March 6, 2016 (full size gallery)
An overcast Sunday but mild for Lent 4. This Sunday is sometimes call "mothering Sunday." During the sixteenth century, people returned to their mother church, the main church or cathedral of the area, for the service 3 weeks before lent. Anyone who did this was commonly said to have gone "a-mothering", although whether this term preceded the observance of Mothering Sunday is unclear.
The service had a good crowd of 44. Before this we continued "Growing a Rule of Life" finishing part 2 on our relationship with God and do most of Part 3 on our relationship with self. We sustain our selves by organizing our time, by keeping our minds active ("reading, listening, worshiping") and searching for uninterrupted sleep.
During the service we celebrated Becky’s birthday and Virginia Bowens. Roger summarized Annual Council 2016 which was help in one day on March 5.
Main decisions
1. Annual Council become Annual Convention based on the Confederacy using the former term which remained the norm until now.
2. Study of women clergy for equality, support for Syrian refugees, and " recommends that no firearms of any kind or other dangerous weapons shall be permitted during worship services or meetings for religious purposes"
3. Elections to various groups.
4. Bishop Shannon on completing the extended Shrine Mont camps goal.
We continued with St. Peter’s Sing with a Quiz which is Part 8. We also introduced the Portland Guitar Duo concert on April 15 and the new St. Peter’s Reads Recommend a favorite book to the Parish. Funds are due now to Clarence for the My Fair Lady Trip on April 3.
After the service, 1st Sunday Social was held at the Long family home. Cookie made both vegetarian and meat lasagna, Alex salmon and salad. Desert was Linda’s hot crepes and Brad’s Bread Pudding, a favorite of St. Peter’s. We had an overflowing crowd in two rooms.
Today’s readings invite us into the welcoming, forgiving arms of our loving God. The sermon extended the Gospel reading "As the father welcomes his young son home, so God welcomes us back home too, when we come to ourselves and decide to return home to God. "
How do we do this ? Through reconciliation.
"God has entrusted the message of reconciliation to us. So we are to be ambassadors for Christ, since now God makes God’s appeal to the world through us—and our message to the world is reconciliation.
"We catch glimpses of this new world, and yet we still live in a time that is captive to the old order, which runs on discord, brokenness, and downright hatred for our fellow human beings. Nowhere is this wandering more evident than it is right now in the state of politics in this country. In my lifetime, I cannot recall an uglier political process than the one we are enduring right now, and this is only primary season.
"The result of this gridlock has left the American people, including Christians, feeling politically helpless, confused, cynical, angry, wearied, or downright apathetic about politics. How are we to be ambassadors for Christ and messengers of reconciliation in the political realm?
The sermon used a book to answer the question Senator John Danforth’ The Relevance of Religion: How Faithful People Can Change Politics, published just last year, in which he hopes that his struggle with how faith and politics should intersect and connect in his own life will “help others think about the relationship between their faith and how they go about their lives as citizens and their engagement in politics” (page 6).
Here are the four principles.
1 The first principle is that “we should insist that politics remain in its proper place. Politics is not the realm of absolute truth and it is not the battleground of good and evil. Faithful people worship God. They do not worship political parties or ideologies…our opponents are not our enemies.”
2 Second, “we should be advocates for the common good. The framers of our Constitution were realistic in their understanding that politics consists of groups advancing their own interests, and they created a system of checks and balances to offset competing interests against one another. .l religion can restore the lost principle of virtue that says that there is a higher good than the self
3 Third, “we should advocate political compromise, and make the case that the spirit of compromise is consistent with our faith…workable politics is the art of compromise, and the result of inflexible positions is gridlock.
4 And fourth, we should be “a unifying force, working to bind America together….the words ‘religion’ and ‘ligament’ come from the same root meaning ‘to bind together’…..Paul said that in Christ, God reconciled the world to himself, and entrusted to us the message of reconciliation.” A fundamental premise of Danforth’s book is that “overcoming estrangement is the responsibility of faithful people and that God has entrusted us with the ministry of reconciliation.
"So getting home to God and seeing that new world that God has spread before us, gives us new hearts and new spirits and allows us to have the strength and courage to go out and participate in healing ways in the world around us, including politics
"Participating in politics does not mean drawing lines in the sand on issues on either the right or the left of the political spectrum, but as Danforth puts it, “our fundamental allegiance is to our structure of government, not to any particular ideology or policy
"And the father makes this point about the process of decision making to his older, disgruntled son who feels that he has been treated unfairly—that what binds us together as a family is not one side or the other, who is right and who is wrong, looking out only for ourselves.
"Forgiveness, compassion, love and reconciliation toward one another are the very things that bind us together as this congregation—and these are the things that equip us to go out into the world as messengers of reconciliation.
"May we have the courage, then, to come to ourselves as Americans, to lay down our anger, our despair, our acrimony, our disgust, and our apathy toward politics so that we can participate as people of faith to carry the message of reconciliation out into these great United States in this season of discontent and despair. "