Focus on Core Values Part 2

 

This week, we are letting our Core Values as a church help us explore, express, and experience our individual stories, our shared stories, and the story of God’s work in the world.  Yesterday, I asked you to think of definitions, descriptions, and examples of our six Core Values:

 

Worship, Caring, Welcome, Belonging, Justice, and Faithfulness.

 

For me, worship is an encounter with the Eternal.  This can happen in the sanctuary as we sing the hymn, Perpetual Praise about God’s many blessings that are new each morning.  Worship happens outside when I notice the vast variety of colors our Creator paints within creation.  Worship happens around kitchen tables during pastoral visits and in Bible Study and drumming circles and writing these morning meditations.  Worship is not confined to a building with walls and a steeple.  When have you felt your soul surge and stirred to offer God prayer and praise?

 

For me, caring is an encounter of God’s love that never lets me go.  Steve Cuss talks about the experience gap.  That we believe in God’s unconditional, unceasing love, but we don’t always experience this love or think ourselves worthy of such love.  That is, we talk about God’s love as though it was theoretical rather than experiential.  Caring puts flesh, breath, and bone ~ caring is an embodied experience that moves from the head to the heart.  There is so much talk today about self-care, which is important.  I believe that you should not say something to yourself that you would not say to a friend; to keep being awake to how we let our inner critic berate and belittle us.  For me, the most powerful experiences of care come from another.  A hug, a smile, words of affection and affirmation, moments I feel seen and heard for who I am, these are all ways threads of care sewn into my life.

 

Welcome echoes care.  I love the definition that welcome is a ‘wished for guest’ (Lucy Finn Borgo).  Welcome is not just about opening the door with a smile plastered on your face and some crackers/cheese put out on the table but feeling truly wanted in a place.  I feel welcomed into people’s homes who make me feel like family.  I feel welcomed into people’s hearts who sometimes say what I am feeling better than I can express.  Welcome is a bit like trying to hold sand, words slip through my fingers trying to define/describe it.  The best experience of welcome was my wife’s grandmother.  When my wife and I were dating, her grandmother invited us for a meal.  At the time, I was a vegetarian.  So, her grandmother made every vegetable she could think of!  I am talking green beans, corn, broccoli, carrots, and potatoes.  Oh, and she made pork cooked in bacon grease, because it wasn’t beef.  That was the day I stopped being a vegetarian ~ because pork cooked in bacon grease is delicious, and because I felt welcomed!

The above story is also an example of belonging, a moment I felt seen and heard and loved.  Belonging is something we all long for in a world where we are more connected than ever via the internet ~ and feel more alone than ever too ~ what a complex contradiction!  I feel a sense of belonging when I say to you all at communion, “There is a place set for all of you at Christ’s table and plenty of room to spare.”  You are welcome, wanted, and belong to One who calls you by name. 

 

Justice for me about showing up and speaking up.  I also think that justice today can be a double edge sword that we just keep fighting the “other”.  We want our way, our views validated, so we find an advisory ~ which is easy to do in a diverse world where everyone has a platform.  So, we craft/create “us” verses “them” narratives.  We blast out emails and evidence that if “they” win, all goes to hell in a handbasket.  And we refuse and refute any nuance.  We keep an internal score card.  And the heartbreaking truth is that we constantly think we are losing regardless of which side we are on.  Listen to our politicians.  Listen to your favorite sports team ~ they are always the underdog.  Listen to a friend who sees only the negative and less than as they drive away in a new car.  We are so complex and contradictory.  Justice, God’s justice, is about opening a capricious space where we are not in control and charge, where hierarchy, win-lose narratives, and scapegoating no longer make sense.  God’s justice is about showing loving kindness to others and walking humbly with God. 

 

Finally, faithfulness is growing in the image of God for the sake of another.  I grow not just for my own isolated Enlightenment-self or to show you how brilliant I am; I grow because worship, care, belonging, justice, and welcome are always pushing at my boundaries – just as the friendship between the Ethiopian and Philip.  I grow through reading, writing, talking, sitting quietly with God’s still soft voice, walking in Creation that grows in the dirt and stardust, sun and moon light that nourishes my soul. 

 

I pray these definitions of these words have helped you.  Now, I would love to hear your descriptions, definitions, and examples from this mid-point of the year.  Amen.