FCC Weekly E-letter – September 14, 2018

How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honeycomb      Psalm 19 

I’m not much of a cook. I can follow a recipe. I’m able to improvise a little, even occasionally successfully. Mostly, though, I keep stringently to a recipe, running multiple clocks and timers to be exactly on-point, doing what the recipe says to the last letter.

Then I’ll have supper at my grandma’s house. She’ll be in the kitchen with ten dishes going all at the same time. She’s throwing salt here and there, eyeballing spices and rolling out noodles and making gravy all at the same time. I’ll ask her for a recipe and she’ll say, “I don’t really have one for that, I just cook it.” It’s aggravating. I like rules and order, structure and predictability. And my cooking, always, is less tasty than hers. A willing mind might suggest that this is the difference between science and art.

It’s Celebration Sunday and we’ll get to eat each others’ cooking at our famous come-one come-all potluck following church. We’ll gather around tables together to break bread, just as we do every Sunday at the Lord’s Table. We’ll gather as people with different cooking abilities, different singing abilities, different social graces and different life experiences. But we’ll all be welcome, we’ll all be needed, we’ll all belong. This is the Church, Christ’s church, where there’s no one right way to follow the Scriptures, no one right way to be led by the Spirit. It takes all of us listening and praying, all of our gifts working together, to get the banquet just right.

I hope to see you Sunday, whether you’re a rule-follower or an intuition-truster in the kitchen, or in the pew. Don’t forget, Sunday School begins at 9am and a Hymn Sing at 9:45! And as we break bread together, as we remember Jesus, let’s enjoy the banquet that is always started, first and foremost, by God’s grace.

Pastor Alex