Stump is a blogging project of Claremont Presbyterian Church

Life moves on, but reflection on the past provides energy for future paths as yet unknown. Yes, it occurred to me time and time again God guides us into an unknown and often challenging future.

But Jacob’s Ladder reminds us life is not just a gift, but a continuing effort on our art to keep climbing even when the weather is terrible and we cannot possibly see where it is we are going. Filled with God’s energy and guiding moments, we accept what comes our way and try to discover God’s love and justice in what we are contributing to our life and the lives of those around us.

So Jacob’s Ladder is really a communal climb, the actions of many people seeking that new future we believe God wants for us, our loved ones, yes, even the whole world. But is this all there is?

Jacob’s Ladder is also an entire life-time. From birth to death, we are climbing (your name here) ladder. To what extent are you climbing alone and to what extent are you being helped along life’s way? Certainly the early years find support and direction, values and hopes from parents, relatives, friends, teachers – even those moments and persons we wish we could forget. But then life moves on to the next stage. Now we are the primary climbers, no longer being carried and lifted along life’s way. So we ask ourselves, “When did I take charge of my life? What decisions were mine that affected my future? Now I am living both past and present. I reflect on my life.

These are life’s creative and self-giving years. You ae what you wanted to become and you trust it is God’s will for you. You receive – you give – almost in equal measure. You feel exhausted when a goal is accomplished – just like Jacob probably felt. So you say with joy and gusto, “I am climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” You rejoice in who you are becoming, and yes, have become.

But every ladder has a top! Eventually you say to yourself, “I’ve done it! I’ve climbed the ladder of life along with many others who helped me and strengthened me along the way. Thanks be to God for Jacob’s Ladder – my lifetime in community with others.

Tom Duggan is a retired Presbyterian Teaching Elder and Mission Co-Worker. He worships at Claremont Presbyterian Church. 

Stump is a blogging project of Claremont Presbyterian Church

What is this worth to you? Would you pay good money for it? Do time for it? Endure pain? Inflict pain?

That’s the question: what is this worth to you? It’s a test.

The forbidden fruit isn’t a test but a warning. The ark isn’t a test but a command. The ram, though? That’s a test.

“Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

That’s the test. So Abraham rose and sharpened his #2 pencil; Abraham led innocent Isaac by the hand, and Abraham bound that boy to an altar. Abraham elevated his blade with intent to kill.

The meaning of the story is plain, and neither Jewish nor Christian tradition has interpreted it in any way other than an affirmation of Abraham’s great faith, his willingness to snuff out the dearest thing in his life for God’s sake. It all adds up. Abraham passed the test.

What is this worth to you? Can there be a cost too great to pay? To ask?

Because it begs for a parental analogy, I recognize that I test my daughter all the time. I test her six year-old willingness to do as I ask and to forego the things she loves for my sake. Each request to come downstairs for dinner commands a sacrifice.

Yet I often relent in my tests because the things she loves make up who she is, and I love her. Laura minus her loves is less than Laura.

Does God really want an Isaac-less Abraham?

God, how much is Abraham’s fealty worth to you? Are you who you say you are if, in order to be true, your man must bleed his own flesh to death?

The bleating ram in the thicket answers back, and the deed is left undone. But would it have been? Even if not, do you ever really come back from that precipice? Does Abraham? Does Isaac? Does God?

And where in the Dickens is Sarah?

Stump is a blogging project of Claremont Presbyterian Church. This is the second camel post. Find the other one here. 

The Sunday-school materials I remember from my youth were full of pictures of camels, because they appear often in the stories in the Hebrew Scriptures and even in Jesus’ teaching. Think of Abraham and Sarah journeying to a new home and a new life with camels among their livestock. In Advent we remember that artists over the ages have imagined that the wise men came from the East on camels to find the baby Jesus. In these pictures camels always look majestic. People who have experienced live camels up close, however, say that they are cantankerous and often uncooperative. They look strangely engineered and awkward. Nonetheless camels are amazingly well adapted to the desert world in which they live, able to carry with them life-giving water while they travel many miles with heavy burdens.They keep their families with them and often travel in caravans. They provide milk, meat, shelter, and clothing for the people whom they accompany and transport, so they are closely woven into human society.

(I didn’t know till I took my grandchildren to the Webb School Museum that there were once little camels in our part of the world. I wonder what they were like.)

