Building God's Kingdom through Worship, Outreach, and Fellowship

Looking out my window – July 25, 2016

July 26, 2016 Uncategorized


I have struggled for several hours with the question, “What do I write for the community this time?”  Knowing that our time together has become short now, what feels central to me to share with you.  I reviewed all the paragraphs previously shared and felt that revising something written near the beginning of our journey together might be best.
Brené Brown, social worker, researcher, and Episcopalian says, “A story is facts with a soul.”  Every Sunday, I study your faces, wondering what stories live behind them in your experiences.  What stories of joy heartache, success, failure?  What stories of God’s love experienced in your life?
We each bring our personal stories to this community and make them part of the St. Andrew’s story.  Both those stories get altered by being interwoven.  St. Andrew’s story changes because of your presence and your story changes by being interwoven in the St. Andrew’s story.  No matter where you and I go if we leave here, our stories are forever different.
Each Sunday, we tell the story of our salvation in the readings and in the Great Thanksgiving.  We nest our personal stories and our church story in the great charter story of our salvation in Christ and find renewal and transformation in the bread and wine and the Spirit and the Word—the outpourings into our hearts of God’s story of saving love.  We become part of God’s ongoing story—the mission of God’s saving love in our world. 
It has been a privilege to be here with you.  The thought of having been with you, fills me with joy–sharing my story, hearing your stories, and experiencing our stories being interwoven into the tapestry we call St. Andrew’s.   You have included me in your personal stories and in the St. Andrew’s story and for that I thank you.  Wherever life takes me, my story will be forever different and richer thanks to you.
 

Muriel Rukeyser said it well in her poem “The Speed of Darkness”—“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

God’s Peace,
Fr. David, Interim Rector