A congregation of the United Church of Canada
PIE Day
“I wonder how we might do it on our sleeves?”
If you attended church at Faith on Sunday (in-person, livestreamed, or tuning in later) you heard me talk at Kids Time about this Thursday (tomorrow) being National Affirming / PIE Day. PIE is an acronym for Public, Intentional, and Explicit. March 14th has been chosen as PIE day each year because the date can be expressed as 3.14, which you’ll remember from Math class as the first three digits in the concept of ‘pi’ (p). (And we all know that church people can’t resist a terrible pun!)
(Here’s a video that explains the PIE concept really well.)
Faith United has been an Affirming congregation for almost 6 years now! That’s wonderful! But having an Affirming designation doesn’t accomplish much unless you find ways to tell the world about that. That’s where PIE comes in. On Sunday I invited the kids to think about the ways that we as a church are Public about our Affirming welcome by counting up all the rainbow symbols we display. There are 7 of them (I think). (Can you name them all?) Some congregants express their support for the Affirming movement by participating in the annual Pride Parade on our behalf, carrying a Faith United banner. Personally, I wear a rainbow wrist band on my right wrist, and yes, it has led to conversations where I was able to be Public in my support.
I wonder what other ways Faith United might be intentional about being public in our explicit support of being Affirming? I wonder what ways ‘you’ might go about expressing your own sense of PIE? It can’t just be something that someone at the church does on our behalf – it has to be something we embody as a whole. And I know that we do, in our hearts. I wonder how we might do it on our sleeves?
Maundy Thursday Pot Luck!
In the before times, prior to when Covid changed the world, one of my favourite events in the Faith United year happened on Maundy Thursday each year. The Maundy Thursday service memorializes the Last Supper. But usually, the way we do communion in church is as a separate, ritualized act. The original Last Supper was actually just a regular meal that Jesus and his followers were sharing, and in the midst of that meal Jesus rose and infused deep meaning into the sharing of food, and the drinking of beverages.
Now that we are back to just about all of our various interactions at church we’re bringing back the Maundy Thursday Pot Luck dinner/service! The joy of this is that we do the pot luck ‘Family Style’ – meaning we put all of the food right on the tables in front of us as we sit, and then we get up and move around the table sharing food. It creates a most wonderfully loving chaos, and really makes us all feel like we’re together in the sharing. The meal is then interrupted several times for worshipful pieces – just like Jesus did at the so-called Last Supper.
If you’ve never been to this Family Style pot luck, you’re in for a treat! And if you’d like to join us online we will create a Zoom link so you can attend and we’ll put your videos on the big screen so you can be with those in-person. Please join us for this memorable and meaningful worship service!