In the church year we often think of Advent as a time of desert and wilderness, of journey, so the camel jogs our reflections during these weeks. Let me offer a few suggestions.

—God must often see humanity behaving much like those ill-tempered camels, not like the beautiful creatures humans were created to be, in the image of God, yet God keeps on trying to help us find the role for which we were created.

—The critical importance of camels in traditional middle-eastern society reminds us how interwoven are all the parts of the planet’s ecosystem: earth, water, air, plants, animals, and people. When one suffers, all suffer. Human survival will require the nurturing of the whole ecosystem, a stark reality that confronts us urgently at this moment in history.

—As we journey, God provides us with the life-giving water of faith that can sustain us in harsh and barren places, and strength even for a long and difficult journey. We take our families with us, and we travel as people of faith in caravans. All across the globe we find Christians who accompany us on our journey and offer us companionship and mutual support.

Jane Dempsey Douglass, elder, resident of Pilgrim Place.

Stump is a blogging project of Claremont Presbyterian Church

The second covenant is called a “Covenant of Works, a prominent feature of Presbyterian and reformed churches…”  This is a seminary topic.

So, to continue from my post yesterday, this is everything I know about camels and covenants. On our trip to Herat, a string of camels was heading towards the border to the then-Soviet Union.  My mum, a handicraft addict, thought there might be rugs or copper sown into the saddlebags, so we got out of the car and stopped the nomads.  The Tajikistani tribesmen would not relinquish any kelims, or saddle-bags (my mum asked) but offered us a consolation prize– a ride on a camel.

Desert camels are dromedaries, beasts with one hump, known to be patient and strong but in reality, they are very stubborn, very mean and have very ugly teeth with very bad breath. Their long, yellow teeth are strung up into pendants on necklaces with blue evil-eye beads and sold to tourists.

The other English mother, Mrs. Jane, was undeterred and she volunteered to go first. Did she ever lose her English reserve! The camel stood up awkwardly on front legs first, which threw the passenger forward, then lurched on its back haunches. Mrs. Jane shrieked and hollered like a banshee. All the men and children, Western and nomadic, enjoyed the spectacle of the Cursing Englishwoman–only the camel was indifferent. However, Mrs. Jane was more than scared, she had trapped her middle finger under the wooden saddle and it was being pinched. It was hard not to giggle when she pointed her bruised and purple digit at us, but we tried to be contrite because we realized she was hurt.

On that day, to make amends, we made a covenant with this ancient desert creature. We promised never to ride a camel again. We would not even buy their teeth at the market!

Stump is a blogging project of Claremont Presbyterian Church.

When I think of floods, I think of the desert. It’s an odd juxtaposition, water flooding the desert. I’ve experienced floods here in California, along the San Bernardino mountains, but the most startling floods were in the Middle East, when I lived in Iran in the seventies.

On our holiday breaks my family would leave Teheran to explore ancient Persian landmarks and ruins, caravanning with other expatriate families. Road trip! The desert landscape of Iran looks like the stretch from Palm Springs to Phoenix, or the road from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. It’s rough and stony terrain with a slow variation in rock color and the height of the hills–not sand dunes with palm trees. On our way to Herat, Afghanistan, we saw a single cloud dumping rain over a distant hill. The earth surrounding us was scorched into a flat, salty glisten, and the ribbon of road blended into mirages of lake water, simmering in the distance. To our surprise, a mile up the road there was a real flood over the road. Run-off from the distant hill had pooled to the flatter land below it, miles away.

One spring trip, in the Alborz mountains, spring waters had scooped away village homes made from mud bricks, washing out the road too. The villagers stood, leaning on their shovels, looking grim. Our western Dads, all engineers working in the oil and gas industry, went to help but they soon returned, frustrated and angry. Instead of digging channels to divert the waters away, the Iranian men responded “insha’Allah.” It was God’s will. There was no way to change or struggle against God. The better way was submission, and acceptance.

When I read Biblical stories, all set in the stark yet unpredictable desert, and populated by small, tenacious family tribes, I remember that scene. Our Western minds want action, justice and solutions. We think that if we are hard-working and true we can re-direct the floodwater. We have a harder time with the notion of surrender, accepting that sometimes, like a flash flood in the desert, things really are in God’s hands.

