to participate in a discussion on the agenda items covered in the recent Leadership Council meeting.
Quarterly Fireside Chats:
1st quarter chat make-up date TBA
July 1, 2022
October 28, 2022
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AMERICA FOR CHRIST OFFERING
Throughout the month of April, your Heart for Missions Team will be inviting you to support the America for Christ offering, one of four denominational offerings which we support annually.
This year’s theme is:
“I will praise you and testify about what you have done.” Psalm 22:22
In the above verse, the psalmist tells of God’s many acts of deliverance and rescue in tumultuous times. We are stirred and inspired to praise God for all the wonders that God is performing in our lives and in and through the lives of many others.
What a wild ride our community has had in the past twelve months….! We’ve experienced a mass shooting and two serious wildfires literally in our backyards (for some of us). But we are not alone ….. other communities continue to experience these same horrors plus many more: wildfires, floods, tornadoes… unemployment, an uptick in homelessness and food insecurity…….
The needs are many and great across the United States and Puerto Rico. We can help.
It is up to us to answer God’s call to help and to heal. COVID-19 continues to wreck havoc in communities across the United States and Puerto Rico. Wildfires are raging in the West and in the Smoky Mountains. Floods are rising in the East. Hurricanes have caused destruction from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast. Unemployment has soared in many communities. In this challenging context, our American Baptist partners are faithfully serving in congregations and communities with helping ministries and creative responses to the diverse needs in their local contexts, whether helping innocent children living in conditions of poverty, assisting a family that is being evicted, providing food and shelter to the homeless man pushing all his belongings in a shopping cart, and so many others who are hurting and lost.
What is needed is God’s love in its fullest expression in all our churches and congregations. Through our generous financial partnership with ABHMS (American Baptist home mission Society) we can—together—work to bring more hope into our broken world with leaders and disciples who are the hands and feet of Jesus.
So please, prayerfully consider your gift to the America for Christ offering as we engage in transformational mission to bring God’s love and light into the hearts of people everywhere and to be the hands and feet of Christ wherever there is a need.
Let’s set a goal of $1500 and work to surpass it! CLICK HERE and select "America for Christ" from the drop down options to give online today!
With gratitude for your generosity….
Your Heart for Missions Team
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Art Brunch
with Waverly Matthews
Lessons of Native Americans - Animism
The vast majority of art we see expresses a distinctly Western European perspective. But what about the art of the Americas? In this series, we will examine artistic expressions born of the indigenous American experience - beginning with the petroglyphs of the North American Southwest and ending with the contemporary work of Chicano artists. From such art, we experience different philosophies, spiritualities, and understandings of the human experience.
In this presentation, we will examine the idea of animism, the belief that all things possess a spiritual essence or soul. In indigenous cultures of America, this belief results in a respect, even reverence, for animals, plants, and places. Human beings are not placed in a privileged position above other creatures as in most Western traditions. But does animism have any basis in reality i.e. science, and if not, should it hold any moral sway over our actions?
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Holy Week Off Broadway Art Gallery Exhibit:
Worlds Unseen
The womb of the underworld
the Art of Annie Dowdell
Tilled by worms and held by fungal mothers, we wait for spring in Worlds Unseen.
Artist's Reception, Thursday April 14th, 6pm - 9pm
7pm - Panel Discussion
with Jamie Beachy, MDiv, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Contemplative Chaplaincy at Naropa University, and Del Jolly, the Director and co-founder of Unlimited Sciences. Representatives from the Psychedelic Club of Denver will be available to provide additional resources for inquiring minds.
30% of all sales to benefit the Off Broadway Preschool of Fine Arts
From the Artist:
Bears have always been revered and feared by mortal men across almost every human society they've shared an ecosystem with. They're powerful, brave, adaptable, and patient. Humans have long admired and aspired to possess those traits themselves, as evidenced by our earliest cave paintings, and countless beautiful myths. The Norse people for example, believed that bears were special because they had deep self-knowing, and could travel between worlds, and indeed they can and they do. Half of the year they dwell on the surface with us, only to descend to the underworld to hibernate in the darkness below for the rest of the year. They understand the ebb and flow of nature and the rhythms of the sun and the moon. They know that they must descend, so that they can ascend with the wisdom and strength to weather another season on earth.
