New Year, New Life

This week was the start of Preschool.  I looked around at the little kids (who doesn’t love a little kid?) and their parents, and I get this warm embracing feeling. 

I look around at the church. I think about all y’all, and I get that same warm embracing feeling. God uses this place, this community, to embrace and bless us.  That blessing is simply something we’re given, a gift, which we receive and don’t have to work for (we Lutherans call that “grace”). And what flows out of that feeling and sense of “gratitude” is a desire to share it, to live into it, and try to make real the hope it engenders. Hopes for the people here—children, adults, the elderly—hopes for the world where our lives intersect with it. Hopes for the life that comes from God’s embracing blessings. That warm embracing feeling makes me want to embrace. All this happens in my mind and heart and motivates my service.

            Jesus this Sunday says, “Lose your life to find it” (Mark 8:35-36). On the surface, that doesn’t sound inviting. I like my life! I love my wife and kids, I like my house, the trees that grow in my yard, my dog and cat… You get the picture. But Jesus is inviting us to lose our selves, to let go of ourselves. The promise that is attached to that, that is like a result of that, is new life.  Jesus calls this death and resurrection (Mark 8:31)—the death of our “old self,” so our real self can emerge, like a butterfly from a cocoon. To let ourselves be taken hold of by him, by his Spirit. When Christ’s Holy Spirit takes us by the hand, it takes us outside of ourselves for a moment, and the world looks different, and how we live and love becomes different. God embraces us so we can embrace others.

            I’ve seen that happen here and have heard y’all describe it happening here, maybe not in the words of my poetic flight of fancy, but it happens! So come follow Jesus. Let us lose ourselves in his blessings!

Peace,

Pr. Christian