REV. HOPE HARLE-MOULD,
PASTOR AND TEACHER

They call me a "preacher with props."  On other Sundays, I might portray a biblical character, get people to act out a story, or perform a new song I've composed to express the Word without words.  Since my Sabbatical (see photo), I've linked St. Peter's in mission and peacebuilding efforts from Western New York to West Africa.  At St. Peter's, I strive to bring forth each person's unique gifts and weave them together into a New Creation to serve our community and give glory to God.  Let me help you take the first steps on the new path God is calling you to begin!

UPCOMING SERMONS BY PASTOR HOPE (All services start at 10:00 a.m. unless otherwise noted):
9/5:    "The Epistle of James:  FaithWorks!"
9/12:  "Re-Boot Me, Jesus:  Exercise & the Brain" (Sunday School resumes)
9/19:  "Love the Alien as Yourself"
9/26:   Holy Humor Sunday:  "Jesus the Jester"
10/3:   World Communion Sunday:  "Poems for Jesus'Welcome Table"
10/10:  Native American Sunday:  "Lost Languages - Holy Languages"
10/17:  "Widows of Faith"
10/24:  "What Kind of Game Are You Playing?"
10/31:  Reformation Day:  "The Ministry of All Believers"
11/7:    All Saints Sunday:  "That Was Beautiful"
11/14:  "Jesus' Touch & 100 Drums of Healing" - special guest Carolyn Zimmerman of Drum4Health

                                 POEMS FOR LENT AND LIFE
                                                                  

                                          "The Prayer of Dominant Desire"
                    [Composed by Hope Harle-Mould, Pastor & Teacher for St. Peter’s worship March 14 and for the 
                     West Seneca Community of Churches Lenten Journey March 17 at First Presbyterian Church.]

Sometimes when I sing the hymn,
“Lord, I Want to Be a Christian,
I mean it with all my being:
“Lord, I want to be more loving…
be more holy…
be like Jesus…
in my heart, in my heart,
Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart.”

But sometimes I don’t mean it,
not truly, not enough,
not with all its implications and complications.
not with all my heart but only partially,
perhaps with three chambers of my heart
but not all four.
And not every day in every way—
maybe Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, of course
—but there a few other days in the week.

Yet I know there is only one secret to a Christ-like life
of abundance, fulfillment, and joy—
what Harry Emerson Fosdick called
the prayer of dominant desire: Roses are red,
Politics—red and blue,
But in Christ we’re shaped into one—
Purple people—who make the world new! 


                                            "Blessed By An Earthquake"

“Why are there earthquakes?”
a woman of my church asked.
“Why does God allow these terrifying things to exist
and kill so many innocent people?
If God were truly loving, there wouldn’t be any.”
“I must admit,” she concluded,
“my faith is shaken
whenever earthquakes shake the earth.”

I replied as best I could:
God works in mysterious ways.
Why so many suffer—I can’t explain,
but I do know that what matters in the end
is how we respond—with compassion-in-action

Yet consider this:
Destructive earthquakes do not happen every day;
they are rare;
so every other day is beautiful.
And they do not happen everywhere on planet Earth;
they’re localized to one area at a time;
so everywhere else is beautiful.

But if there were no earthquakes,
it would mean the earth was not alive inside,
that it had no rotating, molten core
that generates the massive magnetic field
that shrouds our planet far into space,
shielding and protecting us from hostile solar radiation,
enabling life to exist.
Without earthquakes, the world would be safe
and quiescent
and dead.
Earthquakes, then, are a blessing,
a gift of God for the people of God,
giving us a beautiful life
on a living planet,
every day, everywhere. 


                                          "I'm Giving Up Chocolate for Lent"
                                                                                   (A Limerick)

Yes, I’m giving up chocolate for Lent,
Holy sacrifice vowed on knee bent,
But new research has sung--
“Chocolate keeps your heart young!”—
So love God with all Hershey’s well-spent. 


                                                           "Left Turn Signal"

One of the pillars of our church,
Bert Danhof, often says,
“Whenever I get off track in life
and veer away from the straight and narrow,
I always put on my left turn signal
so the Lord will know
I intend to get back on right path
as soon as possible.”
Thank you, Bert,
for this holy lesson in homespun metaphor,
for I know the time may come soon
when I will mess up
and lose my way
and with my luck
my left turn signal will be busted,
so I hope God will get it
when I point my left arm out the window
and shout to heaven,
“I’m coming back, Lord,
I’m coming back!”

to will God’s ways with Olympic passion,
to hunger and thirst for the Spirit’s flow,
to seek the sacred with clarity of focus and tenacity of purpose,
to refuse to settle for anything less than what is possible,
to make Christ-consciousness not the first thing on our list
but the only thing at our center,
where all the spokes of our existence meet,
around which all else revolves,
“the stillpoint of the turning world” [T.S. Eliot].

Dear God, teach me to pray
the prayer of dominant desire. 


                                                   "Frames of Reference"

I once heard the true story
of a man in a mostly empty subway car,
tired from work,
just wanting to be left alone,
loses himself in his book
in the white-noise silence,
when at one stop, the doors open
and into his subway car bound several young children
who proceed to demonstrate the Newtonian law—
objects in motion will tend to stay in motion—
as kids leap from seat to seat
and spin around the silver pole in perpetual circles.
Their mother simply sits down
ignoring it all,
staring off into space,
oblivious to how her kid’s obnoxious behavior
was affecting other passengers.
The man says something to the mother,
and she immediately replies:
“Oh, I’m sorry,
I didn’t realize they were bothering you.
I guess I didn’t realize anything.
You see, we just came from my husband’s funeral.”

