Welcome
Each week one of our pastors or staff members writes a column observing what is going on in our congregation, the Church and the world, and offering reflections on the Christian life and faith. Through this series of columns, we hope to connect your and our story to the enduring story of Christ; to offer pastoral reflections on our ongoing congregational life and mission; to report on news of the Presbyterian Church and Church universal; and to invite further reflection and deeper discipleship. We welcome your comments and suggestions. In other words, our words here are an invitation to continue the conversation.
We are more than halfway through our summer preaching series, All Creatures Great and Small, which highlights the animals in scripture that shape the biblical story. As we have moved through the summer, I often find myself pointing out to my colleagues the places where these same animals that appear in our sermons also appear in our stained-glass windows here at the church.
On your phone, on the internet, and on television, you can constantly check how the stock market is doing, along with getting analysis about the prospects for a bull or a bear market. As someone interested in how my retirement investments are doing, I check on them regularly. However, there are other things we affirm as having value that are harder to measure regarding how they are doing.
When I became a youth pastor, I knew I wanted to treat mission trips differently. I knew missions were more complicated than just going on a trip, doing service work for some poor people, telling people about Jesus, and going home. Rather, there was an opportunity for something genuinely sacred to happen.
As a five-star general who led the Allies to victory in World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower served two presidential terms before retiring from public office in 1961. In his celebrated Farewell Address of that year, offered just days before John F. Kennedy was sworn in, the outgoing President delivered words of caution to a nation still living in the hubris of armed might and growing Cold War hostilities:
After church on Sunday the 16th, when our volunteers gathered for training, we paused in prayer. Each person offered a hope for our VBC campers. Words like "friendship," "welcome," "peace," "grace," "joy," "love," and "belonging" filled Congregational Hall. The words were a prequel to what would unfold over the next six days as campers and volunteers alike were surrounded by and embodied welcome, belonging, joy, grace, love, and even an occasional second of peace.
Yesterday, we, as a community and a country, once again celebrated Juneteenth, our annual recognition of the day when the very last enslaved people in our country were told that they were free. For several years now, starting even before the pandemic, the BMPC Anti-Racism Committee has been working on ways for our congregation to learn, dialogue, and grow as individuals and as a community around issues of systemic racism and implicit bias.
In 1989, the Sanctuary Choir embarked on its first choir tour. That tour, to Austria and communist Czechoslovakia, turned out to be so exciting that the thirst for travel subsequently led the choir to places as diverse as South Africa, Cuba, and Brazil, along with Northern Ireland during the “troubles” and Russia during the chaotic rule of Boris Yeltsin. Some tours have focused on exploring our roots. Tours through the American South and, several years later, through Luther’s Germany whetted that appetite and gave us a context for who we are in this time in history. And, with a war now raging in Gaza, our most recent tour to Israel and Jordan proved to be incredibly poignant, especially considering our profoundly moving encounters with Palestinian children in the West Bank.
