Dear Caldwell,
Well, it’s been two weeks, three days since Easter Sunday. How’s your Easter holding up?
It’s startling sometimes how life rushes on, making us feel as idmore time has passed that actually has. The azalea and magnolia blooms are gone. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be in the 90s. School is winding toward its close with proms and graduations almost upon us. For others, family members have fallen ill or maybe things at work have gotten complicated.
With all of this and more, we can forget we are Easter people. We can lose touch with the joy and exhuberance we felt around the flower-covered cross and how we shouted “alleluias” in worship that day. So take a moment and remind yourself and those around you that we are still Easter people. That hasn’t changed. As with Mary Magdalene, who initially mistook Jesus for the gardener before her eyes were opened, we are called to see in new ways. Not just to see, as I preached Easter morning, but to “see and recongize” resurrection signs all around us, even if it seems the world has reverted to its old ways.
Theologian Karl Barth put it this way:
For everything lasts its time, but the love of God – which was at work and expressed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead – lasts forever. Because this event took place, there is no reason to despair, and even when we read the newspaper with all its confusing and frightening news, there is every reason to hope.
Pastoral note: We will have a full rundown of pastoral care and prayer concerns later this week in Caldwell This Week but please keep Marie Mancinelli and her partner, Terry Nilles, in prayer as Marie’s father is in the hospital with significant complications. Maries’ mother died only last fall. Also, Jackie Abernethy still welcomes visitors at Olde Knox Commons in Huntersville, just 15minutes up I-77 from uptown.
Finally, our own Beth Van Gorp was invited to give the “charge to the congregation” at First Presbyterian Church uptown as it installed its new Associate Pastor for Missions Erika Funk. Erika has been called to lead First Church’s many outreach and service ministries. Beth did a great job with her “charge,” which I add below.
Charge to First Presbyterian Church upon the installation of Rev. Erika Funk: by Beth Van Gorp
I love the fresco here at First Presbyterian Church which shows an image of the good Samaritan kneeling and covering with a piece of his clothing a wound on the head of an injured man who looks up with a mix of resignation and hope. I understand you wanted to ask in this painting the question: “Who is our neighbor?”
In installing Erika Funk today you have invited someone into your community who understands the need for that question. I know that you already welcome the neighbor in the family who visits the food bank or while building together at Habitat for Humanity and those are good and real things. And from all of your times of ministry, I encourage you to listen to her questions and to ask difficult ones of your own. Be fearless in these questions.
Erika will represent your congregation to folks like me who work at non-profits and to the neighbors who you want to invite into your family. I charge you to support her in this work, as it takes her around the world and around the neighborhood . Ministry is messy and can be lonely and painful. She needs your understanding and friendship.
I also call on you to be her co-worker not just her committee members. I know you to be faithful, imaginative and hard working. However, I’m guessing a few of you may have sighed in relief when Erika was called- perhaps you are tired or maybe just happy to have someone who understands the copy machine. But, I humbly ask you to remember that the Samaritan was not a preacher or a teacher, but one of us normal church folks. Do not be weary in doing good – encourage one another.
Your church has already claimed as your own an affirmation of the Presbyterian Church found in our denomination’s book of order. It reads “The Church is called to be a sign in and for the world of the new reality which God has made available to people in Jesus Christ.” May you, together, continue to make it so in this corner of the Kingdom of God.