The sweater I’m wearing today was made in China. My socks in South Korea, pants in Lesotho, shirt in Hong Kong, underwear in Honduras, shoes in Slovenia.

For breakfast I had coffee from Sumatra/Indonesia, milk from Middle Tennessee, cereal from somewhere in the United States, and an apple from New York State. Before I left for work (in a car from Japan), I filled my thermos (made in Nashville!) with tea from India. I’m typing this on a laptop made in Malaysia while listening to music from Italy on a device designed in California and assembled in China.

I’m amazed at how connected my life is with people in so many other places around the world, and how most of the time I’m not aware of that reality.

As part of our hunger:360 ministry project, we invite you to do a little domestic geography and economy research. We call it Mapping the Pantry in phase one, and Mapping a Meal in phase two.

Phase one. Between now and the end of March, take a moment (ideally in the company of all members of your household, especially the children),find a pencil and a piece of paper, and pick up all the food items in your pantry and/or your refrigerator and/or your cupboard, and write down where they came from. List their place of origin as accurately as possible – countries, states, and cities.

Phase two. This is a very similar research project.  Between now and the end of March, choose a meal and write down where all its ingredients came from, again, as accurately as possible (the honey in my tea is from Goodlettsville, depending on how far Mr. Johnson takes his beehives around Middle Tennessee).

On two Sundays (March 21 and 28) and on the days in between, we will transfer all the results to a couple of maps in our sanctuary, one of the U.S. and one of the world. We want to get a visual impression of just how connected we are with people all over the whole world in the things we eat. We want to create opportunities for questions and wonder.

You can use the form below to report your results, or return one of the “grocery lists” from the hunger:360 bulletin board (these lists will also be available in the Sunday bulletins). Better yet, bring your list to worship on March 21 or 28, and transfer the results to the maps yourself!

On Saturday, March 6, from 5-7pm, we have the opening reception for muddy hymnal, a photography exhibit in our sanctuary. The artist, Tallu Schuyler will be present and give a gallery talk at 6pm about her experience in Nicaragua.

Also on Saturday, March 6, the Vine Street youth group will host another fantastic Fair Trade Coffee House.

On Sunday morning, March 7, at 9:30 a.m. we look forward to welcoming Prof. Douglas Heimburger, the Associate Director for Education and Training at the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health. Prof. Heimburger will help us understand what happens to our bodies when we don't get proper nutrition, and what the impact is on an individual's as well as the larger community's development.

There is hunger in Nashville. Food security is a term from the dictionary of bureaucrats. Hunger is a human experience that impacts body, mind, and spirit. There is hunger in Nashville, and there are people who help us see and understand and address it.

Following the 10:45am worship service on Sunday, February 28 (approximately at 12:30pm), Tallu Schuyler will be at Vine Street to talk about food security, food deserts, and hunger. She is the Executive Director of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a ministry named after a miracle. We will eat a simple, nutritious meal (rice, beans, and cornbread) and we will learn together - statistics, terms, facts, numbers, and the human experiences that so easily get lost behind them. Come and join us for this Sunday afternoon opportunity to eat and learn together!

This lunch & learn is part of our hunger:360 ministry project, and more events and programs are coming up soon. Check the calendar for details, and watch for more information early next week.

Friday I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours in the kitchen with friends. We browned turkey breast, cooked rice, chopped  and sauteed onions, sweet peppers, broccoli, sweet potatoes, and celery. And when we were finished - the last ingredient we added was a handful of fresh oregano - there were several trays of delicious lunch, ready to be served.

It all began with the lovely fragrance of garlic from the marinade that had infused the turkey. With the magic of heat and olive oil, all the other flavors emerged and blended, sweet and salty, meaty, malty, musty, hot and mmmh. Cooking a meal is alchemy, beautiful magic.

We loaded the food on a truck - a great truck equipped with heated compartments - and then the miracle continued in the streets of Nashville. We had made lunch for men and women who spend the night in shelters and tents, under bridges, or just walking until morning. We had cooked a good meal for people who spend the better part of the day hoping for better days.

There is hunger in Nashville. Food security is a term from the dictionary of bureaucrats. Hunger is a human experience.

There are food deserts in Nashville. And there are people who help us see and understand and address those realities.

Next Sunday, February 28, following the 10:45 worship service, Tallu Schuyler will talk to us about hunger in Nashville. Tallu is the Executive Director of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a ministry named after a miracle. We will eat lunch together (rice, beans, and cornbread) and we will learn together - statistics, terms, facts, and the human experiences that so easily get lost behind them.

On Saturday, February 27, you have an opportunity to be part of a little kitchen magic. There will be rice, black beans, onions, peppers, garlic, corn meal, eggs, salt, milk, water and fire. Would you like to be part of turning all that into a meal for many? The cooks will meet in the Vine Street kitchen sometime on Saturday. Just complete the form at the bottom of this post.

