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jalapeño cranberry relish

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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jalapeño cranberry relish

Years ago, my mother sent me a recipe that I have since seen named “cry babies” or “candied jalapeños”–basically it involved adding crushed pineapple and sugar to a jar of pickled jalapeños and cooking them till they were happy together. It’s a good recipe. I’ve made it many times.

A few years later, I wondered what a Thanksgiving adaptation of that recipe might taste like, and by that I mean what would happen if I added cranberries to the mixture.

Short answer: it rocks.

I have since tried to come up with a cute name, but to no avail, so I’ll stick with a descriptive one.

jalapeño cranberry relish

1 16 oz. jar of pickled jalapeños
1/2 cup sugar
2 8.25 oz cans of crushed pineapple
1 dry quart fresh cranberries
1 cup water (or a liquid of your choosing)

Dump them all together in a saucepan and cook over medium heat until the cranberries burst and most of the liquid is absorbed. Stir occasionally with a wooden spoon to crush the berries. Let the mixture cool and then put it mason jars to keep. The recipe makes enough to share.

Peace,
Milton

refrigerator rolls

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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refrigerator rolls

I know the world is covered up in recipe posts, but this is one of our holiday favorites. Like most of my Thanksgiving recipes, this is one I learned from my mother. Unlike most of the recipes I learned from her, this is one I bake pretty much the way she taught me. I make these rolls every year for Thanksgiving and then again for Christmas, and then, for the most part I don’t make them–not because they are difficult, but because our health would suffer. This is an insanely good seriously addictive, and extremely versatile recipe.

refrigerator rolls

I know this is an odd way to present a recipe, but it helps to see the sequence. Start with

1 quart milk, scalded and then poured over
1 cup sugar and
1 cup butter

I do this in the bowl of my stand mixer. I let the mixture sit for a minute and then mix using the dough hook.

Dissolve

2 packages yeast in
1/2 cup water

and add it to the milk mixture once the milk is below 115°. Then add

8 cups of flour, one cup at a time

and knead the final mixture for about five minutes. You can do this is your mixer is big enough. If not, pour the whole thing into a big bowl and give your arms some exercise.

Cover and let rise until doubled, then add

1 cup flour mixed with
3 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda

Cover and let double again.

Preheat the oven to 425°.

Pour a layer of olive oil in a flat dish. Pinch off small batches of the dough–enough to cover a floured cutting board when rolled out–and roll the dough to about 1/4 inch thickness. Take a biscuit cutter (2 or 3”) and cut out the circles. Drag the bottom through some olive oil and fold then in half. Place them on a rimmed baking sheet or in a baking dish and space them apart where they have room to rise. Bake for 11-13 minutes.

You can also cook the dough in loaves; it also makes great cinnamon rolls.

One last thing: the reason these are called refrigerator rolls is you don’t have to use all the dough at once. You can keep it in the refrigerator for up to a week. When you are ready to use it, roll it, cut it, let it sit for a bit to come to room temperature, and then bake.

These rolls make it feel like Thanksgiving for me.

Peace,
Milton

we are saying thank you . . .

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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we are saying thank you . . .

I veered away from the lectionary passage this week to talk about gratitude. My text was the story of Jesus healing the ten who had leprosy, yet only one returned to say thanks. The point of the story runs deeper than saying we all should write thank you notes.

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We live in a world that is conscious, perhaps even hyper-conscious about borders. We fight wars and build walls to protect them. We worry about who crosses them. We have come up with all sorts of papers and procedures to make sure we know who is coming in and going out. Though the folks in Jesus’ time didn’t have to deal with some of the paperwork, they were conscious of borders as well—and one in particular: the border between Samaria and Galilee. Well, and the border between Samaria and Judea.

Samaria sat between the two Jewish regions, but the Samaritans were not Jewish. The religious differences caused misunderstandings and even prejudices between the two groups. The borders were not officially patrolled like ours are, so people went back and forth for a number of reasons. But if you were a Jewish person in Samaria, or a Samaritan person in Galilee, for whatever reason, you knew you didn’t belong.

So when Luke writes that Jesus crossed over the border from Galilee into Samaria, he was saying that a lot was already going on in the story before the people who had leprosy even showed up, which leads me to my next statement: we live in a world full of layers. Most everything—and everyone—has more going on than what we see on the surface.

