Dear Friends,

As I reflected upon last week’s beautiful All Saints Sunday Celebration, in which we welcomed 18 new members into the fellowship of our community, it dawned on me just how far we have come since last year when we were worshiping entirely online with limited physical connection between us. I owe this sign of new life to the fact that through it all, we have kept our focus on the business to which God calls us the most – the business of relationships. Real, loving, and supportive relationships. Each candidate who was welcomed on Sunday came to us through a relationship, and each one offers us a doorway into new relationships.

This is true, even as we acknowledge that things may never “be the same” as they were before the pandemic, and in many ways our world feels as chaotic as it did in the aftermath of World War I when poet William Butler Yeats penned the words, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

Some of you may be aware that this prophetic line from Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming” is rooted in the apocalyptic imagery of our gospel reading for this Sunday, in which Jesus tells his disciples who gaze with awe at the Jerusalem temple that before too long, “It’s all going to come tumbling down.”  There will be leaders who will lead them astray; wars and rumors of war; earthquakes, and famines; nations rising against each other. Everything will feel like it’s falling apart.

While our own context is radically different from first-century Palestine or the great world wars, our realities are rapidly changing, from increasing wealth disparity, racial reckoning, climate change reaching the “red zone,” to the rise of COVID-19 cases when many expected them to be falling. In this liminal, threshold space, between what was and what is to come, what on earth do we do? I must admit, I get dizzy from trying to sort out what it is I need to be most worried about. At the end of our gospel passage, Jesus says that it will feel like birth pangs…a groaning. What type of life will emerge from this? Will I recognize it? Can I trust it?

In the words of pastor and spiritual guide James Marsh, “Things will get strange, Jesus warns, but hold fast. Seek out quiet places to listen. Be a part of an intentional and inclusive community who will try their best to know you, and who you can know in return. From this vulnerably strong place, rivers of justice and mercy can flow. Broken spirits will be healed within it. New life will be born amidst the rubble of it all. Elegantly stacked stones are no match for human hearts and hands, for the human life, the image of God.”

In order to give birth to the courage to find the face of love in difficult things to come, we need real relationships with real people who will hold each other up through whatever seems to be falling apart.  Thank you, dear people of St. John’s, for being that kind of community.

In Christ,

Amelie+