Clergy Corner – December 2025

Happy Holidays

by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

 

May you wind down if your clock is racing.

May you wind up if your clock is dragging.

May you wind down enough to wind up again if you are a little of both.

Let these holidays incarnate you. Let them inoculate you with joy. Let any fears that lurk be packed away with the Christmas ornaments at the end of the season. Come to church and worship your heart out. Sing carols. Come to the Advent services for a quiet self-guided tour of the season. Come to the Blue Christmas service if you are blue. Give your sadness away. Help someone else with theirs.

In case you need any more New Year’s resolutions:

If you’re looking for something to do with your assignment to provide a spiritual focus for your board or committee, which happens to be one of the great traditions at our church, consider doing something funny during January or anytime during this our anniversary year. You might also appoint yourself jester in residence for your committee.

You might follow Connie Caldwell’s instructions to both of her pastors that we have more music, more puzzling, more karaoke, more grace, and fewer obligations ongoing.

Have you got an idea for fun? We plan to initiate a few things. One will be karaoke during our Congregational meetings as a warm-up, the way a minister tells a joke at the beginning of a sermon. Those who went to the karaoke by Brendan Telg on Pride Sunday remember it as one of the most fun times we’ve had together for a long time. Let’s remember it by repeating it.

Connie began her muse with Talia and I by saying these new rising movements are so wonderful. Don’t they need an anthem? Don’t we need to sing even more, as our hearts get so deeply troubled?

On the beauty matter, both of our recent studies of ourselves, Convergence, and the Strategic Communications Plan, commissioned by the staff to get help with the unfilled communications position, both talk about how much we love our trees and how our campus needs to become more forward facing. We want people to know we’re in there among the forest and the fountain and the beautiful seating areas that Larry Alsobrook has provided for us just this year. Do you have an idea for a mural or a sign or something that would make us look new from the street to each other and ourselves? What beauty is bothering you that you want to share with the rest of us?

When Talia presented to the Seekers last month, she asked congregants to draw their own stained glass that represented our church. She will say more about what happened. The creativity was amazing.

On another note: Happy 126th Birthday, Howard Thurman! He is to me the most famous Floridian of all, a man of deep devotion who left the world a more just and beautiful place. “The measure of a person’s estimate of your strength is the kind of weapons he feels that you must use to hold him in check.” This was his diagnosis of oppression, fear, and domination – and why the world tried so hard to contain free blacks. But Thurman never bowed to containment. He built alternative communities instead.

He founded the Church of All Nations in San Francisco. Thurman and his wife, Sue Bailey Thurman, created something revolutionary: the first interracial, interfaith congregation in the United States. It was a gathering that held Buddhists, Christians, agnostics, laborers, scholars, Black migrants, white intellectuals, immigrants, artists, and activists – all under one roof, all in one Spirit.

Fellowship Church was Thurman’s proof that spiritual imagination could outpace the broken politics of his time. And its legacy remains a blueprint for every faith community that dares to confront the fractures of American life with moral imagination instead of fear. Thurman believed that to change the world, you must first reclaim your soul. That inner authority is stronger than outer intimidation, that a free spirit cannot be colonized. And he reminded us always: “There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.”

On his 126th birthday, we return to that truth. Happy Birthday, Dr. Thurman. Your courage still instructs us. Your mysticism still steadies us. And your witness still calls us: “Build the world the soul knows is possible.”

 

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

The work of Christmas begins:    

     To find the lost,

     To heal the broken,    

     To feed the hungry,    

     To release the prisoner,    

     To rebuild the nations,    

     To bring peace among the people,    

     To make music in the heart.

– From The Work of Christmas by Howard Thurman

 

This poem and others by Howard Thurman can be found in The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations, published by Friends United Press. Howard Thurman was born at the turn of the century, November 18, 1899, in Daytona Beach.