Over the last few weeks of September we have had a great time introducing and thinking about our three new strategic values: Curious, Courageous, and Connected.
During the month of October, we will focus on what it means to embody hope personally and as a congregation based on our new mission statement:
We strive to embody the hope and love of Jesus for all through service, worship, and companionship.
Each week we will consider how we can each grow in our own experience of and participation in that hope and love.
Hope is a quality that many of us struggle with these days. It seems that there are many reasons to grow hopeless. Our faith, however, reminds us that our hope comes from a different source, one that transcends ourselves and the things of this time and place that often seem hopeless. Our hope is in the God who creates, sustains, and renews; the God who and meets us where we are through Jesus the Christ and the beautiful mystery of the Holy Spirit.
Victoria Safford describes this kind of hope and what it means to embody it, living it out through our words and actions every day as people of faith who together are called the church:
“Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of self-righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges; nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is gonna be all right,” but a very different, sometimes very lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it might be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle — and we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.”
Worship and Prayer are at the heart of this work of hope. They point us in the right direction to get started, give us language for the work of hope, and provide a place to share together and celebrate the source of our hope.
This Sunday we will think about how our worship and prayer help us embody hope and what it means to be “A Living Hallelujah.” Matthew 6:5-8 and Revelation 4:1-11 will help guide us.
Blessings,
Pastor Suzanne
Romans 15:13: 13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.