From the Rector

Friends in Christ—

Sometimes, when asked about some aspect of Church or another, I have likened it to a mosaic. In a mosaic, each piece comes together to reveal some larger image. For churches, our mosaic always is of Jesus. The big picture for us is his image — is growing into his likeness. Or it should be.

As we all know, churches fail again and again to be living icons of Christ. At our best we are the workshops of sainthood but, seemingly more often, we are the warehouses of sinners. We should, actually, always be a place where sinners come together. That’s kind of the point! But what do we do when we get here, all together, in this one place?

The Church doesn’t say, “Come together in your various sins and wallow together.” We are challenged, provoked, encouraged, and equipped to be transformed. The grace we encounter here finds its focal point in your heart. In my heart. In our lives. The grace, mercy, and love of Christ draw us out of being a single chipped piece adrift, tossed akimbo into a pile of other pieces.

That grace, mercy, and love challenge us even as they comfort us. In our yard, there are some pieces of pottery lying all around. They have been in the desert for quite some time. So there is lots of dust. Lots of buried beauty. Life has that impact on us. It teaches us to sin. The way we come to cope with the world, more often than not, involves developing defensive responses that save us in one moment and then doom us in others.

We learn to lie to avoid being hit. We learn to steal to eat. We learn to show rage to avoid being picked on. We learn to criticize rather than be criticized. We learn to scream to stop being ignored. We learn not to feel lest we drown in feelings.

On and on it goes. It’s so easy to come to Church, chipped and dusty as we are, and never really seek to become part of something else. We can come and just rest. That’s a wonderful thing to find — that sense of being safe.

But ultimately grace is like heat. We don’t turn on the stove just to turn it on. We cook with it — we bring together lots of different ingredients so they can feed us. We learn to cook with it so we can feed others. The bitterness, acidity, over-sweetness, and the like are blended as the heat turns up so that something new is made — something with life-giving potential.

We all come together here with all sorts of histories, stories, challenges, traumas, and more. We come together here to get dusted off and to be fit together into a bigger picture — as pieces of a mosaic that shows forth the image and likeness of Christ. 

The big picture is always our goal — and along the way, we come to find that letting grace change us and change the ways we’ve learned to just cope makes it possible to hope for something more. As tempting as it is just to let ourselves be put on a shelf to be one more dusty thing in the warehouse that’s not really the big picture. We’re here to be made part of a whole, part of something that loves us into more, something upon which the Spirit descends. 

We’re taken in all of our brokenness and with all of our flaws and the like, blessed, and made new together. As we regather in the months ahead let’s never lose sight of the big picture, of Jesus, who never loses sight of us and of who we might be together. 

Fr Robert