With All Your Mind

 January 27, 2021

 

Hello, church family!

 

Yep, every time. Just enough hint of Spring to get us thinking about garden planning and spring cleaning, and then the biggest winter storm of the year. The biggest in a couple of years actually, according to the news last night. I pray that you are all enjoying it from home, or somewhere safe and warm!

 

Today, as I write, is Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the day in 1945 when Allied troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau and discovered how horrible it all truly was. This time last year, we were in Israel for that event, touring the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem in the middle of a rainstorm, while dignitaries from all over the world were arriving to mark the 75^th anniversary. We stayed for a couple of hours, and it wasn’t anywhere near enough. There was a mountain of small leather suitcases, and an installation of shoes worn by victims. There was detailed history, about how the Holocaust played out all over the world. A whole room, with just lists of millions and millions of names. Photos and objects and videos of people telling their stories. Powerful, and terrible, and beautiful. 

 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an excellent website, www.usmhh.com, with reflections and memories from survivors and their families, and lots of other good information if you’d like to learn more. I’ve been reading it all morning. It’s hard for most of us to really wrap our minds around it now, 76 years after the end of the war...and what I’ve been reading tells me that even Jewish people themselves didn’t quite believe what was happening, right in the moment, until they couldn’t escape it. Especially for we who believe in a good God and the power of God’s transforming love, for we who are taught so carefully and believe so deeply in the power of forgiveness and the essential goodness of every human being, it is nearly impossible to imagine.

 

Mixed in with all of this are my memories of being in and around Jerusalem and Jordan. I remember feeling like a foreigner in the birthplace of my faith...an interloper, even, who didn’t belong. I carried that feeling with me for months afterward, and grappled with it. But since then it has deepened and broadened into a humbling, and humbled, thing. What I found there was not just history, but life. The best food I have ever eaten, by far. A level of hospitality that felt utterly strange, and completely undeserved. Birds and mountains, deserts and oases, sheep and goats and camels and their keepers. Mothers and grandfathers and children. Art of all kinds, ancient and new. Sadness and peace, conflict and joy. Life. It has gotten under my skin, and I am longing to be there again.

 

Yes, absolutely we were foreigners. And that continues to teach me. Jesus and Jesus’ people, then and now, they are different from us. We are all human obviously, and beloved by God, the same in that way...but also very different in our language, culture, life experiences, outlook, even values. We are guests in their home. Guests in their faith, given undeserved welcome. Adopted children.

I don’t know how all of this fits together, exactly, Holocaust remembrance and the deep spiritual lessons I am continuing to learn from my time in the Holy Land, even a year later. Two separate sets of thoughts and feelings, really.

 

Maybe that is something, the way those separate thoughts and feelings don’t fit together. Because they don’t, at all. They are two extremes that cannot exist together, and maybe that is something to learn from. We can either encounter someone or something uncomfortably different from us and hate it, hate them, imagine the worst possible things and use those imaginings to justify our hatred. God knows, in small and large ways, human beings do that all the time. Or, we can understand our own undeserved welcome and unmerited belovedness, live in that deeply uncomfortable humility, and extend unearned grace to each other. And gain life, rather than death, in the process.

 

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; 

I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

~Ezekiel 36:26

 

Standing on the promises,

Pastor Dawn

 

 

Worship at Epworth and at Home

Sacred Vessels, Part 3: Loving God with Our Mind

We are vessels of God’s grace, to be poured out in the world. I love the image of God molding and forming us, carefully and particularly, with great attention to detail...and then of that vessel being filled with the Living Water to overflowing. Maybe that sounds intimidating, the idea of being bearers of God’s grace like that. Maybe the first thing that enters your mind is, I am not full enough of God’s grace for any of it to pour out anywhere. God is still busy molding me, I’m not ready! If those are your thoughts, you are not alone. We are *all* a mess, all in the process of being molded and made, all imperfect and partially complete. That’s OK. This life in faith is one of “moving on to perfection”, as John Wesley so famously said. And even in our incomplete, imperfect state we are each a gift to the world. 

 

This month, we are talking together about the part we play in submitting to God, the master potter, in molding and making us. With a focus on the Greatest Commandment, we are exploring how to make healthy choices for healthy physical, emotional, and spiritual living so that we can more fully love God, our neighbor, and ourselves. Because when we do that, when we follow God’s leading and make healthy rather than self-destructive choices, we rediscover our love of life again. 

 

We spent the last 2 weeks considering how to love God with all our heart. This Sunday, we will consider together how we can love God with our mind.

Worship will meet in person, at 9:00am in our sanctuary for those who prefer, and on Facebook and KVLV at 9:30am. Tell your friends! It appears that some are not reading these newsletters, and tell us they had no idea we were meeting in person. And then, after worship we will pray together and enjoy coffee hour in the sanctuary and on Zoom. The link will be in your email; if we don't have your email, reach out by emailing us at office@eumcfallon.org or by calling the church at 775-423-4714 and we will make sure you get the link.