Jesus was walking the border between Galilee and Samaria when he was approached by ten men who had leprosy—nine Jews and one Samaritan who had a skin condition that people thought was so contagious that they banished the victims from society regardless of which side of the border they were on, so these guys knew a thing or two about being outcast. They lived on the border. They didn’t belong with anyone other than those who were also outcast.

They saw Jesus walking in their world and cried out for mercy. Jesus didn’t make a scene, or big statement about healing; all he said was, “Go show yourselves to the priest.” His words would have made sense to the Jewish men because the next layer, according to Jewish law, was that the only way they could re-enter society was for a priest to declare them healed; then they could belong again. All ten of them left, and as they walked, Luke says, their leprosy disappeared. Nine of them continued on to find a priest—as Jesus had instructed.

One of them turned around and came back to thank Jesus. The Samaritan. The border of leprosy was not the only border he had trouble crossing. The next layer for him was the priest would not have declared him fit to join Jewish society no matter how clean his skin was. When they all had leprosy, the other nine had not minded hanging out with him. They were a community of misery. But now, when it came to belonging, he was still going to be without a lunch table in any Galilean high school, yet he was thankful to be healed, so he came back to tell Jesus since that would be a more meaningful exchange of words than he would be able to have with anyone at the synagogue.

Hear me clearly: none of the nine did anything wrong, nor did the priest that declared them healed. They followed the rules. They did as they were told. But the tenth man understood something the others missed, or perhaps he stumbled on it when he turned back to Jesus because no one expected him at the temple. Both disease and healing are layered.

In the same way his skin had flaked off in layers because of the leprosy, both his isolation and his healing were more than skin deep. Perhaps as he walked and saw the sores fall away he realized the other painful boundaries in his life that had been covered up by his leprosy. He had not had to think about being a Samaritan in a long time; now he did.

And he came back to say thank you, over and over.

Jesus said, “Your faith has healed you.” He, too, was talking about more than the leprosy.

As I thought about these verses this week, I was brainstorming about their meaning with a friend and came to a realization about why I was so moved by this idea of layers. In fall of 2000 I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. Well, first it was sleep deprivation because every time I sat down I dozed off. I had gone most of my life getting by on four or five hours sleep a night and then, in my early forties, I couldn’t stay awake.

I went to the sleep center and they told me I was sleeping in ninety second increments and gave me a CPAP machine. After my first night of using it, I told Ginger, “If this is what feeling rested feels like, I have never felt this way.” It was such a gift.

In the fall of 2001, as I told you, I was overcome by a profound depression—a condition, a struggle, a reality (it’s hard to know what to call it sometimes) that has not been so easy to shake. They don’t make a CPAP for it, but I have learned a lot about both myself and my depression that have made my life meaningful. When I look back, I can see I was depressed long before I knew it, but a big part of the problem was my lack of sleep covered it up. I had to be get well before I could feel the real sickness of my life.

I would wish depression on anyone, myself included, yet in the layers of it all, I find reasons to be grateful. Much like the one healed in the story, my faith has not solved the layers of my problems or erased all the borders, but it has given me reasons to be grateful, which is probably why the poem “Thanks” by W. S. Merwin is one of my favorites. He speaks to the gratitude I am describing.

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Living in gratitude is hard work. That’s an odd thing to say, yet it is an important truth. To keep saying thank you is an act of faith. Even though all ten were healed, it didn’t mean life automatically got easier, it just meant one layer of pain had been lifted, and that was worth being thankful for. But gratitude is a choice, and often a courageous one, if we are up to it. Whatever is going on, it is our faith that heals us: our trust that love is stronger than any border, any difference, any condition, alive at every layer of life. May we be those who choose to keep saying thank you in the middle of it all. Amen.

caramel apple butter pie

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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caramel apple butter pie

The other name for Thanksgiving at our house is Pie-a-pa-looza. I love baking pies and sharing them. Starting Saturday or Sunday I’ll begin making crusts and then filling and baking them on Monday and Tuesday, before I am called to Thanksgiving Dinner duty, and then Ginger and I “Preacher’s Wife it,” as she likes to say–we spend an evening or two taking the pies from our house to other places.

It is my favorite part of the holidays.

