Mid-Week Message - September 18

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you!

I have a slightly different opening than usual this week, as this weekend the United Church of Canada world was rocked by the news of the death of The Very Rev., The Honourable Dr. Lois Wilson.  It shouldn't have been a surprise - after all, she was 97 years old - but sometimes it seemed like she had always been there and would always be there.

If you have been around the United Church for a while, you might remember that Lois Wilson was the first female Moderator of the United Church of Canada, serving from 1980-1982.  She began life as the daughter of a United Church minister, and was later married to a United Church minister, before she became one of the first married women to be ordained by the United Church of Canada in 1965. (Before that, even though women had been ordained since 1936, it was believed that a married woman couldn't be a minister as her primary calling was to her husband and children.)

But Lois Wilson's influence reached far beyond the United Church of Canada. She was the first female president of the Canadian Council of Churches, and later was the first Canadian to serve as the president of the World Council of Churches.

Outside of the church, she was also a University Chancellor and a Canadian Senator.

Her passions were social justice, human rights, and ecumenism (ie different denominations working together). Someone asked me this morning if she had written any books, and while I do have a couple of books that she wrote, I think that her influence in shaping who we are as the United Church of Canada (including how she shaped our current denominational leaders) will be her lasting legacy.

She will be missed (she stayed active in the church right up to the end of her life), but I'm confident that she won't be quickly forgotten. May her memory be a blessing (as our Jewish cousins would say); and may she rest in peace and rise in glory.

If you want to read her full obituary from the United Church of Canada, you can find it by clicking here. (It includes a link to her funeral which will be livestreamed on October 15.) And you might recall that a couple of weeks ago, at my closing thought in my mid-week message, I shared a link to an episode of CBC's Ideas that was all about Lois Wilson. If you want to re-visit that episode (and it is worth listening to!), you can find it by clicking here.

Moving on to announcements this week:

• Worship on Sunday will be 9:15 at Summerville and 11:15 at Westfield and on Facebook Live. Two exciting things are happening this Sunday - the Westfield United Church Choir will be back for the first time since June! And I am doing a pulpit exchange with Rev. Douglas Painter, the priest with the Anglican Church of Kingston. This means that Douglas will be doing the services at Summerville and Westfield, and I will be up in Kingston pretending to be an Anglican (lol). You are in for a treat as Rev. Douglas is an excellent preacher - when I have a Sunday off, I usually choose to drive up to Kingston to worship at the Anglican church there. And I have told him that you are all very welcoming! I can tell you that the scripture reading will be Mark 9:30-37, but I can't give you a sermon preview as I don't know what direction he is going to go with the reading.

• Asking the Big Questions - yesterday was the first of these gatherings to talk about some of the bigger questions that we don't have space to talk about outside of the church. (After the fact, I was thinking that it is a bit like Sunday School that is open to adults as well as younger members, with different activities and discussion prompts to engage with the question.) If you missed last night, our next gathering will be on Tuesday October 15, again from 4:30-6. I'm also open to suggestions - what "big questions" would you like space to discuss? Feel free to send them my way!

• Confirmation - As I mentioned last week, it looks like there is some interest in a Confirmation Class this fall.  This would be open to youth who would like to take the next step in their faith (technically, confirmation is when someone who was baptized as a baby has the opportunity to re-affirm the promises that were made on their behalf, usually by their parents, when they were baptized); it is open to teens or adults who would like to be baptized; it is open to adults who were confirmed in another denomination (or who were never confirmed) who would like to become members of the United Church of Canada; and it is open to people who were confirmed when they were younger but who would like an opportunity to explore their faith from their current perspective. If you (or your children/grandchildren) might be interested, let me know! I'm trying to figure out what day/time will work best for these classes.

• Broadview Magazine - as I mentioned on Sunday, I'm trying to gauge interest in resuming our monthly gatherings to discuss Broadview Magazine. If there is interest, I'm happy to resume these gatherings. (We always had great conversations, prompted by the articles each month!) Please let me know, and if there is interest, I'll look at picking a date to gather in October.
  

And I think that's it for announcements this week!

For a closing thought this week, I have an app recommendation for you! I was excited a couple of days ago when I got a notification from the library that an audiobook I had been waiting for was available for me to borrow. The timing was particularly good as I'm driving to Halifax on Friday for a meeting on Saturday, and I love listening to audiobooks when I drive. (The trick is to find a book that is interesting enough to keep me engaged, but not so exciting that it distracts me from the driving! This one should be good, as I listened to the first book in the series while driving home from Quebec in March, and the second book in the series while doing shorter drives closer to home, as well as when I was puttering around the house.)

Anyways, did you know that you can borrow e-books and e-audiobooks from the library at no cost with your smartphone or tablet? I'm never one to say no to free books! You don't need to drive in and out of town to get to the library, and there are no overdue fines as the books return themselves to the library after 3 weeks. You want to download the app called Libby, and when you log in, it will ask you to enter the name of your library (the technical name of our library is Bibliothèques publiques du N.-B. / New Brunswick Public Libraries), then it will ask for your library card number. Once you are logged in, you can browse by author or title; they have suggested books by genre; and you can filter by ebooks vs. audiobook.  You can place books "on hold" as there is sometimes a waiting list for popular items (like the one I downloaded this week - it was just published in June, so I had to wait my turn for it), but I can always find books I'm interested in to borrow right away. I highly recommend this app (and I probably shouldn't confess this, but if you have active library cards from libraries outside of New Brunswick, you can sign in with all of them to access an even wider selection of books and occasionally shorter waiting times. Because I have moved several times in the past decade, and because getting a library card is one of the first things I do each time I move, I have been signed in to Libby with up to 3 library cards at once, though one of my cards recently expired so I'm only signed in with 2 cards at the moment.)

(If you're curious, the audiobook I just borrowed is Disturbing the Dead by Kelley Armstrong - a time travel / mystery book, the third in her "A Rip Through Time" series.)

Blessings to you and yours, today and always!

Kate.

Rev. Kate Jones

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

(506) 757-2201 (office)

(506) 343-1307 (mobile)

www.tworiverspastoralcharge.com

Pronouns:  she/her/hers

"Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the law?"

Jesus replied, "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: "You must love your neighbour as you love yourself."

(Matthew 22:36-39)