Beloved Members of St. Martin’s,
If you are of a certain generation, there may be a game you played with your hands as kids: here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors and here are the people.” Do you remember that game? Because here is a key truth about that game—eventually we pull our hands apart, and the people go out into the world. But they’re still the church. In fact, that’s where they are the best church of all—embodying Jesus’s loving, transforming, hopeful message in a world desperate and starving for all those things.
In our gospel for this Sunday, Jesus is trying to explain to us this fact: the church exists in a specific place, but it also exists beyond the parish walls and outside of times of worship. As followers of Jesus, we who share in his baptism and his cup, we live BOTH in the heart of God, and in the broken places in the world. This is what makes us more than fans of Jesus. Our worship as a community is meant to empower us to make common cause with those we meet beyond the walls of our beloved building and beyond the friendships we form here.
And so I also want to remind many of you that YOU need the fellowship of regular worship, the balm of regular communion more than once in a while in your life. Organizing your life around a pattern of daily and weekly worship is vital in reminding ourselves of the ways we are connected to one another.
We are the church of St. Martin all together here, worshiping and giving thanks, but that we also have to be the church of St. Martin out there, where people need us to show us who God is in the face of poverty, exploitation, fear, and division. We discover who we are called to be in being brave enough to turn the values of the world on its head to reflect the love of God in a world that thirsts for it.
The way of Jesus is the way of service, community, and healing. That’s why we shouldn’t say that we take communion, but that we share communion. Jesus asks us to share in his cup—and by his willingness to lay down his life for us, he has transformed a cup of suffering and death into a cup of blessing and community. Jesus asks us to share in his baptism—and his baptism is the transformation of our lives from lives focused on ourselves into lives of purpose for the reconciliation of the world. Jesus calls us into community and fellowship with him, so that we may extend that fellowship with the whole world.
Especially as we prepare to head to the polls next month, I pray that we boldly keep that commandment of fellowship even with those with whom we may disagree.
As we will sing in one of my very favorite hymns this weekend, “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, and we pray that all unity may one day be restored. And they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”
In Christ,
Mother Leslie+