Realigning Before the Rising

Hi, friends, and welcome to the Weekly Dulin Podcast, a brief weekly reflection from Dulin United Methodist Church in Falls Church. Here, we take time to think together about faith, community, and what it means to live as disciples of Jesus in today's world.

Hello, Dulin Church. It's me, James Henry, your pastor, coming to you again with the weekly moment and podcast on this lovely Thursday. We are coming toward the end of the season of Lent. Next week is Holy Week. We have the Maundy Thursday service.

We have Good Friday service. There's an Easter egg hunt on the Saturday before Easter, and then an Easter sunrise service, and a regular Easter worship experience. In the midst of all of that, this time of Lent has been the forty days in the wilderness in the desert. We've called it, I've called it an opportunity to realign ourselves, to figure out if we are in the place God created us to be. What is it that God hoped when we were made?

What place are we meant to hold? What post in this beautiful universe, in this beautiful world we're a part of? What is God looking for in us? What did God make us for? What kind of a gift do we bring?

And that's what this desert time, this realignment time has been all about. So as we're getting close to the end of that time, I thought it might be a time for us to sit back and just ask the question, how's it going? Have you sort of, has Lent has worn on kind of just lost track maybe of the practices you took up, either an added practice or fasting from something in particular during this season, has that kind of slipped by the wayside? Or has it become just a habit that you no longer ask the question, what is this teaching me about myself? What is this saying to be about who I am and who I am to God and how God is calling me in this moment?

It's an opportunity to kind of one last time come to the realignment table, if you will, and ask ourselves: What is God asking? Where is God speaking into my life? Do I hear it when the scriptures are read on a Sunday morning? Do I hear it when the lector reads the scripture? Do I hear it when the choir sings a song or on those occasions when the bells play?

Is it in the quiet moments before worship? There aren't as many of those maybe as we might normally. There's usually a conversation amongst all the folks, but is that where you're finding your alignment? Are you finding your alignment in a morning walk or in watching a sunrise or a sunset? Maybe for you as spring is coming on, some of them feel like warm days and those warm days are just inviting you to see that part of the cycle of our lives together is that things cool down and fall away into dormancy and then things rise up again.

What is the thing that's rising up in you? What is calling out to you in this season? How can you align with the the mission of what, Dulin stands for, to make disciples of Jesus Christ for, the transformation of the world? What does that look like for you? What does that feel like for you?

What part do you play in making that happen? And have you taken time to sort of, as you realign, look at what maybe your personal mission is? What are you called to do? What is your mission in life? My own is to embrace the world with in its infinite preciousness as an unconditionally loved piece of what God is making.

More or less those words to embrace the world just as it is knowing it's infinitely precious and unconditionally loved by God. That's my personal mission. So I try to enter into that mission every day that I live and try to see how I'm doing with alignment. Has this desert time that all this time that you have been trying to realign yourself with perhaps what God wants for you, have there been things that have been challenging you in this time really pushing at you? Are you feeling like not only is it a symbolic desert time but maybe it's a desert time in your spirituality.

You can't seem to see God in the world no matter where you look. That happens. It happens to everybody. The spiritual giants of history as well as everyday folks, folks like you and me. We come to those places where we can't quite figure out where God is in all of it.

Maybe in this season, you have been overwhelmed by the fracturing of the world in which we live. That fragmentation is often called from a biblical perspective if you're looking for a word sin. The discord that happens in our public discourse. The blaming, the naming, the calling of names, the demonizing and scapegoating one of another. Judging, blaming, forgetting who we are.

Remember we talked about that in the Lord's prayer and lead us not into temptation is also don't let us fall into forgetfulness. Don't let us forget whose we are and who we are, and therefore how we are meant to be and act in the world. Have you just felt overwhelmed by what you see around you in our communities, in our country, in our world, the wars that are starting, that have dragged on, the inhumanity that we perpetrate against one another and against the very creation God made for us. The lack of reverence for the beauty that surrounds us. Treating nature itself as if it's yet another commodity to be exchanged.

Maybe that breaks you a little bit. All the suffering in the world, maybe that breaks you a little bit. Maybe you feel it deep in your soul. Maybe you have your own personal challenges that are breaking you just a little bit. Maybe you've lost someone dear to you.

Whether you lost that person through death or through the end of a relationship and all that you hoped for, all that you invested in, all that you imagined for that relationship did not come true. Perhaps you have unfinished business. We talked about grief this past Sunday in worship, and perhaps grief is weighing you down. And maybe it's not just grief for someone you've lost, but for a kind of world that you imagined was true that no longer seems to be. All those could be part of your desert experience.

And in the midst of those experiences of uncertainty and trying to figure out what is next, what you can do to realign yourself. Let me say, first of all, it's very important. Stop for just a second and catch your breath. I need to say this to you. You may feel alone, but you're not alone.

You're not alone in the feelings of looking at a world that seems to be descending into chaos. Prices rising, cost of living going up, all those things. You are not alone in seeing that, in feeling that, maybe even in your body. You are not alone because you're the spirit is always always with us. That's the promise of God and that is the hope to which I hold because I have seen that truth to be real.

So you're not alone. And you're part of a community. If you are one of our Dulin friends or Dulin disciples, members of our congregation are just watching us for the first time. You are loved and you're a part of the human community, which extends across all boundaries and borders, all the artificial lines we draw. If I'm to understand the words of Paul who tell us that in Christ there is no East or West, Jew or Greek, male or female, any of the things we think of as opposites, that in Christ those walls, those boundaries break down and we get to be a part of one another.

It is a desert season. It is a season that's meant to invite us into reflection, but not just reflection within, engagement without. But if we're going to be engaged outside of ourselves, we want to be sure we're grounded in what's most important. And that most important thing is the love of God. That's why we spent this season, continue to spend the season, realigning ourselves if we felt, you know, we were a little out of alignment.

It's an opportunity for us to be more like Jesus. If we're going to follow the path of the one whom we follow, the one in whom we believe, Jesus, then the invitation is to live and to act and to follow as he calls us to. I am so thankful that you've joined me today. I am so thankful that you are out there listening to the Dulin Weekly Podcast, that you're out there watching the Dulin Weekly Moments because hopefully they're helping to draw us together more to build some bridges. Not only worship on Sunday, not only other things that you might be engaged in, but another opportunity to reflect on our place in God's infinite love, unconditional love for us and for all that is and everyone who is.

Well, thanks for joining me today. I want to wish you all the best in these last days of the Lenten season coming ahead. I want to be sure you know you're invited to join us for the Maundy Thursday service at 07:30, not tonight, but a week from tonight. So April, when we turn over the new year in April, the fifth is Easter, the fourth is the Easter egg hunt, The third is Good Friday night at 07:30PM service. And the second, Thursday night the second is our Maundy Thursday foot washing and communion service with some of our sister United Methodist churches in the community.

You're invited to all of those. Hopefully they will offer you the kind of renewal at the end of this long Lenten travel we've been on the path and help us to realign. Thanks for joining me and letting me invite you to those things. As always, remember that you are loved. You are a gift.

You're precious. Thanks for your generosity and your ongoing work to make the world the place God hopes it would be. Until our next time together, all the best.