Before you scroll down: on Friday, February 26, a group will gather at 9am in the kitchen at Woodmont Christian Church's South Hall to prepare lunch for the homeless. Contact Caitlin Dally caitlin.m.dally@vanderbilt.edu or Tallu Schuyler talluschuyler@gmail.com for details.

At Vine Street, we want to integrate what we do in those areas: the life of faith is not a pizza, but more like a circle where all points are defined by a common center. Our work, our worship, our family life, our study, our hopes, our fellowship – they all share, we all share a common center in the God who meets us in Jesus Christ.

360 is the sum of all angles. 360 is our way of saying, “We want to look at this from as many angles as possible. We want to experience this as completely as possible. We want to bring together what we know belongs together.”

hunger:360 is our second 360 project. Why hunger? That’s the question. Our gardens, fields and farms produce more than enough food for all, and yet there is persistent, deadly hunger on every inhabited continent. In November, the Department of Agriculture reported that here in the United States the number of Americans who lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million. The government began tracking what is now commonly called “food security” 14 years ago, and the number of men, women, and children lacking “food security” has never been higher.

During Lent this year, beginning with Ash Wednesday on February 17, we will bring hunger and faith together to see how and where they touch.

We will study, we will fast, we will prepare and serve meals, we will pray, we will map our pantries, we will walk, we will read, we will trust the God of abundance in the deserts of scarcity.

hunger:360 offers us opportunities to

• talk with Tallu Schuyler, Executive Director of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, about hunger in Nashville, and how we can address it
• hear Kevin McCoy, Coordinator of the Nashville CROP Walk, who is passionate about the work of Church World Service and its fight against hunger
• prepare meals and serve them in unfamiliar places in our city
• walk through a photography exhibit in our sanctuary
• pray with Jesus, the bread of life
• watch a movie about a community garden project in L.A.
• tour Second Harvest Foodbank
• ask ourselves what hunger drives our insatiable consumerism
• talk with Prof. Douglas Heimburger from the Vanderbilt Institute of Global Health about the effects of hunger and malnutrition on the human body
• read Sara Miles, Take This Bread and discuss it in a small group
• participate in the Nashville CROP Walk
• map our pantries and refrigerators and find out where all this food comes from
• worship God with our whole being

Watch for updates on individual events on this website.

The calendar below looks best in Agenda view.

[This is from the liner notes of Andra's 2009 Insta-Rock Records Release: In Small Things. We know that after reading this, you'll definitely want to check out her website]

It was February of 2006 and I had a tall order:

The children’s choir I direct had been asked to sing in our church’s Ash Wednesday service.  Now, I don’t know if you are familiar with any children’s choir anthem that addresses our mortality, our need to repent, or our general insignificance, but I couldn’t seem to find any in our filing cabinet in the choir room.

I sat on the floor of my living room and as I mulled it over, I somehow found myself thinking about middle school science class and Carl Sagan and a rock concert I’d been to the previous winter.  Here’s what happened:

In 1990, NASA sent Voyager 1 into space.  After it had travelled about 4 billion miles away from Earth, Voyager 1 was directed to turn around and take some pictures.  Astronomists were very surprised to find that Earth showed up in the picture.  Can you see it?

It became known as the Pale Blue Dot picture, because that was all our Earth looked like in the vast expanse of space.

Carl Sagan, an astronomer, author and scientist affiliated with the space program since its inception, gave a talk the year these photos were released.  These are his words:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Alright, now I was cookin’.  This is definitely Children’s Choir Anthem material, right?

The answer is YES! It’s EVERYBODY ANTHEM material!  We’re all in this together: our hopes, dreams, frustrations, loves, losses, significance, insignificance — all of it.

We are all in this together as one tiny speck of dust on a sunbeam, the sunbeam that God holds in His hand.

The way I see it; the way I sing it, we live our lives to know that we are called by love.

So.

After all that worry and effort into trying to find an appropriate anthem for the kids to sing, I wrote the song for Ash Wednesday in twenty minutes.  The song just arrived.

The only part missing was a bridge.  I talked it over with Thomas Kleinert, the minister of our church.  Thomas recommended Psalm 42:2.

My soul is thirsting for You.  When will I see You face to face?

When the kids and I gathered to rehearse, I wondered how to preface the song.  I decided words like “cosmos” and phrases such as  “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam” might  be a little much for these second and third graders.

I decided to keep it simple and preface the song with “We’re going to sing a new song. Here’s how it goes.”

To my astonishment, the kids were captivated by this song from the get go.  By the second chorus, they were singing along, and when we got to the end, the kids and I sat silent with only the buzz of the yucky fluorescent church light overhead.

It was one of those holy moments.

I was struck by the brilliance of the miracle that we are significant to God.

