November 2013

through the looking glass

l.l.wimmer

On the final sermon of our series exploring the vision of our church I summarized remembering the future this way: We have a vision. It is a vision of caring for one another. It is a vision of teaching our children. It is a vision of reaching out to the world. It is a vision of sacred time and sacred space, a longing for the Holy, it is a vision of family and of doing all the good we can. It is a vision of reconciling all the broken pieces of our common humanity in one heart of love and mercy, of bringing those who are separated together again in all the colors of the rainbow. It is a beautiful vision well worth living out in community, a future to hope for, a life to be lived faithfully. I also shared that my personal dream was for a happy church. You were given time to share your hopes and dreams for the church as well, all of which are now part of the conversation as we go forward and you will be hearing about them again as we become who we are becoming.

On Sunday Dave spoke about what would be nice to have and what do we have to have. This will be the question on our hearts and minds in this year’s pledge campaign as we consider our church. Sometimes we take for granted what we have and forget how valuable it is. There are many things that we can take or leave. There is so much stuff. Hopefully, when we really think about what our church means to us in the everyday living of our lives we will see that we really cannot do without it and will value it enough to support it with a generous pledge of financial support. We have enjoyed a great year of giving. You have been generous and together we have been able to be the church in the world that we want to be. May your generosity continue in the new year as together we realize just how much this place means to us all. Included in this newsletter is a pledge card. Please consider prayerfully and thoughtfully what you hope to give in 2014 and return your pledge by November 24 when we will dedicate our gifts that give us life for another year of being the church we love.

Through the Looking Glass

Through the Looking Glass

In the midst of revisioning the vision I hope we are beginning to see ourselves with more clarity and in a greater light. Sometimes when one is living life we fail to see the life we are living. For this reason if no other it is good to look and see. If we do so I hope we will see what we have done together that has contributed to the goodness and love of God in the world.  I hope we see how God is present and working in us and through us to love the world. Of course, we may also see, if we are really looking, where we have failed the love of God but this is to be expected. Of course we will not always get it right. The truth is that we can’t really get anything right if we are unwilling to see that we can also be wrong.  This is how our lives are perfected, how we are changed until we become shalom, the peaceable kingdom on earth where the wolf shall live with the lamb and they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain for the earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. You talk about vision. How about the vision of shalom? To get there we do not focus on what is right and what is wrong but on where is the next opportunity for love to be lived out among us for where love is there is God and love will take us to God and God is shalom.

So far we have remembered that we are a community of the beloved who teach our children of God and who reach out to the world in need and include everyone in our embrace.  In October we will celebrate the role of worship and hear the perspective of the laity and share with each other our hopes and dreams for the time that we have left to be what we will be and do what we will do as God’s people at Holy Trinity United Methodist Church in Danvers Massachusetts, planet earth. Remembering the future, we become who we are. Thanks be to God for the gift of each new day and for the gifts of God’s people and for the love that is still possible for us all.  

Blessings, Larry

through the looking glass ~ May 2013

through the looking glass

As I write it is a sad and gloomy day in April. The weather is not helping with the sad reality of recent days in our world. Like many others I am searching my heart for how to understand what is happening. I know with all of my heart that the world is still a beautiful place and that there is so much good in the world, so many good people and yet there is so much pain. How do we bear the random violent death of people whose lives are a sacred story with so many connections to other lives and their sacred stories? How can our own story not be torn and shattered as well? Furthermore this is not the first time in the history of the world that such pain is present among us. No, the world and its people have experienced this pain of so much loss and horror so many times. When did it ever cease?

It will not help to hurry and fix it. Perhaps it cannot be fixed. It will not help to rush to forgiveness for forgiveness that is too easy does not change anything. No, we must take our time, the journey from such an event must be long and slow and there must be time spent in silence and in thought and in prayer and in grief. Even justice seems out of reach. What justice can there be for those who are lost, who are maimed for life, whose lives have been torn apart forever? We will try to understand but we must be prepared to reach a place where we understand nothing. In the end there may be only one recourse, to simply practice kindness anyway, anyhow, to do all the good we can, to love more despite the failure of love to keep us safe, to love more when love seems impossibly futile, when the damage is already done, to love even more. Love is something we can do even when we do not understand. We can do good. We can practice kindness. We need to do something. Doing it will keep us going. What we practice will be who and what we become.

I don’t know to whom to attribute these words but they are beautiful words and wise words and may enlighten us in the time of sorrow of what blessing may be found even in a broken heart.

Before you know what kindness really is

You must lose things,

Feel the future dissolve in a moment

Like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

What you counted and carefully saved,

All this must go so you know

How desolate the landscape can be

Between the regions of kindness . . . .

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak it till your voice

Catches the thread of all sorrows

And you see the size of the cloth. . . .

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore . . .

May the sadness soften our hearts and not harden them. 

Only kindness makes sense anymore. 

Larry

Feb 2013 thru the looking glass

Kathleen Norris tells of a moment in time when she glimpsed something of the light. This is what she wrote: One morning this past spring I noticed a young couple with an infant at an airport departure gate. The baby was staring intently at other people, and as soon as he recognized a human face, no matter whose it was, no matter if it was young or old, pretty or ugly, bored or happy or worried-looking, he would respond with absolute delight. It was beautiful to see. Our drab departure gate had become the gate of heaven. And as I watched that baby play with any adult who would allow it, I realized that this is how God looks at us, staring into our faces in order to be delighted, to see the creature he made and called good, along with the rest of the creation. As Psalm 139 puts it, darkness is as nothing to God who can look right through whatever evil we've done in our lives to the creature made in the divine image.

Grace is the precious gift that encourages us to not give up hope for a world where evil deeds seem only to increase because grace overcomes deeds and can even change what we do by helping us to see who we really are, a child of God. Grace is more than just something that can fix something that is broken, it is the revelation that the broken thing is valuable itself as something that was made and can be broken but not lost. It is a reminder of our true self, our created self, the self made by God for love. Grace is not just an afterthought to heal the wounds of the moment; it is the place where we are from and the place where we are going. It is the place where we were whole and beautiful, where we find ourselves broken yet still beautiful in the eyes of God, and where we are healed, restored, recreated, made whole again, made new. In other words, grace is not just one category of experience; it is the context of all experience, of all creation, of life itself. By grace we can see God in each other.

And when we see God in each other it changes how we treat each other. It is easy to hurt an enemy who hates us but it is not so easy to hurt the beautiful child that God has made. When we experience grace, it is very personal. It can be described in a general way as a sense of well-being, of being loved without conditions, to intrinsically lovable by definition, though the details of how we experience these things may differ. One thing every experience of grace has in common however is the overwhelming desire to be gracious. It is as if one could no more stop the movement of grace than the movement of time itself. Once touched by God's grace we are compelled to touch others with God's grace. To hold back would be life trying to hold our breath.

If there is anything we aspire to be in this place it is a place where grace happens, where grace is present, where we see ourselves and each other as blessed by the grace of God in a world where there is hope because there is grace. It has been written that where sin abounds grace abounds even more. We need not be afraid but boldly and gently share the grace of God with the world as we meet it and so by the grace of God shall the world be transformed. Thanks be to God who delights in us. May we delight in God.

Blessings of grace, Larry.