Sacred Vessels

 January 12, 2021

Good winter morning, church family 😊

I love this time in the dark and the quiet, with the fire going and the hot coffee next to me, and content puppy dogs under my chair all fat and happy after their breakfast. I am definitely a morning person, but I do like to start the day slowly and quietly, with prayer and thanksgiving and scripture. 

You may be more of a night owl, or find your best energy mid-day. Either way, I hope you’re finding a time in your day to spend regularly in prayer. Like an appointment with God. (Is that the right word?? That sounds so clinical. But “date” sounds a little weird too...well, you know what I mean.) If you don’t yet have a regular prayer habit, let me encourage you that you will, I guarantee, find it really helpful. Especially now, when the rhythms of worship and church life are so different, and when anxiety and loneliness are high, it is essential to our heart and mind and soul that we are intentional about our practice of prayer. Like taking time to eat and sleep, prayer and sabbath are critical pauses to tend to our spiritual health.

I have been pausing a lot lately, thinking and praying about what is happening in our country right now. Some of you may feel that a pastor does not need to worry about that (or at least not talk about it), since a pastor’s focus should be on the spiritual life rather than the political life. But our spiritual life is deeply impacted by our life in the world, and our life in faith becomes dry and empty when it is divorced from what is happening in the world around us. Our words and actions are fueled by the state of our hearts, and vice versa (Luke 6:45, Matthew 12:34, Proverbs 4:23), so both must be healthy and faithful.

One thing I know is that there are people of faith on all sides of our different concerns, who truly believe that they are acting out their faith and honoring God by their actions. Even when I disagree with those beliefs and when the actions seem clearly wrong to me, still I see the passion for righteousness and love of God in the intentions. I hope you do, too, and that you are keeping that knowledge in the forefront of your minds when you consider the beliefs and actions of your fellow Christians, and your fellow citizens. Though people with evil intent certainly exist, for the most part we are all trying to do what is right here.

However.

Just because our intentions are good or we deeply believe a thing doesn’t mean we are right. History shows that well-meaning Christian people with passion for their faith and love for righteousness sometimes get it really, tragically, catastrophically wrong. Sometimes that happens because we have gotten our facts wrong; always it’s because we have gotten our hearts wrong.

So this is what I will say, with full confidence that I am mostly preaching to the choir here. It is never, not ever, NOT EVER FAITHFUL to take the life of someone – or even threaten anyone – unless they are actively trying to take the  life of someone else. Even when those who sought to kill Jesus came to arrest him, Jesus refused to respond with violence and did not allow his friends to do so either. Those who stormed the Capitol and sought to murder Nancy Pelosi and hang Mike Pence, no matter how righteous they feel their cause might be, are wrong. Those who killed or deliberately injured police officers and others during the riots last week are wrong.   Those who are writing words about violent, murderous revolution, or making vile “jokes” about doing violence to President Trump or members of Congress or anyone else, and those who are reading and enjoying and sharing those words, are wrong. WRONG. This is nonnegotiable. I know that we all, as people of faith and representatives of the gospel of Jesus Christ, will speak firmly with one unified voice in condemning such things when we encounter them.

We at Epworth UMC, in our community, and in our country disagree regarding what is true and what is false, on a whole lot of topics. We can’t all be right, so some of us – most likely all of us, to one degree or another – have our facts wrong. I am praying earnestly that we quickly become better able to discern truth from falsehood, and gain in wisdom. I hope you will join me in that prayer.

But while we continue to grow in wisdom, it is vital that we get our hearts right. When we focus on fighting what we hate, we find our hearts grow dark, hard, and shriveled pretty quickly. That anger and hate, even when we intend it to fight evil, can become all-consuming and spiritually destructive. It can steal wisdom from us, steal peace from us, lead us far from God, and cause us to become the very thing we seek to destroy. 

If, on the other hand, we resist evil by focusing on saving what we love, our words and actions are altogether different. We still might have our facts wrong, but we are better informed by the Gospel, and better able to be vessels of God’s miraculous lifegiving grace. Self-righteousness becomes impossible. Violence, in word or action, becomes unthinkable. Obeying Jesus’ command to love one another, even our enemies, becomes easy and instinctive. And the Gospel is made manifest.

The greatest revolution on earth is one of uncommon, irrepressible love, and peace beyond all understanding. Its source is the living God, made known in Jesus Christ. As my friend Ed Stallworth said the other day, we have seen what hate can do. Let’s show the world what love can do. 

 

In God’s amazing grace,

Pastor Dawn

Worship at Epworth and at Home

Sacred Vessels

Last week in worship, we renewed our baptism together and our covenant with God as we remembered Jesus’ own baptism and God’s promises to us. These next few weeks, we will talk together about becoming healthy, holy vessels of the grace that God has poured into us. Using Jesus’ command to love the Lord our God with our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves, we will talk together about the importance of caring for our body, our heart, our mind, our soul, and each other. Our bodies are a temple, after all, and together we are the body of Christ. January being a time when lots of us resolve to take better care of our physical health, we will start this week with our physical body: how to honor God by keeping our body as healthy as we can, and why tending to our physical health is an important spiritual practice. As you prepare your heart for worship, you might like to read and pray with Psalm 139:13-16, or (and!) 1 Corinthians 6:19-20.  

Worship will meet in person, at 9:00am in our sanctuary for those who prefer, and on Facebook and KVLV at 9:30am. We can give GREAT thanks to God that, due to our care in sanitizing and masking and whatnot, we have had NO spreading of the virus in our church, even though a couple of members have gotten the virus elsewhere. Keep it up, beloved! It is a great way to follow God’s commandment to love one another.