Then on Saturday, Mar 28th, we once again showed that many hands make light work! With the help of Junior Girls Scout troop 71669, 5th grade from Cranbury, we had a clean-up day. The girls are working on their Bronze award (the highest award a junior Girl Scout can get) and they picked House of Manna for their service project. So from 9:00 until 11:00 we cleaned all the chairs and tables in the Fellowship Hall, top, and bottom. And you would be surprised to discover how much dirt and unmentionables we found under the tables and chairs. Then we cleaned the woodwork in the Fellowship Hall, all the doors we cleaned and even the bathrooms were done. Meanwhile, the women of the church cleaned in the kitchen, the windowsills got a good going over, glass doors were cleaned. The cabinets were emptied and reorganized. House of Manna supplied their own plates so we put ours back in our cabinets and put away the new plates. We looked at all the items in the cabinets and made a decision if it still was used and needed by the church or that a toss was the better way to go. It was a lot of work but it is so satisfactory to see all the gleaming surfaces and know that everything is clean again!

A big thank you to: Allison, Brittany, Elina, Ellen, Ethel, Evelyn, Imma, Janet, Joan, Kathleen, Katie, Kelly, Lisa, Maggie, Nicole, Norma, Olivia, Petra, Premilla, Renee, Sandy, Susan, Tessa, Theresa and Walter.

The Invitation and Outreach Committee is looking into such a sign, but they are far from cheap. It will be a little longer until we have a sign there, so bear with us. We will keep you apprised of our plans and how the congregation can be included in this project.

And here is a little information on Pat’s career:

She graduated from Hope College in 1972 and received her Master’s Degree for Bilingual-Bicultural Education from Rutgers University. She has taught ESL (English as a Second Language) for one year, Bilingual/Monolingual Grade 2 for 35 years, and Bilingual First Grade this past year.

Reformed and education, this has been a good pair throughout the centuries. We are grateful for Pat keeping up this well-tried tradition and wish her God’s rich blessing for the coming school year.

On Jun 11th we brought in a rich harvest! Approximately 90 children and youth from the Livingston School here in New Brunswick provided us with an unforgettable Lunchtime Recital, and The Star-Ledger even covered the event.

It was a meaningful endeavor, right along our lines of inclusive ministry, although this time without religious undertones. Why inclusive? Because, at least from the students’ standpoint, the concert had a lot to do with integration. The overwhelming majority is of Latino background, first or second generation. Anybody who has ever moved to another country knows how much gets lost in the translation. Immigrant children, therefore, have to reclaim a lot.

Yet it does not stop there, because we do not live in a monoculture. Consequently, the children of immigrants to our culture do not just have to reclaim their own heritage. Rather, they are also challenged with negotiating a place for their heritage in the midst of this potpourri of traditions, languages and cultures we call Central Jersey. This makes integration a twofold process.

Usually, our lunchtime concerts feature pieces of western origin. But there have been increasingly composers and musicians from an African or Caribbean background. On Jun 11 , the Livingston students th took their place. May the experience guide them into a future worthy of their families’
dreams!

We wish to thank especially school principal Mr. Jeremiah Clifford and music teachers Mrs. Agnes Crespo-Helmstedt (Livingston School Band) and Ms. Clayde (Livingston School String Orchestra) for their leadership, encouragement and support.

Unfortunately, the task proved more difficult than anticipated, and we ended up with Plan B – for which Consistory had wisely prepared. The tank will now be excavated, and we’ll have to deal with some remediation costs. At the same time, however, we hope for support from a program funded by the State. But be this as it may – the end of our oil tank marks the end of an era. It is clear that we now have left behind so much more than a mere heating method. We have left behind the Modern Age that was built on oil.

What do I mean by that? Very simply, from the moment the Industrial Revolution took off, it required oil, first as lubrication for the new steam engines, and later as fuel for all sorts of gas-guzzlers. Oil was a staple of Modernity even before we tapped into the planet’s reservoir of fossil oil – think of the whaling industry, Nantucket, and Moby Dick, and you realize what we did before we could exploit the oil fields in Texas or the Middle East.

First Reformed Church seems to have had enough of that! We now heat with natural gas. This is cleaner, cheaper, and a clear sign that we have made it, finally, into the 21st Century!

A big thank you goes out to Julius Fekete, Ellen Hamilton and Jim Hance, and many others who have all helped with the transition.