Before the baking begins, I type something like “creative pie recipes thanksgiving ” and the year to see what new twists people have found, or what new pies (at least new to me) are out there. Pages of posts by people who did share their recipes come up and I get lost for an hour or two clicking and thinking. This year, one that popped up was “apple butter pie.”

Bishop’s Orchards here in Guilford makes their own apple butter, so I knew I was off to a good start.

The post talked about an alternative to pumpkin pie using apple butter, which was intriguing. I like my pumpkin pie recipe, but I mostly make it because I feel like I’m supposed to. If I am choosing pie I really want to eat, it is not at the top of the list. Several different sites offered similar recipes, so I printed out four or five of them and compared ingredients and procedures, along with the stories that accompany recipes on food blogs. One of them used sweetened condensed milk in the mixture. That caught my attention because it reminded me of something my mother used to do.

When she needed caramel for something, she would take the label off a can of sweetened condensed milk, put it in a pot big enough to cover the can with water, and then boil it for three hours and let it cool in the water. When she opened the can, it was a beautiful, dark caramel sauce. I always thought of it as a cool shortcut until I worked with a seriously trained pastry chef who did the exact same thing.

The memory of mom made me think of caramelizing the condensed milk before I put it in the pie, thus making a caramel apple butter pie. The challenge was that the name made big promises. Since I had not made the pie before, I did a practice one last night–and I took pictures just in case it worked.

And it worked. Ginger, who doesn’t particularly like apple butter or caramel, has had two pieces. Rachel keeps coming back for more. And I like it, too.

Obviously, this recipe takes a bit of planning because you have to make the caramel, but you can do two or three cans at once and they will keep until you are ready to open them. Who knows what you will come up with if you know you have a can of ready-to-go caramel in the pantry.

Here’s the recipe.

caramel apple butter pie

1 pie crust (smitten kitchen has the best pie crust recipe; it’s worth making)

1 cup unsweetened apple butter
1/4 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon cardamom
1/4 dark chili powder
1 can sweetened condensed milk, caramelized

Roll out the pie crust and put it into a 10-inch pie pan. Crimp the edges and put it in the freezer for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 375°.

Take the crust out of freezer and line it with parchment paper or aluminum foil and fill it with pie weights. (I use dried beans.) Bake for 15 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and set the pie weights aside. Return the crust to the oven for another ten minutes, or until the bottom of the crust has browned a bit.

While the crust is cooking, mix together the apple butter, brown sugar, and eggs in a stand mixer. Add the vanilla and mix again. Add the flour and the dry spices and mix until combined. Finally, add the caramelized sweetened condensed milk and mix it well.

When the crust comes out of the oven for the second time, raise the heat in the oven to 400°. Place the pie pan on a baking sheet and then pour the filling into the crust. Put it in the oven and cook for ten minutes, then–without opening the door–lower the temperature to 350° and let it cook for 30-40 minutes, or until the center is not jiggly.

Let the pie cool on a rack on the counter. Once it is completely cooled, cover it and put it in the refrigerator–if it lasts that long. It does need to be fully cooled before you cut into it.

This is not a last minute pie, obviously, but it is worth every minute.

Peace,
Milton

 

share the oil

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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share the oil

The lectionary passage for this past Sunday was Matthew 25:1-13, which is one of Jesus’ more enigmatic parables, but, hey, I was up for the challenge—and my preparation took me in some interesting directions, which I think is what the parables were intended to do. Anyway, here’s the sermon . . .
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“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women only players,” is an often-quoted line from the beginning of a lengthy monologue about mortality by the character Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The line has held up for four hundred years because the metaphor of life being a play is a pretty good one–except that it can lead us to believe that life, therefore, has some sort of script that we can follow. When things happen that we don’t expect, or that are difficult or painful, we can easily wonder how they fit into the script, as though it might be comforting if we knew there was some kind of master plan.

We want the assurance of a life GPS that shows us where we are and tells us the best way to get where we want to go—and even points out the obstacles. Yet our reality is that life is made up, mostly, of things out of our direct control. We can prepare, but we don’t always know for what. Somewhere in my stacks of books and papers, I have a card with a quote that reads, “The story of my life has a wonderful cast of characters, I’m just not sure about the plot.” I find great comfort in those words.

In his song “Beautiful Boy,” John Lennon sings, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,” which is another way to say that our lives are not scripted. Rather than a set drama, life is improvisational theater: we make it up as we live, which means it does matter that we try to prepare for things we can’t see coming—and, at the same time, we do well to remind one another that what matters most are everyone else with whom we share the scene.