Judy Kohnen is from neither here, nor there, but those places in between. Raised in Iran, France and Canada, she is a cross-cultural writer whose works are unified by themes of identity, loss and belonging. She escapes her suburban life by typing up stories, much to the dismay of her starving family. On occasion, she’ll take a break to haunt her cemetery of unfinished manuscripts and poems, located in Claremont, California, under her bed.

Stump is an Advent blogging project of Claremont Presbyterian Church. It’s 30 days of posts exloring the symbolism of The Jesse Tree by members of the CPC family far and wide.

For a pastor, there is no fruit more forbidden than a Sunday “off.” Even if this vacation has been on the calendar for months, even if your colleagues are multi-talented and supremely capable of flying the plane themselves, the sound of the coffee maker has a snaky hiss  this morning.

Your early morning sleep was disturbed by liturgical anxiety dreams: portents of the disasters about to ensue because of your shameless self-indulgence. The Advent wreath is a nightmare of plastic poinsettias and styrofoam. The sanctuary carpet is mysteriously stained and ripped. Your fiercest critic from a former congregation has come back to life and is sitting in the front pew.

You had looked forward to a long, contemplative walk on this forbidden morning, but it is raining. Even the sky pours out its judgement on lazy servants.

You turn to the internet, your sweet addiction. Is there anything on iTunes that you should add to your holiday playlist?  In the midst of this browsing comes the miracle. You are five years old again on the first day of December.

There is a gift for you by the record player: A Merry, Merry Christmas from Captain Kangaroo. Could there be anything more wonderful?  The Captain and Mr. Greenjeans sing in the season. You sing too, dancing in the living room in front of the tree all month long. And so it is every Christmas that follows–until you are grown and gone and record players are no more.

Lo, it comes, from the iCloud descending. It downloads in two minutes. A benediction from days of old.

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,

and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;

and a little child shall lead them.

Karen Sapio is the Pastor of Claremont Presbyterian Church. Follow her on Twitter @revsap

Stump Is An Advent Blogging Project of Claremont Presbyterian Church

The sun is close to me.  It brings me warmth.  It brings me light.  It divides my day by its varying presence.  I was taught to alter my gaze, there was danger in direct contact.  My understanding of the sun deepened, layers of knowledge built up through the years.  The sun took its place in an expanding universe.  I looked beyond the sun and saw recurring patterns.  Patterns that gave hint of all creation.  The sun, so close to me, my first step to all possibilities.

Judith Abbott lives in Alta Loma, California with her husband, Tony.  They have a daughter, son and granddaughter. They enjoy traveling.  When home they can be found at Judy Kohnen’s prompt writing group at Buddhamouse, Claremont every Friday.

Stump is an Advent blogging project of Claremont Presbyterian Church. It’s 30 days of posts exloring the symbolism of The Jesse Tree by members of the CPC family far and wide.

I like the Jesse Tree prompt as it refers to Jesus’ family and because our six-year-old great-grandson is named Jesse. I thank God every day for my family, which has always included our pets.

Recently, Jesse walked into the house and stooped down to hug our dog, Missy. I said, “She missed her friend.”

He replied, “She’s not my friend.”

Surprised, I said, “She’s not?”

He explained, “She’s family. I call it family.” Out of the mouths of babes.

Along that same line, we once were praised for going out of our way to help loved ones. Someone said that we must be saints. After I stopped laughing, I said, “No, we’re not saints. We’re family.”

We are beginning that special time of year when our thoughts turn from problems and challenges to thinking about those we care about and how we can make it a special, happy time. We pull out traditional recipes, decorate our homes, and plan get-togethers. It reminds us that all that is truly important in our lives is love.

I pray that everyone’s minds and hearts are filled with the light of God’s love during this blessed season.

Libby Grandy

Libby Grandy lives in Claremont, California with her husband, Fred. They have two daughters, three granddaughters and three great-grandchildren. Libby’s novels, Desert Soliloquy, a mystery, and Promises to Keep, Book One of the Haverford Trilogy, are available on Amazon. Lydia, Book Two of the trilogy will be published in December 2014.

Starting this Sunday, November 30th, yorocko.com will host a unique blogging experiment called “Stump.” For 25 consecutive days posts will appear here exploring the symbols of the Jesse Tree. These posts will be written by members and friends of Claremont Presbyterian Church, and they will offer personal reflections on the apple, the ark, the star, and everything else on a Jesse Tree.

Read these posts. Share them. Live them.

Stump: coming this Sunday.