Pastors E-Letter 1/15/21
This past Saturday, I had the privilege of co-hosting a baby shower for a mom in our Suntree family. While this is her second baby, the pandemic has meant that there is less opportunity to celebrate her and the marvel of her body’s work to create a human. When we decided to throw a little socially-distanced “sprinkle”, it was to both honor the good and beautiful work she was doing to create this new human and to just plain celebrate.
We’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times. 2020 was a doozy of a year! And 2021 has hope for better horizons but still contains all of the same things that 2020 did. If you left 2020 with grief, certainly you are entering 2021 with it. The pandemic rages, even in the hope of a vaccine. And our country remains as divided as ever.
So it was, with great joy, that we paused all of the news cycles running in our heads and the angry emails and the clamoring sounds of social media to eat donuts and giggle about a new baby, set to arrive just a month from now. The practice of celebration set my heart in a better place after a week that saw political division and hard conversation. It was, in fact, healing. I entered Sunday morning feeling lighter, more grounded, and with a better perspective. Good was still a part of this world. Babies are born. Vaccines are created. Good, important conversations happen when no one sees them. The light is still present.
This week in worship, we’ll begin a new sermon series called The Healing Practice of Celebration. It is based loosely on the book by the same title from Dr. Elaine Heath. As a personal note, I am a huge fan of Dr. Heath’s work. I studied with her at Duke Divinity School and enjoy all her work about the mission of the church. (That’s a conversation for a different time.) But this book in particular came at just the right time. It reminded Pastor Annette, the worship planning team, and me of the dedication it takes to find and seek light, even in the midst of the difficulties of our world. Celebration implies joy, but the healing practice reminds us that seeking joy itself can be a healing and grounding way to sustain ourselves through life’s difficulties.
In that way, we’ll look this weekend at two people whom we consider to have immense faith, but who struggled with doubt in their time on Earth. Our Scripture tells of John the Baptist’s asking of his disciples if Jesus was truly the Messiah. We imagine that even though John accepted Jesus in the womb, he still struggled with doubt after being thrown in prison and persecuted. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom we celebrate this weekend, felt the same doubt in his own prison sentence, even though he believed deeply in the power of Christ and the transformation possible in the Civil Rights movement. Jesus replies to John, and to us, that we should look for the evidence of the light. We will think about this evidence as we celebrate amidst our own doubt and darknesses.
It is okay if you don’t feel like celebrating much these days. I struggle, too. God’s invitation is to open our eyes to see that goodness, love, and light are still all around us. And even if everything else feels rather dark, that is certainly a truth worth throwing a party about.
See you Sunday,
Pastor Allee