Jesus walked the earth during a period of world-wide unrest. Even though the world as they knew it was much smaller than ours and they didn’t have to deal with a twenty-four-hour news cycle or social media, people were convinced they were living in apocalyptic times because of the Roman occupation. When Jesus came on the scene, his presence fanned the flames of interest around what the highly anticipated end of the world would be like. People wanted someone to tell them that life didn’t have to hurt so badly and that things would get better.

Right before Jesus told the parable we read this morning, he told people no one knew how things were going to roll out, but the best way to live was to be faithful to God and to one another. Then he told the parable about the ten young women, five of whom ran out of oil for their lamps because they didn’t expect the bride and groom to take so long. The ones who had oil wouldn’t share because they were afraid there wasn’t enough to go around, so they told the ones without oil to go to the store and they missed the wedding.

Then he told a parable about a rich man who was going on a long trip and gave three servants money to invest or use while he was gone. Two of the servants had ideas for what to do with the money–they were ready to say yes; the third was so frightened of his boss or of failing that he dug a hole and buried the money so he could return it intact when his boss came back. He didn’t lose the money, he played it safe. When the master returned, he chastised the man for being captured by his fears and had him thrown out.

Then Jesus told a third parable that was set at the final judgment when the nations will be divided into sheep and goats. The sheep are congratulated for responding to the needs around them: “I was hungry and you fed me; thirsty and you gave me something to drink; lonely and you included me . . .” The goats are chastised for not doing those things. Both groups ask, “When did we see you hungry or thirsty or lonely?”

Jesus answered, “When you met the need in the face in front of you, you met me.”

But here’s the thing that always gets me in this story: neither the sheep not the goats knew the impact of their behaviors. They all asked, “When did we see you?” They didn’t know. The difference between the two is the sheep had prepared to notice their fellow actors who were in need. They had prepared to be able to respond with food and drink, clothing, and companionship. They saw themselves as supporting actors. The goats didn’t. And those described as goats were also left out.

I know we have talked about this before, but I want to say it again: some of the parables of Jesus are difficult to comprehend. They are not allegories. They are not fables with an easily identifiable moral lesson we can all take in. In all three of these parables, well-intentioned people get left out for not being able to see what was coming. The bridesmaids were unprepared for the long wait, the servant was an overly cautious investor, and the ones labeled as goats couldn’t see beyond their own needs.

But there’s another progression in these stories that is worth noticing. In the first one, the bridesmaids with oil refused to share and sent the others shopping, which was why they missed the wedding. In the second one, the successful servants took care of themselves, but didn’t share their knowledge of investing. In the last story, those who were identified as sheep saw the people around them who were in need and shared what they had.

Perhaps when we focus on those who got it wrong—which is really easy to do—we are missing the heart of these parables. Again—these are not allegories or fables. I am not saying this is The Point of These Stories; I am saying here’s one of the layers of meaning that continues to speak across centuries, much like Shakespeare’s words.

It is starting the obvious to say we don’t know what lies ahead.

A year from today—and I mean the second Sunday in November of 2024—we will be worshipping for the first time following the next presidential election. Today we speak about the pandemic in the past sense, yet I would venture none of us has had a week go by in the last three and a half years without hearing about someone who has COVID. The war between Russia and Ukraine is almost two years old—so old, in fact, that it doesn’t make our headlines very often. The conflict in Israel and Palestine is both heartbreaking and ominous.

We all want to know what is going to happen. We would all like to know how to plan, just like those who asked Jesus how to prepare for the end of the world. Both directly and through his parables, Jesus said, “Be faithful,” another way of saying be true to yourself, to God, and to those around you.

Our call to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God is not based on favorable circumstances. We are called to share our oil even if we aren’t sure there’s enough to go around. We are called to share our knowledge, even if that means we don’t come out on top. We are called to meet the needs in front of our faces because every last one of us is created in God’s image. God calls us to a difficult way of being in the world that chooses to be faithful in the face of our fears. When Jesus says, “Be awake because you don’t know the day or the hour,” perhaps it has more to do with being awake to how we can nourish and support one another rather than avoiding punishment.

