As Holy
Cross worships together this fall, we will study and discuss how our faith
benefits us in our daily life and how we can nurture that faith and receive its
challenges, joys and benefits. How people express and live out their faith has
undergone some profound changes since the pandemic. Some of these changes are good, and perhaps
some not so good. We will look at how our faith can meet the needs of today and how best to live it out in light of all that is going on in our world today.
The series will also have two main themes that run throughout the Biblical texts that we will discuss. They are that faith is a lot about keeping God’s people together, and that faith is also about making each of us whole as individuals.
Keeping
God’s People Together
Our series
will start off with talking about how we are called to take our relationships
with others seriously. Often when we
think about our faith we examine only what it might mean for us as
individuals. Does God love me? Am I going to heaven? Am I a good person? And so on.
However, by
reading scripture we learn that faith is central to our forming healthy and
life-giving relationships. This is
because faith itself is a relationship.
The term “faith” is really a way to explain how we relate to the divine
during our course of life on earth. The
bible also teaches us that our faith relationship is not walled off from the
other significant relationships in our life.
When things work well, our faith relationship can give us the strength
to be more attentive to the other relationships in our lives, family, friends,
neighbors and society. It can at times
work in the reverse, when our relationships with others become stressful our
relationship with Christ can suffer. I
am convinced that our society’s increased lack of trust is affecting how people
engage churches and practice their faith.
Before the
pandemic societal and technological changes were leading people to report
increased loneliness and isolation, with several significant studies reporting
that friend networks of all ages are decreasing in size. This trend was accelerated by our struggle
with COVID-19 and I am sure we have yet to reverse it.
The faithful
response to our society’s isolation is to call people together into
community. The book of Acts teaches us
that the first work of the church was to be a community that comes together in
prayer and that second was to go out and invite more people to come into our
community. As Jesus taught and we will
discuss on Sunday. So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that
one of these little ones should be lost. Matthew 18:14
Making each
of us whole
The beauty
is that when we work on including the lost, restoring relationships, and
inviting others to come along, we are participating in our own healing. The virtue of faith is that though the
healing of our relationships with others we find peace and that peace can heal. Faith is given as a gift to us for times when
we are in need. God is good and gracious
and Jesus reminds us that he came so that we can have an abundant life, not just
in some far off future kingdom, but here in this place today.
The Hebrew
word for peace means to be whole, and when Jesus leaves us his peace, it means
that he is working to put us back together again. When we catch glimpses of God’s work of
restoring relationships and bringing us peace within ourselves, the result is
joy. The church works best when we are
working on reconciliation and healing. This fall we are looking to examine how
that may work in our daily lives and in our church today. If we keep the faith, it is as Paul said to
the Philippians “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:7
Be blessed
Pastor
Knecht
