Pastors’ Column

The scripture reading for this coming Sunday is one of my favorite passages of scripture. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is giving final instructions to his disciples, and he uses a beautiful image for them to hold onto even though their Lord is about to take his earthly leave of them. He says, “I am the Vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” It is a lovely and powerful reminder that God is the source of life itself and all that we do as followers of Christ grows out of his life and love for us.

This Saturday we will gather as a congregation committed to a deep and wide experience of mission in our community and around the world. This will be the third year that BMPC has held an annual Mission Summit, and each year the event has looked a little different. This year is no exception.

This Sunday, during the 10:00 a.m. worship service we will celebrate the Ordination and Installation of elders and deacons. The ordination of lay leaders for the church goes back 500 years, to the Protestant Reformation, when our tradition parted company with an ecclesiastical hierarchy of church governance and ceased to have bishops entrusted with the power and authority to appoint church leaders. Presbyterians believe we make more faithful decisions together than any one person could alone, and affirm the “priesthood of all believers” by electing lay leaders to govern the church.

This Sunday, April 10, high school youth from BMPC will take part in an interfaith program called “Walking the Walk,” coordinated by the Interfaith Center of Greater Philadelphia. The event will include youth from other local congregations including Mainline Reform Temple, New Horizons Islamic School, and Mainline Unitarian Church.

During our second year working at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, a new student entered the Master of Divinity program from Syria. In many ways Mathai (not his real name) slipped into the comfortable camaraderie that all of these young men shared. But in other ways Mathai was different. Because of the struggle to get a visa into Egypt for school, he would not be able to travel back to his home until four years later when he will have finished his degree, while all his classmates travel home each weekend to be with their children and families. Though many of our Egyptian students lived and even worked in congregations through the various revolutions and violence that Egypt has experienced over the past several years, Mathai had experienced much worse. His jokes were a little edgier. His patience for dealing with difficult situations was shorter. His grief at the violence and destruction happening back home didn’t make him miss it and his family any less.

Today’s Maundy Thursday communion services and tomorrow’s Good Friday services enable us to follow in the footsteps of Jesus to the end as the gospel enacts God’s raw, brutal entry into human suffering. Then, come Easter morning, the Alleluias will peal from heaven and from within our hearts at the incomprehensible wonder of resurrection. Worshipping together, in word and deed, in song and silence, in ways beyond mere thought, we embrace the most confounding mystery to which we Christians cling – that in the midst of death God bestows life.