What Your Kids Can Teach You

This article in Slate ponders the mystery of what kids get out of worship. It is fascinating to watch children explore their spirituality and experience God in ways that might challenge us as adults. They ask questions we find hard to answer. They celebrate aspects of religious life in ways that make us uncomfortable ... all you have to do is hear them discussing the size and nature of the communion bread they receive to realize that worship is vitally important to them, and everything they do in worship means something.

Most importantly, when kids enjoy coming to church, to Sunday School, to worship, they prod and provoke us to understand and life our own faith. They look to us to put our money where our mouth is ... in our attention to worship, in our knowledge of the Bible, and in the ways we live as a Christian the other six days of the week.

They are watching us. Do we make it worth their consideration?

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Archbishop Desmond Tutu Visits CMSU at All Saints

Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited with our Canterbury MSU students today in the Undercroft, sharing thoughts and wisdom with these young adults as they prepare for their lives and vocations in the wider world.


Local clergy were invited to attend with their wardens,and Bishop Wendell Gibbs and his wife Karlah joined us for a tea lovingly prepared by women from All Saints and St. Paul's.




Bp. Tutu had all sorts of wonderful advice for the students, most importantly, he told them, "Don't stop dreaming. Don't get seduced by the cynicism of your elders. Dream about changing the world and go out and do it."

He also shared his tips on how to win the Nobel Peace Prize: 1)Have a big nose. 2)Have a short, easy to remember name. 3)Have really sexy legs.

Kudos to CMSU chaplain Sarah Midzalkowski for arranging this wonderful visit for the students and for letting some of us share in the day.

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Taking Action for Children

Justice and advocacy for children has long been an important aspect of our calling to Christian witness and service here at All Saints. Our annual observance of the Children’s Sabbath, frequent collections to furnish apartments for children leaving foster care, layette and teddy bear collections, and our work with the families at Haven House, the project at the orphanage in Haiti, all show our commitment and concern for the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society.

This month, we have an opportunity to ally with local churches to speak out for equity and justice for the children of mid-Michigan. Action of Greater Lansing, the interfaith justice network, of which All Saints is a member, has chosen to focus this year on children’s health. Specifically, working to make sure that the new Children’s Health Initiative (CHI), coming into being in our community, will address the health needs of ALL area children, regardless of whether or not their families have insurance or are able to pay.

Last fall, the Action member congregations voted to focus on the lack of user-friendly, centralized access to human services in the Lansing area. The research committee that tackled this broad request soon learned about the CHI --an effort of local parents, health care providers and organizations--to create a children’s health center where pediatric sub-specialists – the doctors your child must see when the primary-care doctor cannot address all their health needs – can provide care for children with serious health problems. Currently, families must travel to Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids or even farther for their children to receive care. The CHI would bring this kind of care back to the Lansing area for our local children.

Action’s interest is to make sure the CHI meets the needs of all children in our area … not simply the ones whose families can pay. You can imagine the kind of burden this need for specialty care places on poor and uninsured families and their children – 40 to 50 percent of the children in our area are on Medicaid. Traveling to distant doctors, trying to retain a job, caring for the other healthy children in the family, all without financial resources, is vastly more difficult for poor families than for those of us with insurance, education and financial security.

There is a key event coming up where our presence is necessary to show our support for uninsured and underinsured children.

Everyone is asked to come to the Nehemiah Assembly and to bring THREE PEOPLE. The Nehemiah Assembly will be held at Union Missionary Baptist Church, 500 S. MLK Blvd., on Tuesday, May 12 at 7 p.m. We will bring leaders from MSU and Sparrow Hospital to hear our request for the CHI and for a commitment to serve all children, regardless of ability to pay. Our Action goal is to turn out 600 people at this assembly. Your presence is so important!

Come out to this event. Bring your family members, friends and neighbors to the Nehemiah Assembly. Speak out for Lansing area children, who need our voice and our commitment.

Feel free to speak to any All Saints Action team member ... me, Janet Chegwidden, Pam Miklavcic, or Gus Breymann, with your questions.

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Rebuilding Ingham

More than two dozen All Saints folks spent their Saturday helping to restore the home of a woman in South Lansing, through Rebuilding Ingham. Rebuilding Ingham, formerly known as Christmas in April, sends out teams on a Saturday in April to repair the homes of elderly and ill people who are not able to repair their own homes, and who cannot afford to pay for others to do it.

Our team assisted a woman with diabetes, lupus and other medical conditions. They built a handicapped ramp, repainted the home's exterior, and the living room and hallway inside, cleaned up the yard, and generally made it more habitable and comfortable for the homeowner. All before the torrential rains started!

Special thanks to Neil and Carolyn Plante, who always do an excellent job organizing this annual event. And thanks to all the All Saints folks who pitched in.

(Pictured above, from top to bottom ... Katie Ellis and Rachel Korest; Deb Babcock and Jean Lepard; Cassandra Peyerk and Amy Maffeo; Larry Hart.)

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Haiti Update and Coffee Fundraiser

Sunday during coffee hour, members of the mission trip to Haiti will report on our work there, what we did and what we learned. We'll have an a/v presentation, and a chance for you to hear from the group about what was meaningful to us.

Also, Cafe Rebo, a Haitian coffee, will be available for sale -- both whole beans and ground. A 10-ounce bag of either costs $8. The proceeds will serve as a fundraiser for the Haiti Outreach Mission and its work in Mirebalais.

See you Sunday!

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Another Poem

From Anne Porter's Fire, and Torrential Rain

Fire, most beautiful of flowers,
Whose only perfume is brightness,
You have no season, and you bloom
On the highest of high altars
And under the vagrant's pot.
Through centuries on centuries
Like Christ you are everywhere,
To kindle the half cigarettes
Which the homeless find in the gutters,
And the tall paschal candle.

Seven Stanzas at Easter


By John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Telephone Poles and Other Poems © 1961 by John Updike.