January 21, 2021
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Greetings Lake B family and friends,
This coming Sunday we will discuss Luke 5:1-11, the familiar passage in which Jesus calls the first disciples. The account always reminds me that the call on our lives is characterized by God’s love for us, our love for God, and our love for others. I have mentioned this before, but it’s worth mentioning again: we are people created in God’s image and filled with the Holy Spirit to love beyond our capability to love. The invitation is to live our lives in service to a vision grander than we can imagine, that of loving God and loving one another. I’m not talking about some trite, shallow pie-in-the-sky Love. Our love for God will always produce in us an inexplicable love of others and a desire to work for their well-being as much as we work for our own. That is the hard work – the vocation - of the people of God. Such love goes beyond our circle of comfortable relationships to create the beloved community Dr. King envisioned; a love that recognizes how we are inextricably connected in what he called a “web of mutuality.” It’s not merely deep concern for others but an ethic of Love calling us into accountability as disciples following Christ. Recent events at our nation’s Capitol revealed to us in many ways that the Church is profoundly lacking in the kind of love Jesus commands us to have for one another. At times, it seems as though parts of the Church are swept up into the temptation to love politics, power and privilege. The “web of mutuality” is thin and weak and needs to be thick and strong. May God give us wisdom, courage, and creativity to help strengthen our part of this web as we follow Christ together in community. We talked a lot in 2020 about the question, “Who are we becoming?” I invite all of you to continue with us in considering seriously what we are called to do and be in the world, as individuals and as part of the Church. This is our vocation in life, what we are made for and called to be about in the world. Whether you are a teacher, a student, an administrative leader, a retired person, a parent, a lawyer, a community organizer, city employee – it makes no difference. Our vocation – the thing we are about – drives us in all that we do to be formed by an ethic of Love that transforms, liberates, heals and – here it comes – leads to the work of justice. Our vocation leads us to better understand that Love and Justice always go together, and leads us to live and work in ways that make it visible to the watching world. May our lives and our work together bear witness to this kind of love. Blessings, Lina |