In the parable, the five who didn’t have enough oil finally found some and got back to the wedding, it was in full swing, but no one would let them in. Doesn’t that feel a bit strange that the bridesmaids weren’t allowed into the wedding? Why would they have wanted a wedding without the bridesmaids? Why didn’t they throw the doors open and say, “Glad you made it”?

We all feel the pain and pressure of life. In one way or another, I think it’s fair to say we all live with some fear about how things will turn out and if we will have enough to do whatever it is we want to do. But let’s ask ourselves this: How can we grasp God’s beloved community unless we prepare to include everyone? Isn’t it better to share our oil so everyone gets to come to the party? No one dies of generosity; a lot of people die of loneliness. Let us keep awake to every chance we are given to share our oil, to share the love that gives us life, and gives us life together. Amen.

in a clearing

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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in a clearing

I have had the privilege of spending a few days doing nothing but practicing friendship with a group of men who care deeply for one another. This poem grew out of the observations of one of them as we sat on the porch together after dinner last night.

in a clearing

the room held silence
save the sound of men
clearing their throats
but I would be remiss
to say the silence

was broken by their
wordless utterances
nor was it interrupted
the sound accompanied
the silence as we sat
alongside one another

to clear is to free
from obstruction
which begs these
questions

what lies behind the clearing?
what is struggling to surface?
what has been left unsaid?
what blockage keeps returning?
what wisdom yearns to awaken?
what lament? what joy?
what wants to be given?

we sat silently in a room
save the sound of us
clearing our throats
guttural gestures of grace
of solidarity and friendship

speak if you must
but for now
let us sit
silently together
in a clearing

Peace,
Milton

sing a song of the saints . . .

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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sing a song of the saints . . .

Because I am going to be in Houston on All Saints Sunday, we celebrated a week early at my church. (Here’s hoping the Liturgical Police don’t catch wind of it.) The sermon includes a reference to a cookie recipe that I was commissioned to create which you can find here, and a poem that I wrote for the same event. The service was rich and meaningful, even if we were a little early.

______________________________

I can remember the first time I heard—and sang—our last hymn.

I was a child sitting in the pews of the Argyle Road Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia. I even remember the pastor’s name: Basil Medgett. It was a congregation not much bigger than ours made up of mostly English people who had moved to Zambia for one reason or another. We were the only Americans, and we were welcomed there.

The line that got me from the very start was the one about meeting saints at tea, which seemed an odd place for a saint to be in my young mind. I had heard Bible stories, so I imagined saints as those who put their lives on the line—the ones in the first verse who were prophets and priests and killed by a fierce, wild beast—but what were saints doing in shops and at tea?

Didn’t they have more important things to do?

Perhaps that is why Lesbea Scott, the hymnwriter, wrote this song for her children. You may already know this story, but this hymn was a part of a collection she wrote called Everyday Hymns for Little Children that she composed to help her own kids understand more about faith. The sequence of the verses follows the way our understanding of the word “saint” has grown over time.

The oldest meaning is much like the first verse: saints are ones with devotion that goes beyond what seems normal, if you will. But as we mark All Saints’ Day, our understanding is much more like verse three: we are remembering those who ate with us, who talked with us, who loved us—and who are no longer physically with us. Saints are those who are loved, and that is every last one of us.

Celebrating All Saints’ Day is another way of reminding ourselves that we are not alone. We call the names, and we open the memories, we honor the grief of their loss, and in all of that we assure ourselves that the ties that bind cannot be broken by death, or anything else for that matter. We are not alone. We are together and they are still with us.

We sing our own song of the saints of God—the saints we knew, the saints we loved, the saints that sat around our breakfast tables, or worked alongside us, or went to school with us—and we remember that to be a saint is not to be perfect but to be present.

To become a saint, officially, among those denominations that grant sainthood is an arduous and lengthy process that always happens after the person has died. Their words and deeds are examined, and those examiners have to prove that the life of the would-be saint was not just your average life.

That’s exactly why I love this little hymn—because the road to sainthood is wider and filled with fellow travelers and not just those who have gone before. Sainthood is present tense rather than posthumous. The hymn begs us to write our own verses:

they lived not only in ages past
they are walking through Hamden still
our streets are filled with joyous saints
who all love to do God’s will,
you can meet them for donuts, apizza, or wine
at tai chi, the tag sale, the grocery line
for the saints of God are around all the time
and I want to be one too

We don’t become saints; we are saints, which is another way of saying we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved, and also capable of great love delivered in daily doses.

