Beloved! Beloved! Beloved!
How good it feels to say that again. How good it feels to be seeing you, hugging you, patting your baby bellies, hearing your tales of woe and triumph and moving house, seeing you tan and relaxed, seeing you working hard on your stuff, hearing about the fullness of your lives, praying with you in coffee shops and at church meetings, again.
I was a wanderer, a stranger, a homeless Christian for the summer. It was an incredibly poignant and valuable experience, and I can’t wait to share it with you, in bits and pieces, over the next many moons. And how glad I am to be spiritually homeless no more! To be back among my brothers and sisters!
This Sunday I’ll see you in worship, and you get a chance to see each other, on this Great Gathering Sunday. Some of us started school this week. Some of us got serious with job searches, or new internships. I hear a lot of new leaves turning over, all at once. All that busy-ness with which we are busy means we need even more that hour of prayer, of holy hugs, of grounding in our callings and a chance to remember that we belong somewhere, that we belong to Someone and a lot of little someones.
At the beginning of the summer, just as I left for sabbatical, you got to take home a puzzle piece. If you can find it (!) bring it with you this Sunday, when we put all the pieces back together.
In worship, Laura Ruth and I will be preaching from 2 Timothy 4; a letter Paul wrote to one of his church leaders, maybe on his deathbed. He says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” We are in a holy relay race in our faith community; we have work we need to do, wonderful work, and you are absolutely necessary to making it happen.
Sabbatical team will join us in a litany of Christian elemental symbols to remember what we did this summer, while we were together and while we were apart. It is Jubilee Worship and the kids will be with us! If your child would like to help present the elements to be placed on our communion table, please come a little early to practice. We will celebrate communion! I know we just did it last week, but can you really have too much communion?
Choirs sings after long hiatus! Hallelujah! And we’ll have a fabulous coffee hour, before Althea begins a new chapter of NOFBS, focusing on Romans, one of my favorite books of the Bible.
Christlove,
Molly