Thought for Today
Psalm 126:6 Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.
Judges 7:3 'Whoever is fearful and trembling, let him return home.'"
Matthew 2:23 There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, "He will be called a Nazorean."
Acts 2:46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts
Tomorrow we return home! Our congregation has a wonderful summertime tradition. During July we worship with a sister congregation just down the road. During August, they worship with us. It is a tradition which builds community within the church, neighbor worshipping with neighbor, sharing our common faith, enjoying the faith which unites us, but in a slightly different environment with slightly different liturgies.
We have been with them, tomorrow we return home and they will visit with us. It has been a joy to be at their home, now they will be at ours. There is a joy in returning home, because, as we have so often heard, “Home is where the heart is.” There is great truth in that adage.
Greta and I had occasion yesterday to be at our church for the first time since June 30th. There was a sense of serenity, peace and comfort that settled over us as we entered into the sanctuary. We were home. Tomorrow, it will be equally comforting to worship with our family of faith. Peace and serenity are good things, wonderful emotions, especially in the context of being in God’s house and worshipping.
Life is rarely so simple as to be reduced, however, to peace and serenity alone. While I gleefully look forward to ‘returning home,’ I know that there are concomitant perils and dangers in ‘returning home.’ Comfort and ease can also promote complacency. Christians must never become complacent in our faith. We cannot rest upon our laurels. Christianity is and always must be a dynamic faith.
We capture some of that in our hymns. Although I do not often choose militant music for worship, we have songs like Lead On O King Eternal, Onward Christian Soldiers and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory in our hymnals. Having been raised in the South, that last is a bit hard for me to sing, since it is also sometimes known as The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Christians are constantly ‘at war’ with sin, evil and apostacy . . . or at least we should be. In the sense that the church is home for our family of faith, we must be constantly vigilant to ward off the attacks of sin and evil, to defend our home.
Conversely, since Christians are called upon to be part of our communities and to engage civil society ("Luke 20:25 Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's."), we must bear the responsibility of keeping our faith current in terms of technology. We cannot remain locked in a past that is past.
It is good to return home, but the reality is that we cannot ever truly return home. Home, the home we remember from our youth, is no longer there. The world has moved on and Christians must move on with it. Tomorrow we will find comfort in the familiar pews, the familiar hymns, the familiar faces. It will be good to worship with friends we may not have seen for several weeks.
But, some things have changed. Our facility is old and constantly under repair and renovation. Landscaping has changed a bit as we have been forced to cut down some trees and are renovating some of our flowerbeds. We are in the process of upgrading and improving parts of our sound system.
One of the things I love about our congregation is how we engage the community around us. We support the First Parish Community Food Pantry as part of our mission work. We have a preschool open to everyone in the community, church members or not. As our world has moved on, as food insecurity has been exacerbated by the pandemic, we have joined other Christians in changing our mission work to meet the new challenges.
Tomorrow we return home! Tomorrow we will find comfort in the familiar pews, the familiar hymns, the familiar faces. It will be good to worship with friends we may not have seen for several weeks. It will be good to return home.
Stay safe, move on with the world, trust God,
Pastor Ray