Journalist David Brooks has a new book called How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. I started reading it this week, alongside of preparing today’s sermon, and the timing was perfect because his ideas about how we invest in one another’s lives—how we really see each other—go right along with how we live into our calling as the saints of God.

One of the things he talks about is how much of life is about accompanying one another. He says,

Ninety percent of life is just going about your business. It’s a meeting at work, a trip to the supermarket, or small talk with another person dropping off the kids at school. And usually there are other people around. In the normal moments or life, you’re not staring deeply into one another’s eyes or unveiling profound intimacies. You’re just doing stuff together—not face-to-face but side-by-side. You’re accompanying each other.

He says accompanying one another requires four things: patience, playfulness, other-centeredness, and presence. It is less about grand gestures and more about showing up and paying attention, about singing harmony to someone else’s melody, about letting life be about something other than our agenda.

The other phrase he uses is that it is about bearing witness. And he quotes the poet David Whyte who said the ultimate touchstone of relationship “is not improvement, neither of the other or of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another’s, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, some-times just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

We named those this morning to whom we bore witness as they lived with us and loved us, and as we loved them. We named them because they bore witness to our lives, which is part of why we grieve; they don’t do that any more. One of the profound gifts we give each other as we gather together is attending to the daily details of life. The small conversations—the small acts of witness—create the space for deeper expressions of love when the time comes.

It is this wonderful mixture of accompaniment that fills our life together with love—I started to say with the flavors of love because of the story I want to tell.

I brought cookies for coffee hour this morning. They are a recipe I created for an event at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Houston, where I will be next weekend. They commissioned me to create a cookie for All Saints’ Day. Since the church is in Houston, I started thinking about Texas flavors. Pecans are the state nut (well, one of them), and the prevalence of Mexican food led me to add some corn meal. The other big culinary influence in Houston is from Vietnamese residents, so I also added crystallized ginger, turmeric, and cinnamon. Then, because of its mystical qualities and because I always wanted to put it in a cookie, I added fresh sage. It’s a big mess of ingredients that turned into a really great cookie—and that is the review from Ginger (who doesn’t like nuts or the spice, ginger) and Rachel, my mother-in-law. Rachel, in fact, called them “Amazing Delights.”

When I sent a text to Sid Davis, the Minister of Music at the church in Houston who commissioned the cookie to tell him what she said, he wrote back, “They are both amazing and delightful.”

I answered, “As are we, my friend, as are we.”

That is true of not just Sid and me, but of every last one of us. We are amazing delights. We enrich and flavor each other’s lives—that’s why it hurts when one of us dies. The love continues, but their absence is profound. And so we accompany one another—with singing, with stories, with quiet presence, with meals, with laughter, with tears, with uncertainty, with hope—all in Christ’s name, not to replace loved ones, or to explain away the sadness, but to remind ourselves we are not alone. Love is stronger than death. And we are really, really loved.

And it is that love that brings us to the Table this morning . . .

Peace,
Milton

amazing delights

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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amazing delights

The best recipes tell a story.

This one starts with my friend, Sid Davis, who is the Minister of Music at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Houston. He called awhile back and invited me to come to his church to do two things. One was to read a poem for All Saints Sunday (that I needed to write first) and the other was to create a cookie that would be a part of an All Saints gathering we decided to call “This Tastes Like a Memory,” where people would bring cookies that held the stories of loved ones.

The poem is in another post—and it turned it out well. As far as the cookie goes, my first thought was to use pecans, since that is the state nut of Texas. As I was getting out of my car one afternoon, I saw the giant sage bush that graces the flower bed next to the driveway and began working on a pecan-sage cookie, which, thanks to the internet, sent me down some wonderful culinary rabbit holes.

The Houston connection pulled me in two cultural directions, as far as flavors go: Mexican and Vietnamese. I decided to add some cornmeal to the cookie, as well as some cinnamon, on the Mexican side. The Vietnamese connection was the ginger, turmeric, and also cinnamon. I also decided to use lemon extract instead of vanilla to add a citrus layer.

I made a couple of test batches, both of which were sampled by Ginger and Rachel. When Rachel smelled the second batch, she said, “Are you making more of those amazing delights?”—and then I knew what to call the cookie.

