Natalie's Grace Notes

  Friends, there’s an old, famous, joke you may have heard before about a small town with several churches all on the same block who were all struggling with a squirrel infestation. Each neighborhood church, from their own cultural and theological lens, came up with a different solution. The Presbyterian church called a meeting to decide what to do about their squirrel infestation. After much prayer and consideration, they concluded that the squirrels were predestined to be there, and they should not interfere with God’s divine will. At the Baptist church, the squirrels had taken an interest in the baptistry. The deacons met and decided to put a water-slide on the baptistry and let the squirrels drown themselves. The squirrels liked the slide and, unfortunately, knew instinctively how to swim, so twice as many squirrels showed up the following week. The Lutheran church decided that they were not in a position to harm any of God’s creatures. So, they humanely trapped their squirrels...

  Friends, today’s Good News is about what we can do in the name of Jesus with what we have in our hands right now…not with what we wish we had, or with what we think we need before we can even get started. One of the biggest issues holding churches just like this one back from being able to engage in good ministry work is something we call “scarcity mindset.” I’m gonna take a shot in the dark and guess that a lot of y’all have heard that phrase before, and maybe even used it yourselves in another context. Scarcity mindset happens when anxiety starts to take over the control room. Any of y’all see the Disney movie Inside Out ? It’s about a girl named Riley, and her feelings. Disney relatably and humorously had the movie take place inside her head, and showed us her anthropomorphic feelings, voiced by comedians. Anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and joy. In the sequel, Riley gets some new feelings up in “headquarters”—ennui, nostalgia, embarrassment, and anxiety. If you’ve seen either ...

  Friends, we now have our third and final week of The Jacob Saga, and it’s perhaps the most impactful of all of his stories: the day he gets in an all-night wrestling match with a stranger and emerges with a broken hip and a new name. Just one thing after another with this man, I tell ya. Boredom is a luxury he never gets to enjoy. But first, before all that weirdness, some important context about Brother Jacob: he’s still quite far from perfect, but he’s trying. At least as hard as a totally clueless man of his day was able to try. His mistakes are legendary—his wives engage in a who-can-have-the-most-babies contest that he signs off on, ensuring even more Genesis violence—but today he’s a father of eleven children. He’ll have 2 more in time. Despite stealing from his father-in-law, he’s managed to broker peace with him. Still on the move to the land God promised him, Jacob has sent his huge family on ahead, and he’s hanging back, because he fears the Great War is coming. He’s se...

  Friends, as I promised you last week if you joined us at Honeoye Falls, today you’re hearing more about Brother Jacob, and how his story starts to finally get better after years of him wrecking his life and alienating his family. That’s going to come from a bigger question I’m inviting you to: where do we find God? Where do I go, what do I do, who do I talk to, if I want to connect with God? It’s not an easy question for anyone to answer. A lot of folks who gather in buildings that look like this one find that question intimidating. We, the Frozen Chosen, have no answer for it. A good answer for this question would require vulnerability and the expressing of feelings that we don’t like letting out. “Finding God? Uh, can you check Google Maps?” For my own amusement, I did exactly that. I’m a literal gal. I’m cerebral. I was going to be a math teacher, remember? I’d like a computer to be able to solve my problems, or an equation, or some academic principle. Even when it’s a spiritu...

  This morning’s Old Testament reading sits in solidarity with dysfunctional families all over the world. It’s your first piece of Good News today–no matter how nutty things get on a bad day in your house, your family will always be better off than the families we’re introduced to in Genesis.  That Old Testament passage, and all the stories that follow it about Jacob and Esau, poses this question for us: how far do we chase after what isn’t ours, and how much harm do we create in the process? What enemies do we make along the way, and how do we treat them? By contrast, in today’s Gospel message, Jesus shows us how easily we can find him, and how to reconcile with our enemies even when all hope seems lost. First, Jacob and Esau, the twins who put the “fun” in “dysfunction”. Isaac prayed that he’d be lucky enough to be a dad, and when Rebecca finally conceived the twins had a Battle Royale in her womb every night. This distressed Rebecca so much that she regretted being alive, b...