Community & Faith

Changing Each Other For Good

In our worship celebration at Fruitvale Church on Sunday we celebrated and dedicated the coming school year for students (young and old) and those that work in education. There was a significant time of prayer in which we had a ritual prayer to make our prayers visible, silent personal prayer, as well as the possibilty for annointing with oil for the new year.

I was overcome in the midst of all this spiritual acitivity, as many participants in our faith community shared their deep needs, concerns, hopes and visions for the coming year, asking me to pray with them.

I preached on Matthew 28:16-20, borrowing many ideas from a friend's sermon on the same text. Jesus sends out his friends, the 11 disciples into the world as followers-in-training, as life-long-learners, in a community because they would need each other every day. What's striking is that in the middle of that some of them still doubt. Jesus sends them not because they have all the answers, can package an easily-legislated morality, or because their militant zealots. They're sent because they've been changed, for good, because of their relationship with Jesus of Nazareth.

I quoted the song "For Good" from the Broadway Musical, in which the two protaganists sing to each other in the finals song of their relationship, and how they've been formed and informed by their relationships.

Here's some of the lyrics

"I know I'm who I am today
Because I knew you:
Like a comet pulled from orbit
As it passes a sun
Like a stream that meets a boulder
Halfway through the wood
Who can say if I've been changed for the better?
But because I knew you
I have been changed for good"

All of the lyrics are HERE.

I was seized with reflectiveness and gratitude during our worship celebration, and the chorus of prayers spoken, whispered, sung, enacted, and uttered in silence. These are the people who have changed me. Because I've known them in community, and have been known in return in community, I have been changed for good. It's not just a mountain-top, pass-the-smores-sing-around-the-campfire-feeling, but an experience of transcendence. I believe that I've been changed for good first and foremost in knowing this Jesus - who I'm still trying to know and grasp - and that has put other things into motion. But Sunday's worship put other things in motion.....

I was throughout our Dimond/Laurel neighborhood this past weekend...shopping in the Laurel, at the peace pole dedication in Dimond Park, at the neighborhood picnic in Maxwell Park, talking with Dimond Shop owners, and at our church building in the middle of it all. All of those events, all of those people are chaning things for good, for the more good. Maybe that's in part what faith is....not that we doing the changing for good, but that we are transformed and open to the power - I'd call it the Spirit of God - that moves in, among, and through us, changing us for the good (not some sort of moralistic or exclusionary good, but the good of caring for the widow, the orphan and the foreigner). Maybe that's what doing the will of God is...being open to relationships, encounters, sharing words, dialoguing....so that through it, in it, and by it we're all changed for the good?

Here's a video of the entire "For Good" song from the musical if you're interested.