Sometimes in life, we experience our own symbolic death; the death of who we were before... Perhaps through trauma, rite of passage, existential crisis, or illness, our old selves are stripped from us, and we flounder as we dissolve. How can we be born again? We must return to a mysterious, wild, unseen, messy, magical place, far beyond the reach or control of man.... the divinely dark feminine womb. Our mothers carry us until we are ready to be born, just as the bear descends into the earth until he is ready to meet the spring. So when we die and must descend to an unseen world for a time to reconstitute, who can we ask for guidance? Who can show us how to descend, and then ascend? Well bears, for one, that's who I look to as an animist. Ancestors? Yes. But in the spirit of the season, I can think of another being that was born from a mortal womb, died a traumatic death, descended, and then ascended, holy. Jesus knew quite a bit about the life/death/life cycle that drives our planet. He embodied it. It is in this spirit of a bear hibernating deep in the earth, softened by worms, and held lovingly by fungal mothers that feast on decay and bear new life in return, that I drew Worlds Unseen. It is my hope that as we collectively come out of a long dark global hibernation, viewers will find catharsis in my work.
In gratitude,
-Annie Dowdell
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Oasis, Women's Book Study Group
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Want to Help Support Marshall Fire Recovery Efforts?
CLICK HERE to learn about many ways in which you can help
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Chuckles of the Week
This is a new section of the Pine Street Post intended for that holy experience of laughing. As Mark Twain said,
"Humor is mankind's greatest blessing."
There is nary a time in our lives where at least a little humor couldn't improve our day. Come to this section each week for a little laughter that will come in various forms.
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Sunday Morning Greeters Needed
Showing hospitality takes a team. And we need a few more players on our hospitality team for Sunday mornings! Can you help?
We're looking to fill out our online signup form for being a greeter on Sunday mornings. It's both easy and important! And even more so, FUN!
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Men's Fellowship Group
The Men's Fellowship Group has a new meeting schedule. Beginning immediately they will meet in person for Breakfast at the Parkway Cafe on the first Tuesday of the month at 7:30 a.m. They will also hold a monthly Zoom gathering at 9:00 a.m.on the third Tuesday of each month. Please contact Bill Mankin for more information on how to join these meetings: mankin@ucar.edu
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The Pinehead Portal
Check it out, and register today, HERE. There's a church directory, updates from the PSC Leadership Council and much more. Email admin@pinestreetchurch.net if you have any trouble registering and gaining access. |
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God's desire for us is our wholeness; the Hebrew Scriptures call this shalom. This wholeness incorporates our physical, mental, emotional, and relational being.
*Please note: If you wish to include a prayer need on this Community Care list---or another specific pastoral care need for which you would like prayer, please email Pastor Andrew: Andrew@PineStreetChurch.net
PSC's Nurture and Prayer Team also stands by for prayer support. To share your prayer concerns, needs, or celebrations, contact Rev. Carol Simpson at: pastorcms@cs.com
Community Care List
Please use this list today and throughout the week, praying with special intention for:
- The people of Ukraine
- BOCO fire victims and our Boulder community
- Out Boulder County and all those in our LGBTQ+ community
- PSC's Off Broadway Preschool and summer camps
- Those in our Boulder community who suffer from food insecurity and hunger and who are experiencing homelessness
- All who celebrate joys and those who are distressed in mind, body, or spirit, and members of our spiritual family including:
Short term
Shirley Scott
Judy (sister of Polly McDonald who is recovering from a heart attack)
Kathy Caputo (friend of Polly McDonald)
Alicia Andersen
Carter Edgerley (son of PSC bookkeeper Michele Edgerley is in remission!😃)
Lizzie Parker (Susan Anderson's Daughter, still in remission! 😃)
Dan Torpy
Long term
Susan and Julie Gray (Jane Gray's sister & niece are both battling cancer)
Vondell Martin
Shirley Scott
Butch & Kathy Stanko, Friends of Polly McDonald
Jo Judd
Kerry Hassler
Missionaries
Lance & Christina Muteyo, Juan & Denise Aragon, Ruth Fox, Pieter & Nora Kalkman
*Please notify the church office (303-442-6530) or David@PineStreetChurch.net if there are people who should be added to or removed from our community care list.
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In Case You Missed It:
Pine Street Church Sunday Morning Worship
March 27th, 2022
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