We think we know what that means, don’t we? Love each other. On the surface it seems simple, but what does it mean to obey it as a commandment. It has to be more than nice feelings for people. What does it cost to love each other? What does it mean for how we talk to each other or about each other? What does love look like when someone makes us angry? What does love look like when someone hurts someone we care about? What does love look like when someone isn’t pulling their weight or doing their job? Can love set boundaries? Can love say no? Can love hold people accountable. What did Jesus mean when he commanded us to love each other? That’s what we’ll talk about on Sunday.
–Pastor Travis Norton
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Happy Easter! He is Risen! We continue rejoicing as we remember that because Jesus lives, we also shall live!
As we’ve explored more about our relationship with God over the last couple of weeks, I’m aware that we might have dipped our toes into unfamiliar spiritual waters with how we’ve framed the idea of God-in-self and self-in-God. I know I’ve asked before, but I hope you don’t mind me asking again: How do you think about God and your relationship with God in ways like this? I keep asking because I’ve spoken with many people through the years who have felt that spending time thinking about God’s attention to and affection for them personally is selfish or indulgent. The message they “caught” at church, even if it wasn’t explicitly “taught,” was that we’re simply to be conduits for God’s love, letting it flow completely through us to others. Does that feel familiar to you at all? If so, I’d like to ask you to think about this:
God loves you for you. God delights in you for you. God longs to spend time with you because God enjoys you. You! You are the apple of God’s eye. God doesn’t look past you to your neighbor—you are just as valuable to God. God wants to love you simply because you’re you. In other words, you’re not just a conduit for God to use so that God’s love can be poured into someone else. God wants you to be filled with God’s love for your own sake.
So, I invite you to do that—to spend some time in the posture of a fountain, allowing God’s delight in you and for you to bubble up in your inner being, filling the fountain bowl of your heart for your own sake. It is actually incredibly healthy to spend time letting God just love you. Why? Because if you allow yourself to be filled with God’s love for you, the natural result will be God’s love consistently spilling over and flowing from you. We are indeed to let God’s love flow to others, but not at the cost of being filled ourselves. This week, practice letting God love you for you, and if you wouldn’t mind, please email me at lori@flccs.net and let me know what happens.
We need each other, all of us. We truly are better together, as disciples, as a church, in the world for the sake of Jesus Christ, the risen Lord.
The text for this coming Sunday is the last of the “I am” statements in the gospel of John, and it is one that not only tells us who Jesus is but also who we are. “I am the vine, you are the branches.” I’m not usually one to get super involved in the tenses and translations of the Greek, but I like this one because it tells us we’re ready. That we are the branches. It calls into being all of the other directives and calls in John and says, you are the branches. You have everything you need already to bear fruit, grow, flourish, and probably even get tangled with all the branches that surround and support you.
You know what else it reminds me? That sometimes we have to prune the branches. With the weather warming up, I just trimmed back a bunch of things in the yard. Pruning away what isn’t life-giving any longer brings us back to new life. I love the imagery of this text. I love that we can be connected to one another through vines and branches that have lived from generation to generation and still bear fruit for the sake of the world today. I love that a little pruning can bring new life.
Alleluia! He is Risen!
-Pastor Carrie Baylis
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Happy Easter! He is Risen! We still have a few more weeks in the Eastertide celebration of the Living One who once was dead but is now alive forever and ever, so let us keep rejoicing!
Continuing with the idea of God-in-self, please sit for a moment with a few more words from Henri Nouwen: “You are the place where God chose to dwell.” Perhaps you can turn Henri’s words into a prayer, saying to God, “I am the place where You chose to dwell; I am the place where You choose to dwell.” Don’t rush. Say it a few times, breathing the words in and out, allowing your heart to open up more and more space for the Triune God to inhabit.
Now, as you keep breathing, rest with these words from Theophilus of Antioch: “It is the breath of God that you breathe—and you are unaware of it.” So, I invite you to become aware, even just for these few moments, that God’s surrounding breath is the air you are breathing, that the fullness of your being—including the truth of who you really are—exists, is sustained, and held within God. And what does Scripture tell us about God? “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.”
Thomas Merton says this: “The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God.” In other words, who we truly are is held within God. It seems as though Thomas Keating is right: our being exists as self-in-God and God-in-self. He is also right in saying that knowing this has profound implications for our spiritual lives—for our relationship with God—stating that it “supposes that we are to become a living sacrament by being always in the presence of God and in relation to God….”
How is it for you to pray this way and think about your life with God this way? I would love to hear your thoughts about God’s invitation to become a living sacrament. Let’s walk together.
“I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me” John 10:14
“There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” Acts 4:12
This Sunday is Good Shepherd Sunday, and we recognize the classic texts of Psalm 23 and John 10 that illustrate our children’s Bibles and cover our nurseries in sheep artwork. We know this classic metaphor for Jesus as the Good Shepherd. We gain great comfort from knowing that we have a shepherd to tend and care for us. However, our trust in Jesus as our shepherd does not make our lives as sheep any easier.
As Psalm 23 sings, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” The story of Peter and John that we read in Acts shows them surrounded by those who still persecute Jesus’ followers. Just because we are sheep with a caring shepherd does not mean our lives will be sweet and easy. So, what does it mean to be a sheep in the fold of God? How do we walk in life as disciples and followers through the valleys of darkness and death? How do we live a life that proclaims salvation in Jesus, our Good Shepherd’s name?
-Vicar Michaela Eskew
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Happy Easter! He is Risen! I asked you last time to think about how you understand the meaning of the spiritual life in light of Henri Nouwen’s belief that the whole purpose of Jesus’ ministry was “to bring us to the house of his Father,” not just having our sins forgiven and going to heaven when we die but being embraced into the life and love and relationship of the Trinity now. As we continue to think about our relationship with God, let’s add to the conversation the following ideas from contemplative author Thomas Keating.
Dovetailing with what we’ve already discussed concerning Western theology’s emphasis on doctrine, Keating notices how that way of spirituality leads to the perception of the “self-outside-of-God.” He states that early parts of the Christian tradition tended to focus on the “self-in-God, and God-in-self.” He says, “God is not just with us, not just beside us, not just under us, not just over us, but within us, at the deepest level.” I think we would all say we believe that God is within us, but have we thought much about what that means?
So, with Keating’s words in mind, I ask this unusual question: Where do you picture God spatially in relation to yourself when you’re praying? From talking with many people over the years, I think that most of us have a sense of God as somewhere external to us, whether it’s somewhere high and above us or close and sitting right next to us. Either way, it’s God outside of us and us outside of God. It’s not so much that this image is wrong—God does indeed fill the entire cosmos—it’s just that it’s incomplete, because in Christ and by the Spirit, God has also chosen to take up residence inside our innermost being (see Col. 1:26-27 and Eph. 3:16-19).
What might it be like to “relocate” Jesus from next to you to within you, to imaginatively picture Jesus joyfully dwelling within your deepest self, always present, always loving, always filling you with himself? Might it positively affect your relationship with God to see and engage the infinite God of love within your inner being? I’d love to hear what you think about this idea. Let’s walk together.
“They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.” Luke 24:42-43
How do you prove someone’s not a ghost? Apparently, you give them something to eat. Jesus appears to his disciples, and they need some convincing that it is actually him in the flesh. They touch his hands and feet and feed him to prove to themselves that resurrection has actually happened. Our whole faith rests on this event. Not the idea of it or the principles to be learned from it. But the actuality of resurrection is the lynchpin of our faith. Once we believe, we are empowered to go and do God’s work in the world.
–Pastor Travis Norton
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First Thoughts at First 