Home page
• Worship and prayer-- corporately as a congregation, privately in our homes, and publicly in God's world.
• Forgiveness and healing--
in our church, among our families and friends, and throughout our community.
• Faith-building-- forming our minds on the mind of Christ, with each household a community of faith and each gathering a cherished opportunity to share and grow in Christ.
• Hospitality-- treasuring everyone who comes our way, striving to be faithful friends and working to help all in need.
• Good Citizenship-- both of the Kingdom of God and the govern-
ments of this world, seeking justice, peace and dignity for all people.
• Caretakers of God's Blessings
thankful for all of God's blessings, showing reverence for God's creation, and living every day mindful of our duty to God.
We Pledge to be a home for one another and welcome new friends on the journey.
• Forgiveness and healing--
in our church, among our families and friends, and throughout our community.
• Faith-building-- forming our minds on the mind of Christ, with each household a community of faith and each gathering a cherished opportunity to share and grow in Christ.
• Hospitality-- treasuring everyone who comes our way, striving to be faithful friends and working to help all in need.
• Good Citizenship-- both of the Kingdom of God and the govern-
ments of this world, seeking justice, peace and dignity for all people.
• Caretakers of God's Blessings
thankful for all of God's blessings, showing reverence for God's creation, and living every day mindful of our duty to God.
We Pledge to be a home for one another and welcome new friends on the journey.
Adapted from David J. Schlafer and Timothy F. Sedgwick, Preaching What We Practice. Moorehouse Publishing (Harrisburg PA, 2007)
The Love of the FatherThis Epistle lesson
(1 John 3:1-7) is about love and identity: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
I believe that it was St. Augustine who said that if we could only see the holiness of God dwelling in each other we would fall on our faces in awe before every Christian we encountered. And I know that St. Augustine said that we are the bread on the altar, the crude, ordinary stuff of everyday life, that God takes, blesses, breaks and shares with the world. Being adopted as a child of God is all about our transformation from ordinary to exceptional.
Such moments of realization are moments of awe, when we really do see what love the Father has given us, to clothe us through baptism in the garments of Christ.
Thomas Merton, a great 20th century Christian mystic had just such an experience on a street corner in Louisville, Kentucky on March 18, 1958. He wrote the following description:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Merton echoes: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” When we are adopted as God’s children through baptism, we become Jesus’ brothers and sisters, heirs through adoption of the same position Jesus has by right. Being a child of God is a place of highest honor. The catechism in our previous Book of Common Prayer put it this way: "At my baptism, I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven."
And this is by the pure gift of God, utter sacrificial generosity and good will toward humankind. Therefore our only possible reasonable response is acceptance, awe, humility, adoration and thanksgiving. So, as we go about during this resurrection season of Easter, try to put on Christ-focal glasses and see the world as it really is in the spiritual realm.
