I have, over the span of my life, eaten many great pies. Some of you are saying so what? Well, because I believe that pie baking is about relationships. First the stories: The first great pie baker I encountered was my Grandmother Adams. As a very young child I developed a taste for the wonderful pies that would grace the desert table at family events. Grandma was great at fruit pies. Whatever the season she would have a pie made from the fresh fruit which grew on the farm. At that time blueberry was my favorite. Grandma created the pie with wonderful crust both on the bottom and the top. It was like the pictures you would see in the recipe books. The second great pie baker was my mother. We always had desert at our dinner table. And while she was good at the fruit pies like Grandma, her specialty was pecan. It was a beautiful combination of a crust with pecan filling and a layer of pecan top which formed a different texture. I remember as a boy crushing the pecans in this small hand nut crusher. She wanted the pecans small enough to provide the correct texture for the top. Many of my days were filled with the aroma of pies cooking in the oven.
When I moved on to the pastorate Maratha June Shroyer at Millgrove UMC introduced me to the glories of the lemon meringue pie. What a wonderful mixture of the sweet and the tart. Now I have to admit that I have had other lemon merengue pies but Martha June’s were the best until Bernice Lewis at Taylor Chapel discovered I might like lemon pie and I started finding pies on my desk. All of the people who baked these wonderful pies are now baking in Heaven. They all have something in common besides baking me pies. When I ask how they learned to bake such great treats they all said they learned it by watching someone else and learning from
them.
Today I would have to say that I have two favorite types of pies. I love Paula’s sugar cream pie and I love raspberry cream pie. I still enjoy watching pies being baked. If you go to Das Dutchman Essenhaus in Middleburry, Indiana you can watch through the window in the bakery the Amish women baking the pies. It is still about learning from one generation to the next.
I believe that is what church is all about. Young learning from the example of the old. We are blessed to have children roaming around our church on Sunday and through the week. We need to be intentional about passing down our love of God and the church to the younger generation.
Pastor Mark