From the Pastor

A Little Love Note

The Season of Creation is upon us! I love each September. I feel the call to praise God and express deep gratitude for God’s good creation. I also feel the tug on my heart to confess how I take God’s creatures and plants and earth and sky and sea for granted, and how that forgetting impacts real animals, plants, waters, and humans in our world. There is always space for becoming more and more aligned with the love of Jesus, “the Word” present with God throughout and reflected by Creation. In our Prayer Service for Creation, we join with churches from all over the world practicing the inaugural Feast Day of Creation, which will be celebrated either the day of September 1 or the following Sunday. There will be prayer stations set up throughout the sanctuary and during the prayer service, there will be live readings, songs, and prayers.

What is beautiful about our United Methodist tradition is that we believe that we are constantly on the journey of sanctification, or living into God’s sanctifying grace. We are constantly becoming and living into the loving neighbor, the loving creature God made us to be. We are a bunch of people at different stages of our journey, coming together as a community, and we mess up sometimes. We hurt one another (and all that is God’s) with our words and actions sometimes. We doubt and fail and love and laugh and cry and work things out together. We certainly think differently and hold different perspectives. In the book I’ve been reading, A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community," John Pavlovitz invites us to consider the 4 legs of the bigger table for creating truly redemptive community where all are fed (Jesus was an expert in these things):

Radical hospitality: feels fully welcomed, able to rest in the presence of others, no longer having to prove one’s worth (seen and heard, welcome the person as you would Jesus)
Total authenticity: welcome and safe to be exactly who they are
True diversity: the “other” is always elevated and every story validated
Agenda-free community: our main concern is making disciples by letting people know we are followers of Jesus and modeling the fullest incarnation of Jesus that we can manage

During this season of Creation, may this be a time of great praise and great reflection on how we might practice radical hospitality, total authenticity, true diversity, and agenda-free community with all that is God’s. God’s Table is bigger than we think. God’s love and the reflection of God’s image in this world is growing more and more in our consciousness every day. There are species we are still discovering! God can hold the vastness of our personalities and perspectives. Our call is to come to the Table, hungry with a desire for Jesus’ love and healing, and to remain at the Table, no matter who joins us for the meal. And so, dear ones, the season of Creation is our call to praise and prayer for kingdom living: a reminder to realign our hearts and priorities with the priorities of God and God’s creation in this life, to welcome all as we would Christ, and to model our Christian discipleship.

From the Pastor

A Little Love Note

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