Oftentimes I wondered, ‘Why mercury? Where does all this mercury come from?’ Until I learned that fluorescent light tubes of all sizes contain it. Have you ever counted how many of these we have on our church ceilings alone? The same holds true for our basements and garages at home.

But it is worse. The Federal government plans to phase out the traditional incandescent light bulb that has made Edison so famous. Instead, the new energy saving light bulbs are being promoted everywhere. This is a good thing, because it will save a lot of energy and can be seen as a contribution in our fight against global warming. Also, many of the new bulbs last for about seven years.

But here is the problem: The new energy saving light bulbs contain mercury! And there is only one single drop-off site in Middlesex County, accessible twice every month to the general public. This needs to change; otherwise, too many of these poisonous light bulbs will land in the trash.

We have therefore reached out to the Middlesex County Division of Solid Waste Management and received permission to support the Consumer Electronics Drop-Off Program by collecting fluorescent tubes and energy saving light bulbs here at church. So, if you have any mercury containing light bulbs you would like to dispose off, bring them with you on Sundays to church.

For us as good stewards of God’s creation, this is a small thing to do! And, who knows, if our collection becomes a success, other churches might follow, and our fish may taste a whole lot better some day.

Why are we doing all of this? We do it because it is part of switching our heating system from oil to gas. This will be cheaper, environmentally more friendly, and for us easier to maintain. Hopefully, I can report to you in the next newsletter that we have retired the underground oil tank and that we are running on gas. But we will see. There is still some work to be done by Buist, Inc. before the Preferred Tank Services can move in to retire our tank.

Similar dinners are currently being scheduled with several families of First Reformed Church. Our hope is to enter a new stage of Turkish-American relations after a fruitful first stage of more formal discourse on Christianity and Islam. Now it’s time to meet as families, to see how life is in our respective houses, and to foster the personal ties we have been developing – and, perhaps, to learn how to say grace in an interfaith manner before the meal.

Early on in May, the twelve Turkey travelers from our church will have a meeting in Newark to meet with representatives of BAKIAD, the organization that is so generous as to sponsor our trip to Turkey after Christmas this year. What an exciting thing our church family is blessed to experience here! We may not be able to contribute much to the official academic interfaith dialogs as conducted by universities and national denominational offices, but we can certainly help to take down barriers in our local communities and broaden our understanding of God’s buzzing world in the course of it. May God bless our friends from Turkey! They help us to become a little more complete.

Granted, what the ancient Egyptians had mastered was not little. The wealth of astronomical knowledge reflected in the pyramids alone proves the point, and The Discovery Channel and National Geographic Magazine provide ample illustrations. But compare this to the space exploration of the latter part of the 20th century and you will quickly grasp the enormous provocation contained in Herzog’s words: modern psychiatry at the level of the ancient Egyptians.

Much has happened since. But the more we have found, the more our society seems to have grown skeptical of human freedom. Take, for example, the verdict of depression. Even in mild cases we tend to seek solutions through medication. Oftentimes, this means self-medication, because it is readily available and so much easier than seeing a professional.

Self-medication or prescription drugs, both are built on the assumption that our psychological condition is reined by chemistry and not free will. Reduced to our chemical balances or imbalances, we don’t seem to be masters in our own house anymore.

A church family, by contrast, can prove a powerful antidote to this far-spread yet limited conception. This is because, first, you cannot medicate a church, and, second, because a church is an excellent place to learn about the roots of some of our depressions not in chemistry but in false and misguided expectation.

If we use church only to find shelter for our illusions, we will end up disappointed and depressed. If we adopt instead a world-open perspective that regularly exposes us to the buzzing life of this ever changing world, we will not only be more realistic in our assumptions, but we will see our very assumptions changed as well.

It may not be realistic, for example, to expect for our church a growth in membership that will soon solve most of our financial concerns and we should not utilize people in this way anyway! Instead, I see us called to find other approaches to our situation. A pill against church depression? I’d rather ask whether it could be that God has brought us here so that we open the door to something entirely new.

I know I talk very vaguely here, but I’m also aware that our Consistory and its corresponding committees have only begun to explore the wealth of potential our future holds. I am thinking in particular of a little task force that Consistory recently appointed in order to design a vision for the interior of our education building. What type of special ministry is needed in our community, and how should the building be redesigned in order to accommodate new ministerial needs? Please be sure to follow this discussion as we move towards the summer. Our future is in the making here.

