Words of Welcome

  Mourners, Pran Nath Mago, 1947 (National Book Trust, India) Lamentations 1:1-6 It is said that American Christians struggle with laments. We like our religion to be positive and uplifting. I understand why. We often go to church when life is difficult, hoping to be inspired, but there are times when we need to be in a community where it’s okay to weep. We need places where it’s okay to share our concerns as well as our joys, a place where we can acknowledge that there are things happening in our world that trouble us. Because we are a religious community, when bad things happen to other religious communities, we’re affected as well. We can empathize with them. So, when news came last Sunday that a man drove his truck into the front of the LDS church in Grand Blanc, shot and killed four members, while wounding eight others, before setting the church on fire, we feel their pain. Next time it could be us. There were also two other mass shootings that day, one in North Carolina a...

Psalm 62:5-12 I must confess that I don’t always place my full trust in God alone. Perhaps like me, you hedge our bets and occasionally look elsewhere. Maybe you put your trust in an institution. Or it could be a political leader or maybe a family member. Perhaps you only trust yourself and nobody else.  The Psalmist invites us to sing a different song, one that makes this assertion:  “for God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken.” We opened worship this morning with the hymn “ A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. ” Martin Luther based this hymn, which is one of my favorites, on Psalm 46. While Psalm 62 isn’t the source of the hymn, the message is the same. It also proclaims that God is our fortress and our refuge.  As we sing this majestic hymn, we declare that God is “a bulwark never failing, our present help amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.” This is a truth we need to ...

  Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23 Give thanks because God is good! Let us also give thanks because God’s “steadfast love endures forever.” When it comes to the love of God, we’re not just talking about feelings. When Scripture speaks of God’s steadfast love, that love is rooted in the covenant that God first made with Abraham and then reaffirmed at Sinai and in Jesus’ institution of the Lord’s Supper. While we might not always be faithful to that covenant, God’s commitment to this covenant is permanent.      While God remains faithful to the covenant, the Psalmist speaks for all of us when he confesses that “we and our ancestors have sinned.” Yes, we’ve been known to exhibit quite a bit of faithlessness. While the Psalmist begins by giving thanks for God’s steadfast love, the Psalm also provides a lengthy accounting of Israel’s many failures after God delivered them from Egypt. One of those moments of faithlessness came at Mount Horeb while Moses was up on the mountain, mee...