As I write this, we've just finished with an early spring snowstorm that for moments whited-out the backways to Chesley. Another long, cold winter that's growling as it slinks away, and an Easter Sunday a week away that promises not much warmth or sunshine.

I'm reminded again how major church celebrations are tied to seasonal weather. Up here in Grey Bruce, what would Christmas be without cold or snow? Or Remembrance Sunday without overcast skies, maybe drizzle in the air?

Easter is tied to springtime flowers, grass greening, warmth and sunshine. Easter in the midst of snowstorm just doesn't feel like Easter for so many of us up here near Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. Even with sunshine, relentless deep cold and snowbanks in March makes Lent feel forever.

Coming as it does this year wrapped in late winter, Easter AD 2015 in Chesley and district forces us to face the realities, without the cushion of all-out Spring. Do we really believe Christ is risen? Everybody gets Christmas--families, children, presents, candlelight, softly-falling snow. Minus Spring, Easter is like the Reubens painting, a semi-naked, somewhat startled, muscular guy flung out of a rock-hewn tomb, blinding and terrifying cowering onlookers-- a hard sell, indeed!

Yet that's the nub of the Good News, whatever the weather-- "We preach Christ, and Him crucified," as St Paul has it.

St Mark's, Chesley, is a regularly small Sunday congregation of Gospel people. I think worship is like throwing a party, and I always hope for a lot of partygoers on Easter Sunday.

Given the weather, that is proving a vain hope this year.

But our regular congregation here gets it, and they'll all be there on Sunday to shout "Hallelujah!" Surely, that's what counts in God's eyes, and that's what most pleases King Jesus.

The post-Christmas Epiphany season, governed by the date of Easter, has stretched to March 5 (Ash Wednesday) this year, one Sunday short of the longest it can be.

Sundays at St Mark's, we've used this extra time to go "off lectionary" and consider more fully what it means to be children of the Light-- brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, who is The Light, as the first paragraph of John's Gospel so eloquently declares.

What we've been discovering is that while acknowledging that we need to be Light is boilerplate among active Christians, wanting to be Light is almost another matter. In so many ways, liturgy and Word call us to be Light-- the question, though, is whether we actually desire that.

To be Light, we're discovering, is hard work. It's more than giving an hour or so on Sunday mornings back to the Lord. It's becoming Christ in our time and place-- voices proclaiming a living God, bread broken for others, servants to each other and the world God made and loves so much.

Being a nice person, we are coming to admit, is pretty easy. Getting down to work in the mission field isn't. But that's what being Light is all about.

At St Mark's, it's being revealed to us that mission in the Name of the Holy One is ultimately a ministry of healing, both for the fallen world and for us who are disciples of Christ, Light in darkness, Lord and Saviour of the world.

Being Light in that way is a very significant undertaking for a little congregation like ours. Pray for us, as we do for you.

Christmas at St Mark's was particularly lovely this year-- especially for the candlelit night services, Christmas and New Year's Eves, the church glowed golden.

But Christmas isn't over yet-- it officially ends on the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Candlemas, February 2, forty days after December 25. We bless and light the candles once again as we sing Simeon's Song, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy will. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation," with its refrain, "A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel." Thus Christians throughout the world say farewell to another Gracious Time.

The Gracious Time now will continue at St Mark's, though, because we're introducing a regular monthly healing service here. I've been a member and chaplain in the Order of St Luke since I helped found the Hartford, Connecticut, Chapter in the 1990's.

The Hartford Chapter of the Order was greeted at first with not insignificant skepticism. Some of our Christian colleagues outright denied the Biblical accounts of Jesus' healings, others claimed that Holy Spirit removed the healing charism after the time of the apostles and the firm establishment of the Church. We founders just asked the skeptics to come and see, and that while Jesus does not always choose to cure, He always heals. The gift of the abiding presence of Holy Spirit assures us.

St Mark's is offering its healing services to the whole community. The services are simple, fervent but modest. They are a reminder that we all float on the gracious breath of God, our creator, redeemer and sustainer, and that in Him, all will be well, whether here or in heaven. 

Last Sunday, Chesley Ministerial and Rhody Family Funeral Home of Chesley jointly hosted what was first nick-named the "Blue Christmas" service, and now is becoming known as "LightShine." 

