Mission

With the help of the Holy Spirit, our mission is to build and nurture our congregation, whether members, friends or strangers:

~to accept the gift of God's love,

~to be the body of Christ,

~to grow in faith, unconditional love and grace as demonstrated in the life of Jesus Christ.

With God's guidance we strive to understand the differences that separate people and work to fill the void left by intolerance, misunderstanding and injustice.

March 2009

One Great Hour of Sharing
“Who is My Neighbor?”

As we move through the season of Lent, it is appropriate to consider the ministries we support through our gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing. This year, the offering focuses on the question a lawyer asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus, of course, tells him the story of the Good Samaritan, a story perhaps so familiar to many of us that we miss a couple of its central points. One of those points is that Jesus is telling the lawyer, “The road to life goes through your neighbor. First, love God; next, love your neighbor.” Our salvation, in other words, is not a private peace we can negotiate with God. It requires our being involved with one another. Just as the Samaritan saw the stranger on the road first as a fellow human being, literally stripped of all the identities that might set him apart from himself, I think Jesus calls us as well to pierce beneath the surfaces that make us believe our differences are crucial, down to the common humanity and need we all share.

The other thing he tells him is, “If you do this, you will live.” This, I think, is the gift hidden within the challenge to love one another. It seems to me that Jesus means that our separation from our neighbor, especially the neighbor we don't really want to approach, is one of the things that separates us from true life. It is in recognizing our own face in that of our neighbor that we can see the face of God. It is in recognizing our common need and our common humanity ­ with all of those we may be tempted to think of as them ­ that we can open ourselves up to God. I invite you this Lent to consider your gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing as an opportunity to recognize the breadth of your neighborhood and, in doing so, to recognize the depth of God's love for all of us.

I hope you will be moved to accept these invitations as well as the invitation hidden in God's commandment to love our neighbors. May that challenge and that invitation draw us all closer to our neighbors and to God this Lent.

We will receive the One Great Hour of Sharing offering during worship on April 5, Palm/Passion Sunday. You can can also bring your offering to worship or mail it to the church office throughout April.