Friends, 

I returned this week from spending some time in Florida, first visiting my brothers and then attending a “Luminosity” conference in Orlando. (One special treat from the conference is that I was able to visit my Seminary roommate and his spouse, also a friend in Seminary, whose wedding I was part of. What a gift it is to be able to re-connect with friends after almost 40 years, seven children, and three grandchildren.) 

 

The conference was interesting, informative, and refreshing. Our last Plenary Speaker was Dr. Eric Barreto, a New Testament professor from Princeton Seminary, who began his presentation by saying something like, “I’m tired of people tell the story about a church that is losing, failing, and falling apart.” He went on to say that our narrative is a different narrative and demonstrated through the stories in the book of Acts how God is active in the world in ways that defy our definitions of success or failure. I had a hard time focusing on the next thing he would say, because everything he said set me off into an imaginative, learning conversation with the Scriptures. One moment, God comes into the human story with healing, the next with a table that welcomes the outcast, another moment with a clarifying story or enigmatic parable, another with bread, another calming a storm, raising the dead, giving an aged couple a child, teaching the centrality of love, and so on. The sheer multiplicity of ways that God works – often surprising and unexpected – fills me with humility when I consider what we are up to here at St. Mark. 

 

Think of our Session, for example. According to the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church, our Session is a collection of eighteen elders, who have been elected by the congregation to work together to fulfill this mission: “The Session shall have responsibility for governing the congregation and guiding its witness to the sovereign activity of God in the world, so that the congregation is and becomes a community of faith, hope, love, and witness.” Notice the part that I have italicized. Our elders guide us as we point to what God is doing in the world, just as the Scriptures point to what God was doing in their day. We get to ask, “In what way is God calming the storm of our day?” “Where is God offering healing?” “Where is the table being widened?” “What has expired that will be raised to new life?” And most importantly, we ask, “How is God doing a new thing among us, surpassing our imaginations?” Even though so many of our energies are given to routine and necessary things like worship-planning and tree-pruning, even those activities take on new life when we remember that God is not dead, sleeping, retired, or bored with loving creation. 

 

So, that’s a taste of the “streams of consciousness” that our speakers evoked in me during the Luminosity conference. There were many more, but it will take me some time to organize them in my head before I can share them coherently. 

 

In the meantime, here we are in the midst of our Lenten theme, “Turning over Tables,” which I have found compelling. I hope you have, too. And thank you for providing such a kind welcome to Kate Forer, our guest preacher last weekend. I was able to watch the services and know that you heard a fabulous sermon. I’m glad Kate is such a friend of St. Mark.

 

See you in worship,

Mark of St. Mark