Besides all these good things, we are yet thankful that this all happens with an eye, as well, on our spiritual lives. On Easter Sunday, the congregation gave thanks for a triptych (a three-panel painting) by our resident artist Maria Owens. As many of you know, she has devoted her abilities to bringing forth the Biblical text through her brush. Maria lovingly has dedicated this painting to our church.  It portrays the three last days of our Lord Jesus Christ: praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, his crucifixion and his resurrection.

We were thrilled during worship to take away the shroud covering the triptych, dedicating it in the front right corner of our sanctuary. Now folks may sit in prayer and meditation, looking to this most stimulating work of art for inspiration. Praise God from which all blessings flow!

Stef is an elder and chairs our Finance and Stewardship Committee. He also co-chairs our Preservation Team that supervises the historic preservation project that First Reformed Church is currently undertaking. Stef and his family moved to this country from the Netherlands in 2001. He and his wife Erie come with additional international experience: their children Daphne and Theo were born in Saudi Arabia. This background has made Stef, as well as Erie, particularly interested in the interfaith dialogues of our church with Muslims in the New Brunswick area.

Today we recognize Stef  for his outstanding commitment to the treasury of the church. He has put in an enormous amount of hours to bring us up to speed with standard accounting procedures. He also completed the computerization of our accounting. He is a great steward in the vineyard of the Lord!

On March 14th,  Stef and I attended this dinner at the Crowne Plaza in Somerset. As we entered the dining hall, we met Synod Treasurer James Thompson and his wife Sally. Shortly afterwards we had the privilege of listening to an outstanding sermon of yet another Treasurer: Rev. Fred Mold, who is the Treasurer of our Classis.

It was, of course, not just a treasurers’ convention. We shared the table with the delegation from our church in Keyport, and we used the cocktail hour to renew many other ties as well. It is good, once in a while, to see so many representatives from Reformed churches gathered in one room: It broadens outlook and gives us a different perspective on who we are. On March 14th it also provided an opportunity to say “thank you” to Stef and all he has done for First Reformed.
 

The Mar 20th Maundy Thursday Tenebrae Worship this year was quite different because “instead of the usual classical music” my two friends, Bryan Harring on the saxophone, and Enrico Cabriero on piano, played jazz music. Bryan and Rico improvised the beginning of the hymns between the scripture readings. They also performed a jazz song called Lush Life, which made the atmosphere melancholy. Rico then played a lovely piece during communion, which helped the congregation to relax and meditate a bit more. The music added a great touch to the service.

Ethel Salamone also made a specific type of bread with ingredients from the Bible; it is called Ezekiel bread. This made the evening even more special. It tasted quite good and seemed more natural, just as if it was Christ’s real body. The service was moving and ended with the bells being rung thirty-three times (the number of years of Jesus’ life in the world) by Viktoriya. As usual, we left the sanctuary with the lights turned down low and without a blessing.

On the surface, the House of Manna is providing a very basic service to our New Brunswick community. Warm, nutritious meals are being served to needy families.

On another plane, other great things are happening as a result of House of Manna. Each Tuesday and Thursday (the evenings House of Manna provides dinner), a group of about six volunteers assemble at our church to set up tables and chairs, put out place-settings, bring food to the tables and clean up after our guests leave. The volunteers are as diverse as the Central Jersey population. Working side by side with these wonderful people has been especially rewarding to me. This week I met a father who brought his middle-school aged son to our program. What great parenting! A mother brought her son who is in high school to volunteer. I met a young black woman, a Hispanic woman (always welcome as she can interpret) and a Jewish Rutgers graduate school student.

To me, the most unusual volunteer was not really a volunteer at all as it turns out. A young man came in and it was apparent by his attitude and somber expression that he wasn’t happy to be at the House of Manna. He was doing “community service” for some unknown transgression. He seemed surprised that people would choose to give up their evenings on their own to help serve dinner to needy families. He asked why we do this. The answer came from our new Jewish friend. “It’s important to make time to do this.” He said, “You have to give back sometimes.”

Did the experience of helping have a profound impact on our friend with the legal issue? Did he feel good because of the good work he did that night? Time will tell. Spending a few hours with these wonderful people cannot be a bad thing for this young man. (It turns out that he is scheduled to work several more evenings at House of Manna.)
I’m glad to be in a position of watching this situation unfold. Has God arranged this scenario at The House of Manna in order to touch the heart of this young man? We shall see.

There was also very special music during worship: a special choir anthem that involved responsive singing between the children’s choir and the senior choir. We are fortunate to have Viktoriya Raufova with us as organist and choir director. Another highlight was an offertory played by Janet Waanders at the harpsichord and Viktoriya at the organ.

