Saturday Morning (January 4, 2025)

On memory, the holidays and trying to hold everything together.

Good morning friends. We have entered a new calendar year, the Christmas holiday is mostly behind us, the New Year’s celebrations as well. Maybe you traveled to see family. For most of us these relationships are increasingly dispersed. Maybe you had some quiet within the last days as well.

As a boy our extended family’s celebration was on Christmas Eve, at the home of my grandmother. Her three children and their families gathered and this was the glorious night of the year, the high and holy moment. In our large family everyone gave presents to everyone. In my adult years my memory of it would contain the realization that this coincided with the end of the school calendar—my mother was a teacher, a beloved teacher, the teacher you dream about for your child—and she would take the gifts she had received from families of her students and in turn rewrap them and place them under my grandmother’s tree for members of our family—cousins, aunts, uncles.

This was an economic necessity for a schoolteacher trying to hold everything together. I am conscious that in the best of families there are people often trying to hold it together, and in the process they also expressing generosity and love.

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Well, as a young adult I studied for the ministry, which took me to another state, several hundred miles away from home. We usually had Christmas Eve services in the churches I served, so I lost connection with the family gathering. Our pattern became the church services on Christmas Eve, and in some of those years there would be three or four or five of them; recovery on Christmas Day; and then on the next day we would drive from North Carolina to Georgia. Some years this would be me, Pam, Liz and Abby; other years me, Liz and Abby; and other years, just me.

We would take gifts to my mother, who was always glad to see us, and who by now had adapted to the new rhythm. We would exchange gifts. We watched football. Although I had already driven several hundred miles, I would make the rounds and see relatives. Sometimes they would tell me they missed us on Christmas Eve. I reminded them that we had worship services.

An aside: the churches of my childhood did not have Christmas Eve services. Every service was a Good Friday service, and this did not quite fit on Christmas Eve.

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My mother passed a few years ago, a few weeks after Christmas. Our daughters now have their own families. We live in different states. Pam and I have more flexibility than they do, and so we are on the road again. Gladly. Life does come full circle. Travel has become increasingly complex. This year Hurricane Helene took out the major interstate that connects North Carolina and Tennessee. There are alternate routes, secondary routes, that have both complexity and beauty and take a bit more time. And the journey is also a part of the gift.

So where is all of this going? The holidays are by definition about nostalgia. We remember, but with the awareness that we have one-sided memories. My mother carried the stress of those family gatherings, making it work out, a gift for each person. I was trying imperfectly to manage worship services and family and end of year giving and wanting to honor an aging parent and navigate the distances. I was not always fully present wherever I happened to be.

For now there are granddaughters who are at times ecstatic and at times overwhelmed and always a joy. There are daughters who are emerging as brilliant professional women, learning to manage their own lives and all that surrounds them. Pam and I celebrated our 44th anniversary yesterday. Her mother, who lives in an assisted facility in Mocksville, turns 90 today. We have seen her several times over the holidays, and will celebrate her birthday this afternoon.

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Tomorrow I will preach at Broad Street UMC, in Statesville, on the Epiphany of the Lord. So a last memory related to that space. As a young adult pastor I was serving four churches in Yadkin County, twenty miles west of Winston-Salem. A ministers gathering was held one year in January at Broad Street. I was motivated to be there because I felt somewhat isolated in a new and very rural area. The isolation had more to do with me than the goodness of the people. That day I sat amongst some friends and the bishop began to speak to us. I remember the bishop began to acknowledge that it had been a difficult year, a stressful season, and then thanked each of us for our ministries and for the support of our churches toward the mission of the conference. The words struck me as being authentic. I received them as if they were a steady rain falling on the dry earth.

I will probably share some of that tomorrow—the main reason I preach so often in local churches is to express gratitude. Increasingly I have more empathy for the complicated lives of the people who gather in them, and perhaps especially for the people who lead them. I try to imagine that in many of our churches I am meeting the people who have been holding their communities and families together, through Covid and political extremism and disaffiliations and hurricanes, and perhaps even through a stressful and complicated Christmas season.

If you are simply trying to hold it together, be encouraged. As you pivot into a new year, I invite you to read Luke and Acts with us, to grind the beans, and to reflect on where your own journeys have taken you during the holidays. Thank you for the connection, for being a part of this Saturday morning congregation, and for your friendship.