They are a story worth tasting.

amazing delights

3 sticks of butter, room temperature (1 ½ cups)
1 cup brown sugar (8.5 oz)
2 eggs, room temperature
2 oz. lemon extract
2 cups flour (11 oz.)
1 cup corn meal (4 oz.)
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 cup fresh sage, chopped
8 oz. crystallized ginger, chopped
8 oz. pecans, chopped
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 375°.
Cream the butter and brown sugar together in a stand mixer. I let the mixer run for 8-10 minutes to really emulsify the two ingredients. Then add the eggs and lemon extract and mix until well combined.

In a separate bowl, mix the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt, and turmeric. Take about a cup of that dry mix and put it in the bowl of a food processor along with the sage. Process until sage is almost unnoticeable. Then add the crystallized ginger and the pecans and pulse until they are very small pieces. Add the contents to the remainder of the dry ingredients and mix them well. Then add the dry mix to the bowl of the stand mixer and mix until that, too, is combined well.

Mix the sugar and cinnamon together in a separate bowl.

Scoop the cookies on to a parchment-lined baking sheet. (I use a 2 oz. scoop.) Shape them in to discs—like a little hockey puck—and dip the tops of the cookies in the cinnamon sugar and place them back on the baking sheet about three inches apart.

Bake for 13-15 minutes. I let them cool on the baking sheet on a rack. Makes about three shy of three dozen cookies.

Peace,
Milton

all saints

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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all saints

all saints

we move too quickly to
divide the                    world
that’s a complete sentence
but it’s not the whole story

we move too quickly to
divide the world into saints
and sinners as though life
is a contest that demands
winners and losers so that
some can feel significant

we are all saints
our worthiness is not
created by comparison
even the distinction between
the living and the dead
doesn’t feel so definitive
when it comes to love

on all saints day we make
of our hearts thank-you notes
as grief and grace swirl
in a dance of gratitude
for those we hold dear
but can no longer hold

we read their names in the
presence of their absence
they are not here and
we do not know where
they have been taken
other than to trust that
they are not so far            away

the life that lies beyond
this life is not another world
but a dimension we can’t see
the clouded pane of glass
clears when we tell the stories
the veil gets thin when
we talk about belonging
about everyone belonging

you know the stories
we too easily forget to
remember
that’s re-member
as in putting ourselves
back together again

but memory and nostalgia
are not the same thing
anymore than wishing and
hoping are synonyms
remembering is not for
the faint of heart
love and heartache
go together because
some stories are
not easy to tell even
when told in love

still we call the names
of all saints and we tell
our stories of loss to say
that love is stronger than
death and disappointment
deeper than wounds or
weariness wider than
any breach any               breach

love bears all things
believes all things hopes
all things endures all
things love never ends

we are all saints
because of that love
that love will not let us go

we are all saints
because of who we are
not what we have done
or left undone

we are all saints
that’s the whole story

Peace,
Milton

think on these things

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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think on these things

More Sundays than not, I choose one of the passages from the Revised Common Lectionary for my sermon text. I also do it a couple of weeks ahead of time to help our part-time office administrator use his time efficiently, so the verses had been chosen a good bit before it came time to prepare the sermon. As I stood last Sunday morning, feeling the brokenness of our world, here’s what I had to say.

_____________________________

Our reading this morning is Philippians 4:4-9.

These words come at the end of Paul’s letter to the Philippian church. The fourth chapter begins with some personal messages and then moves to a series of admonitions. As we read, remember that Paul was writing from prison.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is nearby. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, do them, and the God of peace will be with you.

These words are some of my favorites from Paul’s letters. Yet, sometimes they hit me in an odd way. I hear them as hyperbolic and overstated—usually when I am frustrated by life, or depressed, or unnerved by what is happening in the world. “Rejoice in the Lord always” How is that possible? It can sound a little too much like Peter Pan: “You just think lovely, wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air.”

That’s why it is good to remember he wrote his letter from prison where he was facing the strong possibility of being put to death. Not only that, he had also been beaten, had survived a shipwreck, had fled for his life, not to mention that he had a past as one who had treated others violently—and still he wrote about living with gratitude and hope and joy.

