Embracing Community Through Faith
Dear First Pres SLO Family,
Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus, the one who holds all things together, even when they seem to be falling apart.
The fires in Southern California continue to dominate the headlines. As I said on Sunday, Shelley and I have more than 20 friends who have lost homes—lost everything. I think that number has popped over 25 in the last few days. Friends from church, friends from seminary—today I learned that someone I went to high school with lost her home in Altadena.
So much loss.
Life is like this too often. We walk in a world that is full of pain and anguish just as often as it is with beauty and hope. Nothing in the life of faith guarantees that this kind of suffering won’t touch us—that’s the hard truth. What a life of faithful discipleship offers is the possibility for meaning—the promise that this is not all there is.
In baseball terms, the Gospel of Jesus bats last.
This month we’re talking about what it means to be the church. If you’ve been with me over these last five years, then this sentence will be familiar to you: A healthy church is built on a foundation of Jesus Christ, and expressed through Fellowship, Worship, Discipleship and Mission. Each of those four expressions come from our place as children of God, holy and dearly loved.
Last Sunday I mentioned a friend of mine who had just lost his father. That father was a well-known biblical scholar and theologian—he wrote gently and clearly about how his mind had changed over time on some of the most divisive issues confronting Christians and churches these days. In a book written by my friend and his father, here’s what the dad had to say about who and how we’re meant to be as we gather in our churches.
It’s easy for people in churches today to be quite content to be separated from those they disagree with. Whether ‘the people different from us’ are ‘liberals’ or ‘conservatives,’ there’s surely another church down the road where they’d fit in better. But that’s not exactly the ideal symbolized by the metaphor of the church as ‘the Body of Christ.’
The vision that Paul offers is quite a different one: ‘Welcome one another, just as Christ as welcomed you, for the glory of God.’ That’s not just a shrugging compromise; it is the climax and consequence of the intricate, passionate argument of the whole letter [to the Romans]. Paul proclaims that the gospel is all about the unsearchable, inscrutable mercy of God (Rom 11:33-36). All of us are recipients of that mercy. That’s why we are called, even in the midst of conflict and difference, to welcome one another.
Richard B. Hays, in The Widening of God’s Mercy, by Richard and Christopher Hays
Isn’t that beautiful and hopeful and challenging all at the same time? We’ve spent so much of the last decade divided by politics and social issues and poorly expressed faith. These words offer healing and a new direction on so many of those fronts. At the very least, we ought to be able to get this right in the church—our fellowship, worship, discipleship and mission work ought to stand as a remedy for so much of what ails us.
That’s what we’re seeing, both in the church and in the wider culture, in response to the fires in Los Angeles. People gathering, sharing what they have, and helping neighbors who have lost so much. The point is this: We were made to be in deeply committed community—we’re hardwired for the kind of life Jesus invites us to in the church.
As you move through this week, and as we journey through these reflections on what it means to be the church, I invite you to follow that impulse to join together for a greater purpose—to welcome one another. There is so much good work to do. That’s why we are called, even in the midst of conflict and difference, to welcome one another.
May that be true for you and yours, today and every day.
Blessings,
Pastor John