I’ve been getting a lot of donations recently from the congregation – crafty things for the Sunday School. Each Sunday, I seem to come home with more plastic bags of squishy things to be sorted through. At home, my office space is in the living room. When I’m at my desk and Beangirl is working at the table, we sit back-to-back. Which suits us just fine. Sometimes I do need to let everyone in the room know that I am working and don’t want interruptions, and sometimes they need to let me know the same thing. But recently, the space around the desk has been getting a bit overcrowded with bits and bags of crafty donations. So this week, I did some sorting. A great spill of yarns all over the living room carpet. So many colours. Perfect for something.
I took a longish piece of white material – cotton with an eyelet pattern and some shiny white embroidered flowers – and I hemmed it. It looked a little like a table runner.
Then, I sorted through the mountainous yarns. Red and rust, greens and blues, natural woolly shades and vibrant yellows. I chose some, and then some more, and threaded them through the eyelets. First, I tried lengthwise and left a fringe at each end. I thought it might give the whole piece a bit of a rainbowed rabbinic look. But the eyelets didn’t run in a straight line, and the lengthwise result made me a little dizzy. So instead I used shorted lengths of yarn and ran them across the width of the fabric. I carefully knotted the ends of each bit of yarn, and made the back as neat as I could.
I took it to church yesterday and laid it underneath the baptismal basin. Decoration to match the lectionary. Yesterday’s reading was the story of Jesus’ baptism, from the beginning of the book of Mark. You can find the passage here. With Christmas behind us, it’s time for Mark, the only Gospel that omits the nativity stories and steps right into Jesus’ adult actions. Mark is such a good January gospel – succinct and well-paced. And it begins so well, too:
“The Beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
There is not even a verb in that sentence. Just a proclamation. Bloggers everywhere are marking the New Year by claiming one word as a theme for their coming year. And Mark gives us Beginning. I like that. Maybe I’ll claim that one – at least for epiphany. It is a good epiphany word.
And for Mark, things begin with baptism. The sky opens, the dove descends and the voice of the Father is heard. Jesus receives a blessings, and with it, knowledge and affirmation. Something old and something new happening altogether in an instant. We might glimpse the Trinity. We begin to lean forward. We wonder what will happen next.
At our church, during the Family Service, the children sit right at the front. They share a couple of benches set against the front of the first pew. Best view in the house. They can see everything from there. I like to show them various parts of the sanctuary and wonder with them about why things are set up the way they are. We wonder together about how things are and what might happen.
Yesterday, we talked about the baptismal basin. Our baptismal basin is very old fashioned, and sits in a bracket attached to the side of the pulpit. It’s an old Scottish tradition to have baptism connected geographically, as it were, to preaching. I like to think that it is there because, when we baptise children and graft them into the family of the church, we want to teach them that stories and thoughts about stories are pivotal to our faith and our love of God.
The new life into which we are baptised is nourished by our faith storytelling.
That’s what I told the children yesterday, and maybe we’ll talk about it again next week and see if they agree with me once they have thought it over.
I also showed them the cloth that I had made, and they chose their favourite colours. Later, they spent some time reading the story from the Rhyme Bible and making their own art. They drew self portraits on art card, and then framed them with woolly lacing using more of the donated yarns.
Bright colours joined together to make something new.
Something vibrant from bits and pieces gathered.
Something joyful.
Something rejoicing.
Just like we’d all like to be.