Very festive also  was the coffee hour afterwards. Maria Owens hosted it, together with our Muslim friends from the Turkish Interfaith Center in Piscataway. Organized by Nuray Tugrul Yurt, they brought to us Noah’s Pudding, a specialty that helps commemorate the landing of Noah’s ark at Mount Ararat, located today in modern Turkey.

Many of us used the occasion to arrange for private dinners between Muslim and Christian families and contributed in this way to peace and understanding between different cultures. All of this served as yet another step in our preparation for our trip to Turkey in December of this year.

What an exciting place this is, the First Reformed Church in New Brunswick!

I have often said that for me Chirstmas Eve and Maundy Thursday are the most important services of the year.  The drama makes these two services memorable.  The drama highlights the significance of the events that we celebrate, the birth of Christ and the death of Christ.

On Christmas Eve we darken the sanctuary and then light the candles – our candles one by one.  As we sing Silent Night, we pass the light, and the room glows with the Light of the World.

On Maundy Thursday the Light is taken away as each candle on the Holy Table is extinquished.  Thirty-three chimes are rung and we leave in silence in complete darkness.

Easter would have no significance for us without the birth and the sacrifice – the darkness, which is triumphantly yet quietly overcome by the light of the resurrection.

Once again we will be gathering donations of filled PLASTIC EGGS only.  Please drop off the FILLED eggs during Holy Week. These eggs can be filled with small coins or little treats. We will gather at the end for a special picture and a short children’s message in the Randolph Room.

The children thank you all for being so responsive in the past, and look forward to this event each year. Of course, we will need volunteers to hide the eggs on Sunday morning, so do come around 9:15 am, if you want to help!

Random House Dictionary defines the word thank as: to express gratitude, appreciation, or acknowledgement. I think all of these feelings are for Jim Hance and Josh Bernhofer. Without their leadership and work there would have been no shelter for the homeless men.  Help was solicited and gotten from Calvery  Chapel and Highland Park Reformed Church. That is not to say that we here at First Reformed did not take part because we did. Women and men from the different churches volunteered to spend the evenings.

Thank you all!!!

The switch-over is not too far away, hopefully sometime this month. After this, we will use up the remaining oil in our tank, before Preferred Tank Services will retire it. I want to use the opportunity and also thank the folks from our contractor, BUIST Inc., for their speedy and clean work, and BUIST President Mike Freund for assisting me in establishing a workable time line that takes the needs of our church into account. And, finally, a big thank you goes out to Jim Hance for his constant good counsel and his efforts in making sure that all involved companies were on the same page.

 

 Did I say “small”? Oh boy, just ask Julius Fekete of his opinion in this regard! He gathered a few of the faithful (Gary, Rod and myself) on Presidents Day for what should have been a short morning of demolishing two walls. But then one thing came to another. The Wayne’s coating proved to be too old and bridle for recycling when we took it off; it had to be discarded. The sheetrock walls came down all right, but the wooden framing behind it was pretty strong and tall, and some of us got bruised a bit in the process of taking it down.

Then we had to deal with the drop ceiling. This was no problem, except that we had to leave enough of it intact as to provide support for the ceiling light. If Julius had not warned us to watch this, who knows, we would have probably demolished until electrocution!

Once we could see through the drop ceiling, we saw the original ceiling above, and how pieces of plaster were about to come loose. For lack of hardheads we tabled the problem until the following Saturday.

Then it was time to tackle the floor. Three quarters of it were easily picked up and stored outside until we have a dumpster. But that last quarter was incredible! When it was put down, a master builder must have used a nail every two inches. It took Julius almost two subsequent days to remove this piece of floor that was surely intended for eternity!
But the project developed followers! Now a good group of our children, led by Ahjani, is so excited about their new nursery that they want to help paint it. So shall it be – after all, what more could we wish for than out youngsters identifying with their church?

Besides, once the wall was removed, we discovered that the current young generation is not the first one involved in nursery renovation. For the old wall, once opened, revealed to us a secret of the past: a paper plane built by none other than David Shipman who had used a Sunday School assignment for this purpose. If you are good at deciphering, try your skills on the picture included and see the results of an interview that David once held with the Delhagen family. But do me one favor and do not assume that the interview was, actually, held! By the way, Gary Delhagen is now the plumber in charge of the renovation of the downstairs men’s bathroom.