Burden or Blessing?

October 9, 2018

Beloved:

This week's devotional comes from Reverend Anthony Pompa, Dean and Rector of Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  I’m grateful to Susan Harrington for sharing it at the very moment I needed this exact word. 

​peace & prayers, pastor annette  

Burden or Blessing
​
I am mindful that if you are fortunate enough to belong to a church community, you may be unaware of just how powerful you are.

I say this in complete mindfulness of the great divide that has arisen in our secular lives. I feel if we are not careful, we may find ourselves giving our power over to the evil and sinfulness that our Baptismal Covenant calls us to resist and repent from.

What evil? The evil of a tribalism that is calculated and strategic to separate us from one another by ideology, opinion, race, class, and economics. This same strategic use of tribalism invites us not to see one another innocently as different, but as a shameful enemy who must be defeated.

Why sinful? It is sinful in that when we fall into the patterns of seeing one another as an enemy over the opinions and ideology we may hold, we fail to see one another the way God would have us, as children of God sharing a future of hope and goodness that has literally been born out of sacrifice.

Be careful folk. Be careful.

I said earlier that we are fortunate if we belong to a community of faith because we will, I pray, hold our bond together as children of God over and against the evils of tribalism our society is now seduced by. It means we can be together in love, in life, in mission, in hope, in service defined by Christ and not primarily driven by ideology or political persuasion. It does not mean we are without our convictions, but it does mean we put the way of love first, and live together as holy people, even in the midst of our differences. It means when we bump into one another’s sensibilities we can walk the extra mile to reach out in love to one another to dialogue, to pray, and to gain understanding, and to be open to being convicted by our faith and transformed by it. It means we can even change our minds and more importantly our hearts.

It takes every ounce of power to live this way. The way of Love. It is in our current climate a swim against the stream. It takes power!  . . . . . In a Celtic worldview, we are invited to see ourselves as part of a carefully woven pattern of relationships that breathe with all of God’s creation. (All of it). Carefully woven with the stars in the sky, the air that moves, the trees in the fields, the streams as they flow. Carefully woven with the sun that warms us, the moon that lights our dark nights, the animals in the field, our brothers and sisters of this race we call human. Together we are knit and together we breathe the life air that is the gift of our very existence. We, the human ones, have a choice in our place in the weave. We can bring with us Burden or we can bring with us Blessing. 

Let us bring blessing.