I hope you all enjoyed your March Break! What a great time to relax, rest, and sleep in. I especially want to give thanks for the retreat we had last weekend: I saw the grace of God flowing in you and through you. I saw the spirit of love and openness flowing at the retreat.
I was so proud of you for how you welcomed and embraced those who were new, and those who are different. I saw you overcome language and cultural barriers to be truly one body in Christ.
I saw how you soaked up the message about the journey from isolation to connectedness and building I-Thou instead of I-It relationships.
Through the retreat, I realized more fully just how deeply everyone craves and desires connection and a sense of belonging. During the one-on-one time, I was so pleasantly surprised to see how you all right away started talking with one another. I thought there might some time of awkwardness and getting warmed up, but you all began talking instantly. It was an amazing sight to behold!
There was so much laughter. The fun was infectious.
We experienced a special time of reconnecting with God, of praying with and for one another. At the candlelight service, our guards really came down as we opened up to one another. We shared what we’re going through the difficulties we’ve been dealing with. We opened our hearts and became vulnerable to one another. You demonstrated the leadership of vulnerability.
Many of us shared how difficult it is to find a place we really belong, where we can be ourselves. Thank God that many of us feel like this is such a place where we can be ourselves and be accepted and loved as who we are.
What a special time we experienced!
My friends, this love we had, this connection we felt, this was the grace of God flowing in our midst. It was a bond glued together by God’s love for us. God was present among us. This is what we mean when we say that God is a mystery, and that we only know in part. God reveals Himself to us – we can’t know him by our own knowledge – and this experience was one of the ways that God revealed more of Himself to us.
This is the beauty of God’s kingdom. What we experienced is just a taste of the Kingdom of Heaven, where love, harmony and giving of ourselves for one another is central. This is what we mean when we pray:
“May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
God’s will is for us to live with this connectedness. And we give thanks to God that we were able to experience this grace overflowing within us.
But now, after a nice break, we are ready to go back to school and back to our everyday lives.
Back at school, we will be reminded of the disconnected that many of our friends and peers experience. Having experienced the connectedness we did, you might feel empty at the superficial level of conversation going on. If our eyes are really open, we will start to see the real depth of isolation that exists among many people, and how insecure many people really are, and how they try to compensate for that insecurity in many ways.
It will be very easy to just slide back into our everyday routines and everyday interactions with our friends. As this happens, it will be easy to become discouraged and lament that we can’t keep the spiritual high we experienced at the retreat. God might start to feel distant again.
But I wanted to encourage you today with God’s Word. Today’s passage tells us that in every way you have been enriched in God, that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift. Even more, God will strengthen you and God is faithful. God will watch over us until the end.
If we cling to God’s Word, we will persevere, and God will carry us through tough times.
But do you want to know one of God’s greatest gifts he’s given to help us through life? The community of God.
You see, the church is called to be the community of God. Among our staff, we also call this an alternative community.
We are a community that resists and fights back against a world that is centred on power, selfishness, popularity, money and self-interest. Instead, we dare to create a community that lives with love, peace and self-giving. We know that we fall short, because we are humans, but we live belief in God’s grace – that no matter how many times we mess up, God’s love is steadfast and He embraces us over and over again.
Isn’t that so beautiful?
The church is called to live life and be a community as God intended it:
- We come and learn of God’s ways
- We practice what we learn in our relationships with each other
- We share life – both the good times and the bad – and we love one another
- We experience grace and transformation
We find strength and empowerment in this community, and then we go back out to the world.
That is a beautiful thing about our Christian faith: it was never meant to be just for our own satisfaction or our own possession. Rather, we experience love, grace and transformation within, and then we go out and share that love with those we encounter. Isn’t that the story of the Samaritan woman at the well we learned about? She lived in isolation, but once she experienced transformation from her encounter with Jesus, she went back and shared the good news with her community.
My ultimate prayer for our Hi-C is this: that we may be this kind of community – one rooted in love, where we share life and experience God’s grace and transformation so that you will be equipped and empowered to go out and love others.
My friends, let us be a Beloved Community. Martin Luther King Jr came up with this term to describe a community where no matter your race or background, that all people can live with love and respect. Let us be a Beloved Community as God intended. Let us laugh together, share life together, cry together when necessary. Let us model for this world an alternative community built on I-Thou relationships. In that way, God will use us to be salt of the earth and a light to this world.
We cannot do this just on our own and with our power, but God will lead us as He already has been, and God will shape us into this community.
So as you head back to school, may the love and grace of God be your strength and foundation, and may you feel God’s presence in your life.
Amen.
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