Paul was not an optimist. I don’t think he was humming, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow” while he sat in his cell. He was a realist. He knew life could chew you up and spit you out. He knew the young congregation was living in tough times and was in for some tough days ahead, even without the oppression of the Roman government.

He was not writing a feel-good letter that was the New Testament equivalent of a greeting card, nor should we hear his words in the voice of the parent of an adolescent—you know what I mean: the cautionary tone of “make good decisions” as the kid shuts the door behind them. Paul was writing for his life and for the life of those he loved. He knew, as we do, that life has a centrifugal force that throws us all to the edges of our existence at times, that drowns us with grief and worry. And for those reasons he told the Philippians to rejoice, to trust, and to focus on things that were life-giving and life-sustaining.

In modern parlance we might say his words were a call to spiritual practice—a call to do the inner work it takes to strengthen our hearts and minds and our connections to God and to one another. Joy doesn’t just happen. Being able to see what is true and just and honorable isn’t something we simply stumble upon. It is a choice, a commitment. We do, in fact, have to make good decisions. We have to learn to see those things. We have to choose to do the tough work of trust and compassion and joy.

Paul’s list of things brought to mind one of the poems I keep in a file called “Poems to Remember. It is called “Next Time” by Joyce Stulphen.

next time

I’ll know the names of all of the birds
and flowers, and not only that, I’ll
tell you the name of the piano player
I’m hearing right now on the kitchen
radio, but I won’t be in the kitchen,

I’ll be walking a street in
New York or London, about
to enter a coffee shop where people
are reading or working on their
laptops. They’ll look up and smile.

Next time I won’t waste my heart
on anger; I won’t care about
being right. I’ll be willing to be
wrong about everything and to
concentrate on giving myself away.

Next time, I’ll rush up to people I love,
look into their eyes, and kiss them, quick.
I’ll give everyone a poem I didn’t write,
one specially chosen for that person.
They’ll hold it up and see a new
world. We’ll sing the morning in,

and I will keep in touch with friends,
writing long letters when I wake from
a dream where they appear on the
Orient Express. “Meet me in Istanbul,”
I’ll say, and they will.

What makes the poem poignant is the reality that there is no next time. We only have this time. This life. These days in this place. In this world where so many keep choosing to do damage to one another. We have much around us that fosters fear and anxiety. The world is dangerous. All of us are afraid—maybe not of the same things, but we are all afraid. And that is where the spiritual work begins. What Paul is talking about is what lies beyond fear, what supersedes it, or at least what lives alongside it in our hearts so we can choose to do something other than be anxious and afraid.

Rejoice. Trust in the presence of God. Focus on what is true and just and kind and hopeful and honorable and excellent. Do those things this time. Right now. While the news is blaring and the stock market is struggling and our hearts are hurting and life feels uncertain, think on these things. Remind one another that we are wonderfully created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. Keep telling each other that we are not alone. Remember that love is stronger than death and fear and anything else that may come. Remember that God is with us, whether we feel it or not, and trust—while all of these things are true—that life will still be hard.

In most of his letters, Paul wrote similar words of hope and encouragement to those we have read this morning. Some of my favorites come from Romans. As I read them, I want to read them as I heard them read as I stood at the graveside of a friend’s father at a cemetery in Georgia many years ago. The Southern pastor’s tone of tangible trust in these words left a deep impression on me as he quoted Paul:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? . . . NO. No, in all these things we are more than victorious through Christ who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We spend our lives going in circles, both literally and physically. Our planet both rotates and orbits in the middle of a solar system of other celestial objects doing the same thing. Those of us who inhabit this world go in circles as well—circles of family and friends, circles of thought and behavior. To quote one more musical, we are a part of the circle of life, which often feels like a circle of violence and destruction.

As our thoughts circle the globe, our feelings circle as well. We cannot live unaffected by what is happening in other places. We are more connected than we realize. The prophet Micah said that what God requires of us is to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God and with one another, which is another way of saying what Paul said to the Philippians who lived in their own circles of hope and uncertainty.

Let us hold on to the words of the old Southern gentleman, even if the world is overwhelming, even if it feels like the circles of violence are engulfing us. When we focus on the love of God and embrace the love that will not let us go, as followers of the living Christ, we can hold on to what is good and right and true, what is just and kind and welcoming, not in desperation, but in hope. We are not alone. We belong to God.

Can anything separate us from the love of God? NO. Amen.

 

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