Weaving Together the Beloved Community
How we can come together in action and advocacy to protect the Five Sisters?
This summer I have called two major meetings together.
The first meeting centers the Great Lakes to ask how we can come together in action and advocacy to protect the Five Sisters. The Great Lakes Creation Care Collaborative recognizes that poisons put into our land through agricultural practice, plastics disposed of into the Great Lakes every year (10,000 metric tons annually), and fossil fuel pipelines like Line 5 threaten to destroy our relatives.
Currently, we have registrants attending from the Minnesota Conference, Wisconsin Conference, Michigan Conference, Illinois Conference, Indiana-Kentucky Conference, and the Heartland (Ohio) Conference. What would it mean to have people of faith come together to protect our sisters with persistence? How could the church be the church in this day and age?
The other meeting is one I have put before the leadership of our church and is now being shared with leadership in the small, local churches within about 30 minutes driving distance of each other. All of these churches have either contemplated closing at one time or are struggling to make it with huge needed capital expenditures and decreased attendance and giving. Two of the churches are going from full-time pastorates to part-time. Most of these churches have buildings that lie dormant Monday through Saturday and have church grounds, like ours, that are somewhat large. It seems crazy for all of these churches to struggle like they are without thinking, “Is there another way?”
We all pretty much do the same thing on Sunday morning. What if we offered a diversity of worship options involving deep spirituality or music that might be something more than traditional church hymns? How is God moving in a new age?
I could get pretty depressed if my faith were in the way the world or the church currently run. But I think God is at work. And, as a person of faith, my task is always to try and trace where God might be leading in creativity and purpose. My hope is that these meetings will bring forward goodness, gifts, and power to give us all hope for another day.
Worship begins at 9:30 a.m.
Sunday, August 6, Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Hiroshima Day of Remembrance, Communion Sunday;
Genesis 32:22-31
What does it mean that Jacob, the one who is the ancestor of the whole Jewish people, is re-named as Israel? On this day of solemn remembrance, how do we live a faith that knows struggle and wrestling to be indicative of our faith journey?
Sunday, August 13, Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Matthew 14:22-33
Faith calls us to risk, to sometimes walk out into the chaos without all the answers. Sometimes, without guarantees, we are called to step out of what we know into the unknown. We know there are real dangers. We know that the way can be difficult. We know that we do not walk alone.
Sunday, August 20, Java Joe’s, Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Luke 10:30-37
General Synod Resolution, Denouncing the Dobbs Decision and Proclaiming Abortion as Health Care
In the last of our three dialog sermons, we talk about probably one of the most controversial subjects in our nation - abortion. How do we talk about such a controversial topic faithfully? As people of faith, how do we respond to such topics when there are no clear Scripture verses to guide us? That full resolution can be found
here: https://generalsynod.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/A.-Abortion-as-Healthcare.pdf
This resolution passed but not without much editing. You can find the final resolution here: https://generalsynod.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Committee-01-Resolution-Abortion-as-Healthcare-FINAL.pdf
Sunday, August 27, Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, Matthew 15:21-28
When I was a missionary in southern Mexico, I would end up in conversations when the people I was speaking with didn’t want me to know particular contents of the back and forth. And so, they would speak in Tzotzil or Tzeltal, an indigenous Mayan language. Peppered into many of those conversations was always the word, Kashlan. Kashlan meant “outsider,” or “not one of us,” and, not surprisingly, I would know that I was being talked about and whether I would be accepted by the community. What does it mean to be Kashlan when it determines whether you deserve healing and life?
Meditation Service, Sunday, August 13,
Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, 7:00 p.m.,
Guided Meditation Service,
“A Steady Heart”
We continue our Meditation Service on the second Sunday of each month with a guided meditation from Jack Kornfield. Jack Kornfield is one of my favorite people to listen to in guided meditation. He is not all rainbows and butterflies but helps people get right with their self-talk and reminds us all of our place in community.
This meditation begins by talking about someone who witnessed the plight of several refugee boats. In a difficult situation, some of these boats overfilled and perilously struggling with the sea, had no leadership. Everyone on board expressed anxiety and fear. And why wouldn’t they? Their lives were in danger.
But there was one boat that made it to its destination. When people surmised why that was, they recognized someone on that rickety craft had a steady heart. It wasn’t that these people were unaware of the danger or how perilously close they were to losing their lives. It was that their anxiety and fear didn’t serve them.
On that boat that made it, at least one leader emerged who had a steady heart. Yes, they could have lost their lives. But the whole community on that boat survived because good leadership reminded them that a steady heart served them.
In a difficult time, Jack Kornfield invites us to a steady heart.
✝