After a plateau period a few years ago, the service is growing again, this year attracting 120 women, men and children, all honouring someone who has died. LightShine recognises that Christmas time can be emotionally wrenching for those who can't help but notice the empty places at their tables; as the dark of evening spreads over Chesley, LightShine is meant to be a service of hope. We sing, we embrace, we remember, we reflect, we grieve, we pray, we light candles, we anoint, we celebrate, all in the context of Emmanuel, God-with-Us. 

Each year, fewer and fewer LightShine attendees seem to be regular churchgoers. 

All the more reason for Rhody's and the Ministerial to offer Lightshine every year. For once again we enter the Gracious Time. Soon it will be Christmas, and we who keep alive the flame of Jesus, Son of God, proclaim to a hurting, hungering world: "He came down that we might have love, joy, hope, peace." "Glory to God in the highest, and peace, goodwill to men." "If ye would hear the angels sing, Christians, see ye let each door stand wider than it e'er stood before on Christmas day in the morning."

Oh, how I'm looking forward to the celebrations at St Mark's! Emmanuel, God-with-Us! The Gracious Time! And all well, and all well, and all manner of thing well!

As the construction of the Lange Memorial Organ has progressed throughout the summer, I have been continually awed by the scope of the project, the multiple skills of builders John and Steve Tite and our faithful volunteer crew of St Mark assistants, and the determination over the months by a number of our St Mark women that all the workers be fed royally every day.

I have been playing pipe organs since I was a teenager--until this project, though, I really had no idea what goes into the making of these astoundingly complex beasts.

But now that the organ is almost ready to play, my thoughts are turning toward my comfort zone-- making the instrument sing.

I am gathering a small chant choir of men to lead Lutheran Evening Prayer on All Saints Sunday, November 3, at 4pm.  We will be chanting as much of the liturgy (a combination of Vespers and Compline) as we can manage, and the congregation will be digging into some grand old hymns.

My special contribution will be three organ pieces in the middle of the service, all of them by the late Healey Willan of Toronto and based on famous Gregorian chant melodies that are proper to the All Saints festival. Each is dramatic in its own way, and will demonstrate the Memorial Organ's remarkable array of tone colour.

There will be two more special afternoon services featuring the new organ-- the first on Sunday, January 5, during which we'll sing Christmas music galore; the second on Sunday, March 30-- before its official gala opening the first Saturday evening in June.  And in the meantime, our organist Ted Filsinger will be offering tours and demonstrations of the instrument for both children and adults.

All of which makes me acknowledge, powerfully and humbly: Our new pipe organ is a truly magnificent blessing from God, not just to St Mark's, but to Chesley and everywhere around it. 

Thanks over and over to Him, the Master of Music and Loveliness!

At worship at St Mark's, we've just finished a summer's worth of homilies/sermons/meditations on each of the Ten Commandments-- a necessary task, both daunting and exhilarating. 

The skeptics of the Biblical studies academy, aided ironically enough by the knee-jerk conservatism of their opponents on the extreme wing of the religious right, has pretty well reduced the Commandments, for thinking people, to nothing more than demagogues' politics of convenience. It's hard to get seminarians to take them seriously-- that's the daunting part for me: "With your education, you should know better." But the exhilarating part is the Commandments' continuing relevance-- they're a lodestone of the deepest spiritual wisdom, which is why they're so necessary for contemporary Christians. Taken together, reasonably interpreted, they form a Rule of Life.

Adultery? Still very much with us-- just ignore the patriarchal color (You know-- wife as possession). Adultery always poisons every marriage it touches.

Murder? What about mean girls and bully boys who crush the spirits of the meekest kids on the playground? Or all those dreams so curtly dismissed on Dragons' Den?

Idols? There are lots of them to tempt us. Maybe not graven images here in North America-- but behold the Bible as "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

Wrestling with the Ten Commandments this summer, as I realise here at the middle of September, has been-- curious to observe-- mentally, spiritually, even physically exhausting. Yet I can't help but feel I've just scratched the surface Sunday by Sunday. And I'm not done yet, because I'm reworking the homilies as essays and publishing them in book form for St Mark's congregation and its friends. 

Will the book be as challenging--and valuable-- to read as it was to prepare?