“Giving From the Heart” was the theme of our successful year-end offering which helped move our year-long budget deficit into a surplus. We also shared our plans for regular support of the ministry of St. Luke’s in the weeks and months of 2023. Our Strategic Plan calls for a year long stewardship emphasis in which we help one another grow in our life as stewards of God’s graciousness in our lives. There are four major elements of this stewardship emphasis.
On September 11, and the days following, our whole lives were a window into life and death, faith and doubt, suffering and global consolation. On that day, at noon, I hosted a prayer service for the Interchurch Center on Riverside Drive, where our offices are located. Thousands in our building had seen, like we did, the towers fall and did not know the fate of loved ones downtown. As our prayer I asked each of those present to name the names of those on their hearts downtown. To hear those names come at me through clenched teeth and strained voices, to add my own names was such a shocking experience that it drove us all to our deepest reserves of spiritual depth. Our different religious traditions did not separate us. We were united in our humanity before God and each other. And I spoke by heart the 23rd psalm, which paints a picture of community which is relevant to us today.
I was reminded as we went through the financial report and Endowment recipients that the ministry of our congregation is, indeed, a Global Link for all of us. In our financial report was an item for $9000 dollars, a once a year offering to our support of missionaries. One of those missionaries is Pastor Wal Reat, our missionary in South Sudan. I know Pastor Reat and will share some of his ministry in this week’s video. Let us remember that our budget is a living document of relationships which change lives. All of us are better together.
I greet you during this most Holy Week of the church year. We have made our Lenten pilgrimage together. Our Lenten pilgrimage has been a journey from death (Ash Wednesday) to life. A journey toward our eternal home in the love of Christ. Now I share devotions for the final four Stations of the Cross.
This coming Sunday is Palm Sunday and we will enter into Holy Week, where we experience together the Passion of Jesus. In the Blog for this week we will continue with devotions for the next five Stations of the Cross, as we make the Via Dolorosa together.
For the next three weeks, culminating in Holy Week, I will share in the Pastor’s Blog those devotions I offered at each of the Stations of the Cross. Together on the Via Dolorosa let us follow Jesus bearing the cross as the path winds through the human hope and hurt of your part of Jerusalem.
Matthew 9:35–38; 10:5–7
As you go, proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.”
I can tell you the exact date I was “redeemed” at 7:30 in the morning. The previous evening I was walking to my car and feeling very unredeemed when I could not find it. At the precinct house the officer checked in with the lot where towed felonious autos are incarcerated. Sure enough, my car had been towed.
We live in a time of increased hate crimes, a time when people are singled out and attacked for who they are. GLBTQ people, racial groups, Jewish people live in a time of heightened prejudice and hatred, just for being who they are.
Dear St. Luke’s partners,
The Lord be with you in these holy days. “Ash Wednesday” is known as the poet T.S.Eliot’s “conversion” poem, written after he joined the Anglican church in 1927. It goes deeply into the tension between spiritual barrenness and his hope for salvation of all things. We live in that tension, and on Ash Wednesday bare on our foreheads both brokenness and death, yet cruciform baptismal hope.
Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain.” So begins the account of the Transfiguration of our Lord according to Matthew. What follows is the amazing vision of Jesus, bathed in light and glory, accompanied by Moses and Elijah. For a brief, shining moment, the identity of Jesus as God’s beloved Son is confirmed. It was a strengthening of faith for both Jesus and the disciples. We are meant to see ourselves on this mountain, to have our own faith made stronger, to see that our confidence in Jesus is confirmed.