Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? I will with God’s help.

Dear Friends,

Advent has begun, and yet the joy of baptisms on All Saints Sunday is still reverberating in my soul. We had a wondrous time on All Saints: lots of kids; lots of familiar and unfamiliar faces gathered to present and welcome the two newest members of St. Paul’s; excellent music with strings, a trumpet and kettle drums encouraging all of us to enter with the choir into the celebration. The refrain in the baptismal covenant we recited together— I will with God’s help – speaks to the promise that attends the commitment: God will work with us to reveal and fulfill God’s purposes. And now, as we look into Advent, we are persisting in our search for the Christ among us, the Christ seeking out and serving us, even as we seek and serve Christ. God’s evolving mission in the world, and the church’s ability to serve that mission, depends upon our willingness to be transformed by the spirit of Christ so that we may more fully recognize the Christ, the anointed one, in all those who populate our congregation, our family, our community, our world.

How does this happen? It seems to me that by offering ourselves to God, and relaxing into God’s commandment that we are be loving of our neighbor, we trust God to work with us and our priorities and our energies begin to shift. Feeling the care of God for us, trusting that we are held by the God of promise, we begin to find our courage renewed, and our hearts softened. Our eyes and ears and our soul relaxing, opening, we begin to detect the Christ among us, and present, like traces of gold, in our neighbors. We seek that elemental goodness of creation, we find it, and we serve it. We detect it in playfulness, in generosity of spirit, in gentleness, in courage, in patience, in nurturing, in creativity, and in so many other ways that reveal to us the spirit of Christ alive in the world, alive in us and in our neighbor. We enjoy it, we name it, we bring it into the light. We find it at the grocery check-out counter, in a bank, at a restaurant, at the gym, in hospitals, in nursing homes, and in so many other places. We affirm the gracious presence of Christ in and through our neighbor with the “light touch” of tuning in to those qualities that are aligned with the spirit of Christ, that bear witness to his continuing presence in the world.

This is the church of the past, the present and the future: rooted and grounded in Christ alive in and through us for the good of the world, in the service of God’s mission to reveal freedom, unity, justice and peace. We look to the Advent of Christ in the world—once in a manger, finally at the close of creation, and incarnate in you, in me, and in all those we meet. I will continue to find these traces of gold in the world today, with God’s help.

Peace,
David+