Dear siblings in Christ,
What a wonderful day we had together this past Sunday! I still feel as though I am basking in the afterglow of a beautiful time of celebrating God’s goodness and making final preparations for the next season of our life together.
- Our Annual Congregational Meeting was a lovely time of celebrating the past year as well as charting our course for 2022. If you missed the meeting and would like to see the recording, let us know and we’ll send out a link.
- During worship we heard good news about loving enemies without fear, and in prayer confronted our fears of embracing an enemy-making solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed.
- We also commissioned members for the first time, as well as our 3 new Vestry members.
I confessed in my sermon that, as a church, our desire for solidarity with marginalized communities outweighs our practice, by a long shot. Because of this, we don’t (yet) have the kind of enemies Jesus commands us to love.
That’s why I’m looking forward to our upcoming class on Confronting Mammon With Jesus with both excitement and trepidation: I’m eager to learn with you how to become an “enemy” of Mammon, and what it could look like for our church to step into solidarity with the oppressed, but if I’m honest, I’m also afraid of what it might require of us.
But this is our work. As a community that is seeking to live in the gospel of Jesus Christ, let’s encourage one another as we walk into this next season together, learning to trust the blessing and abundance of God’s future that Jesus has ushered in.
Let us learn together this new way of life that disrupts and displaces the old systems of oppressive power, embodying God’s future in solidarity with the marginalized, learning to love the enemies we make by doing so, trusting God’s love to liberate us all in the end.
In Christ,
Fr. Ben
P.S. Don’t forget the Confronting Mammon With Jesus class starts THIS Sunday, Feb 27 at 9am. The syllabus and readings are available, but you can still participate in the class if you don’t do the reading.
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