For the past three years, the children’s choir at Vine Street Christian Church has sung “Ashes to Ashes” each Ash Wednesday while our congregation comes forward to receive the mark of the cross, made from the ashes of last year’s palms on their foreheads.

I am so thankful to all the children and youth from Vine Street who came into the studio to finish this track with me (watch them singing along to the playback in the studio).  After all, this song started out with their sweet voices in mind.  You’ll also hear Ben Harper singing a sweet, sweet harmony in the bridge, Will Harrison’s mournful guitar, Stephen Daniel King on bass and Jason Cheek on drums.   

This year, we’ll come together for our Ash Wednesday service on February 17th at 6:00 in the chapel.  I hope you can be there with us.  Feel free to sing along!

Download here or listen below (and sing along!)

 
Ashes to Ashes
by Andra Moran

We watch, we wait
We hope, we pray
We try to take
A path that returns to You

Ashes to ashes, water and rust
We are but dust on the sunbeam You hold in Your hand
You call us by name
And we rise from ashes again

A breath of life,
A thirst, a fire
We live our lives
To know that we’re called by Love

Ashes to ashes, water and rust
We are but dust on the sunbeam You hold in Your hand
You call us by name
And we rise from ashes again

My soul is thirsting for You, I long to see Your face
My soul is thirsting for You.  Fill me up.

andramoran.com

Again, we are proud to be part of Week of Compassion and its approach to ministry: we work with local partners, we cooperate with international partners, all of our disaster relief gifts go to disaster relief (and not to overhead). "Earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade," wrote Tracy Kidder in the New York Times (Country Without a Net). Our response will always address the immediate need as well as reduce the systemic, extreme vulnerability to natural disasters.

Our current focus, as part of the coordinated effort of Church World Service, is on transporting basic material supplies like tarps, blankets, hygiene kits and baby supplies to Haiti's capital area. We are grateful for our strong relationship with our historic partner from the Dominican Republic, Servicios Sociales de Iglesias Dominicanas. Their proximity makes our response possible.

The second prong of our response addresses another basic need: clean water. Our response is targeted and effective because we work closely with ecumenical church partners. This is a powerful reminder that church unity is not a mere matter of opinion or doctrine, but of faithfulness in witness and service.

At Vine Street, we want to make sure that our response always includes even our youngest members. They overhear the news reports, they ask questions, they remember the people of Haiti in their prayers, and they want to help. And we want them to always be part of our mission and ministry.

The hygiene kits that are being shipped to Port-au-Prince via the Dominican Republic come from Church World Service warehouses, and the shelves are now empty. On Sunday, before we gather in worship, we will assemble one hundred of these basic kits from hundreds of towels, tooth brushes, bars of soap, etc. we have already purchased. This is one small thing even the youngest member of our community can do. We will dedicate those gifts in worship together with a special offering for Week of Compassion and with our other gifts.

Because we work with our partners on the ground and in countries around the world, we will soon know what else we can do to honor God in our brothers and sisters in Haiti.

This year, there are about twenty of us (more are coming during the course of the week), and we are working on Mrs. Banks's house. Her home was flooded after Katrina, but she never had the resources to rebuild. The first floor of the house was gutted, and she and her family continued to live on the scecond floor. Now, thanks to churches paying attention and pooling resources, we are able to gut the remainder of the building, do some necessary repairs, and get it ready for new insulation and sheet rock, fresh paint, new floors, new windows and doors.

While it is sad to think that so many years after Katrina people are still living in these circumstances, it is a joy to be part of making a difference in a very significant way.

Our second worship service will take place at 8 p.m., and it will bring together members of our congregation and our Room in the Inn guests.  To make room for those without a home or a place to rest for the night is always an occasion of mutual blessing, but on this night it is especially meaningful. If you wish to join us on Christmas Day for a great breakfast with our Room in the Inn guests, we invite you to come to the fellowship hall around 8 a.m. - and feel free to just stop by and say "Hello, merry Christmas!"

At 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, we gather in the sanctuary for a celebration of Lessons & Carols.  Once again, special music with harp, piano, and viola will begin at 10:45 p.m.  This quiet night service includes the celebration of the Lord's Supper (and since the table is the Lord's, not the church's, all who receive Christ's invitation are welcome to share the meal).

From all of us here at Vine Street, a merry Christmas to you and yours!

Are you thinking, “Mmmmh, chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”? Close. Our hearth won’t have a fire in it, but we’ll gather around it anyway to sing our yuletide carols.

This cozy evening in our fellowship hall has a long tradition at Vine Street. We get together at 5:30 PM for dinner, and then we sing all our favorites and watch a program of music and skits (we haven’t had folks dressed up as Eskimos lately, but the Grinch showed up last year!).

Feel free to bring a dessert or some cookies to share, and if you want to get on the program (with a song or a dance or a story or a surprise?), please put your name on the poster by the door in the reception area.

Christmas Around the Hearth is festive fun for kids from one to ninety-two!