Instantly the man’s feelings swing 180 degrees.
A wave of sympathy and compassion wells up within him
for this mother and these fatherless children.
Suddenly their antics no longer annoy him;
he is glad to see them find
a measure of relief and distraction
in teasing one another.
And the man stops reading
and starts praying
for them.

What if many of the most difficult people in my life
are struggling with things I’m totally unaware of,
or that they themselves are unconscious of
because the pain is too long
or too deep.
What if I reframed my relationship to them,
reframed my understanding of their world?
How different would my feelings be for them;
how different would my prayers be for them—
which I fail to pray.

OK, God,
give me new frames of reference,
so I may see the hidden tears in this world
and glimpse a portion of the astonishing beauty
you see in people I fail to appreciate.
With every difficult situation, Lord,
teach me how to reframe it—
to redeem it. 

                                   "Singing at Midnight in Prison"
No good deed goes unpunished.
So it was with the apostle Paul in Philippi
just after he freed a psychic girl from her controllers.
Deprived of their profiteering from this vulnerable girl,
these men accosted Paul and Silas with words
and assaulted them with fists,
drew a crowd which joined the melee,
dragged them to court
where authorities stripped them naked,
beat them with rods,
flogged them with whips,
and cast them into an underground jail.

Now it is midnight,
darker than dark.
Hungry and alone in a strange city,
bleeding from open wounds,
uncertain of what the future holds,
what do Paul and Silas do?
They start singing,
praying to God with conviction,
praising the Lord for the honor of suffering for Christ,
not downcast or discouraged,
but upcast and courage-filled,
their voices giving voice
to their utter trust, confidence, and hope in God.

But God is not the audience.
Someone else is listening and watching and wondering:
the other prisoners.
They see the fearlessness in Paul’s face,
the faith in Silas’ songs.
But they detect something else, something more,
a presence,
palpable and powerful,
a spirit mightier than iron manacles,
a purpose that seems to connect Paul and Silas
to some distant place of freedom.

Then there is an earthquake,
And the doors break open,
And the shackles fall free,
but Paul and Silas do not rush out in escape.
Choosing to remain,
they save the guard’s life
who was going to commit suicide,
then they save the guard’s soul
as they tell him of a man killed by Roman soldiers
who forgave Roman soldiers
who rose from a grave guarded by Roman soldiers
who now gives new life to all Roman soldiers
who put down Caesar’s sword
and pick up love’s cross.

What happened to those other prisoners?
We don’t know,
but we know this:
they would not soon forget the men
who freed a girl and freed a guard,
who sang with conviction when the dungeon was darkest,
who sang with courage when the powerful seemed invincible,
who sang with hope when hope seemed hallucination.
But perhaps those prisoners remembered
one of those songs
and in the darkness of their lives
learned to sing it
until the dawn.

In our world,
when we are treated unjustly,
suffer abuse,
are wounded by words,
when it’s midnight in our life,
and the way ahead seems walled in,
do we dare to sing?
Do we dare to praise God for the promise
even when we see it not?
Do we dare to thank God for the presence
even when we feel it not?
Do we dare to trust God’s mystery
that somehow
goodness and meaning will come
despite and through
our personal agony and tragedy?

Maybe it’s hard for us to sing for ourselves,
but we must find the courage
to sing for others.
Someone else is always listening and watching and wondering,
someone whose agony and tragedy may be as great as our own,
but whose faltering flame of faith
may already have gone out.

Sing for them.
I’ll sing for you. 


                                      "Extreme Soul Makeover"

There once was a man who wanted to improve his life,
alterations on faults here,
renovations on foibles there,
so he asked God for help.
They talked it over and God agreed:
changes were called for.
They decided that tomorrow
they’d begin work on it together.

Next morning,
before the sun peeked above the horizon,
still comfortably snoozing and snoring,
the man was jarred awake and jolted out of bed
by the sounds of backhoes and bulldozers digging up his yard
and tearing down his shed.
He rushed outside in time to see a crane
hoisting a wrecking ball high above his roof.
And the man yelled,
“Great God in heaven, what are you doing?
I asked for home improvement,
but this is Reality TV nightmare!”

And God replied,
“Welcome to Reality G.O.D.
You prayed for change, and I got creative.
I thought to myself, let’s gut the place,
down to the foundation,
build something beautiful.
You can’t put new wine in old wineskins.
Yup, time for a whole new you!
You should see the mock-up drawings.
It’s going to be amazing!

“It’s going to be traumatic!” the man replied.
“You’re messing up my one, free life.”
“No,” God replied,
“You’re messing up your one, free life.”

Just then the wrecking ball fell for the first time,
and the man cried out, “Oh my God!”
And God replied,
“I know; I’m just too generous;
I can’t help it; it’s just the way I am.”

Then as the wrecking ball swung through
the living room picture window,
the man fainted dead away,
but not before blurting out,
“I can’t believe what I’m seeing!”
And God concluded,
“I know; isn’t it spectacular!” 

                                "See How They Love One Another"

Watching a videotape:
A St. Peter's worship service.
After the anthem and Young People's Parable,
Was reaching to press fast forward to skip to the sermon,
When I paused, looked more closely.
Something caught my eye.
Something astonishing, something beautiful.
The Passing of the Peace.

At first it was just scattered chaos --
Shaking of hands, chit-chatting.
But people seemed so enthused,
Couldn't stay in their pews.
The aisle filled with friendliness.
Then I saw it ---
Micro-miracles unfolding!

One person came from out of the frame
All the way up to the front
To greet someone in a wheelchair.
Another crossed over to an elderly person -
Together they laughed.
On the far aisle a child was lifted up
And actually passed around!
Another person sought out someone
Newly diagnosed with a serious illness.
They spoke intently, then embraced.
Micro-miracles of love unfolding!

It was said of the early church by outsiders,
"See how they love one another!"
At St. Peter's we simply call it,
The Passing of the Peace