From Pastor’s Eric’s Study - March 2025
From Pastor Eric’s Study – March 2025
“The body of Christ, given for you.” I’ve said those words thousands of times as I’ve served communion to a community with whom I share the journey and, with whom I share God's love. This morning, I read an article by Lutheran Pastor Diane Roth reflecting on what she called the “for-you-ness” of the sacrament. She shared how the experience of offering this gift impacted her life and ministry, and it resonated so deeply with my own experiences over the years.
We are incredibly blessed to share this journey of faith with one another, seeking to encourage one another to draw ever closer to our relationship with God. Even as we know the hunger in our own souls to hear the assurance of God's love offered freely for us again and again, most of us still struggle to mirror that same freely given love for others. Soon we will once again begin our Lenten journey, a spiritual pilgrimage in time that encourages us to reorient our lives away from our stubborn ways and back to God's ways of freely given grace. Our temptation is always to hear the Good News as being particularly for us. We tend to listen less passionately for how our receiving that grace should shatter all of the barriers that we have created within ourselves. If we let God's love work fully within us, it would melt all the limits that we construct… and that would be frightening new territory.
I have heard lots of people through the years talk about cultivating a spirit of curiosity as the antidote to certainties, to division, and to despair. When we’re curious, we open ourselves to learning new things. Seeing God at work in new ways, we allow the possibility of setting ourselves free to receive the gift of God's love and then pass it on to others.
When we receive that “for-you-ness,” it is only half of the spiritual gift. The other half comes when we share it with the next person, and the next person, and then the next person. As Diane Roth concluded: “Jesus didn’t come to make us feel good. He came to set us free, whether it feels good or not.” The love of God made known to us in Jesus challenges us to take seriously the work of sharing that grace even when it hurts or is terribly hard. We are called to bear grace that works to dismantle racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of oppression. God's grace offered in its for-you-ness demands that we see God and love God in our immigrant and transgender siblings, in the democrat and the republican, in the Christian and the Muslim and the Hindu and the Jew… that we see the love of God in all.
Our Lenten journey reminds us that we are dust, just star-dust blessed by God with life and God's love. We are blessed, and so are every “they” that we can imagine. On this Lenten journey may we journey ever deeper into God's challenge to love and affirm as powerfully as God. Amen.