The Magnificat, July 2020
Dear St. Mary’s Church and friends,
I was planning on writing about Franklin’s racial divide again this month (I do hope that’s something the Lord will put on our heart as a congregation). But before any attempt to cast a vision for our congregation, I wonder if it’s helpful for me to take a step back and give the broad outline of what I hope for St. Mary’s Church.
Probably the simplest summary of the way I see our Church is that, here, we’re learning to place our lives in Jesus’s hands. To place our lives in Jesus’s hands—there’s a lot going on in that statement. To learn to place your life in Jesus’s hands is to rejoice that Jesus is Lord, the Beginning and the End, the Captain of the ship and the Shepherd of the flock. To learn to place your life in Jesus’s hands is to eagerly seek after his will. It involves praying, talking through things with our brothers and sisters, reading Scripture in search of the mind of Christ, all the while hoping to hear with ever greater clarity Jesus’s voice speaking in our hearts telling us what’s next. Placing our lives in Jesus’s hands means learning to hold our own plans lightly (that part is especially difficult for me, stubborn as I am) and to let the Spirit guide us in the details of each day. The outcome of this process is quite simply that we let go of our old life and open ourselves to receive the life that Jesus would give us in its place. We let him make of us what he will. Placing our lives in Jesus’s hands is death and resurrection.
Opening ourselves to this process is called faith. Faith involves believing certain things about Jesus, like what we find in the Creeds. But the heart of faith is trust. We have to trust Jesus with our lives, our hearts, our families, our money, our bodies, our emotions. It’s all in play. We place our lives in Jesus’s hands without knowing exactly what he’s going to do with them. There are some clues about the shape of the life Jesus has for us, but the details are the mysterious part. First and foremost, it’s plain as day that Jesus himself is the pattern of what’s to come. If the Spirit goes to work on you, you will most certainly be a rendition of Christ. We know that the life the Lord has in store is going to be really, really hard. Jesus was extremely clear about this. But there will be marvelous consolations along the way. If you let him, the Lord will give you what you need to face what comes. The poor will be a part of the life Jesus gives us. Our attachment to earthly things will weaken, even while our gratitude for them strengthens. The Lord will make us generous. The Lord will make us truthful. Our life will be an adventure. We will bring forth great blessings in other people’s lives. We will be holy. That’s the stuff we know. What we don’t know is whether Jesus will ask us to quit our job and take another. Or if he’ll ask us to step out on a limb and pray for a stranger. We don’t know when Jesus will tell us that it’s time to stop visiting certain websites, to stick with this relationship we had about given up on, to give our sister a hard word, to start reading in Church services, or … who knows?
One of the biggest obstacles to walking this path is we often fear that expecting Jesus will give us a new life implies that he doesn’t love us now. But imagine a kid who after Church one Sunday goes out to play in her Sunday’s best. Her momma calls out not to get her clothes dirty, and the child yells back that she won’t. Of course, the girl is playing carelessly alongside a ditch, falls in on accident, is covered in nasty mud, tears up her fine clothes, and gives her head a good bump in the process. She’s terrified to go home after that and can hardly bear to imagine the anger and disappointment waiting there. She finely musters the courage, and when her mother sees her walking up in the yard, the mother runs out to her daughter. But instead of a scolding or a spanking, she takes the girl up in her arms and holds her tight to her chest. The momma isn’t worried about getting mud on herself. She looks at the blood coming from her child’s forehead to see how bad it is, kisses her head, and hugs her daughter some more. But then what? Does she make her stay in her muddy clothes all night? “Climb in bed like you are! That’ll teach you not to disobey me!” No! (That would be creepy.) Instead, she gives her little girl a bath and bandages her wound. She puts her in fresh clothes, brushes her hair, and cheerfully tells her that supper should be ready soon. The warm greeting helps the child trust her mother to give her even more than a warm greeting. If the mother had started yelling, the child might have started crying and ran away again. But the love is clear from the start, and the child lets the mother’s love do its work.
So my hope for St. Mary’s Church: I hope that we’ll turn more and more fully to Jesus. Again, it takes faith to do that. But as we do we’ll only find him ready to take us up in his arms. We saw in his Incarnation, when God became man, that he’s not worried about getting himself messy. In his hands is where he wants us to be. Think about that: God wants to hold you. I hope that everyone experiences the warm welcome Jesus has for us. And then I hope we discover together that Jesus brings us into his own house and starts tending to us, that he has fresh clothes and a hot meal ready. Like the gentle mother, he embraces us as we are but doesn’t leave us to wallow in our failures. He readies us for life in his household. And as we receive it, as we adjust to life in Jesus’s house, we’ll be more and more capable of bringing others in with us for the Lord to tend. We might even find ways to invite a whole city to open itself to the Lord and let him heal its deeply wounded history. Maybe Franklin itself will discover that Jesus has a new life for her. And do you know the most wonderful thing about the life Jesus gives? It never ends.
Yours in the Lord,
Stephen+
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