From the Pastor's Desk

Greetings to you in the name of Jesus Christ,

 With the coming of the New Year, the time has arrived for making resolutions.  Changes that we want to make in our lifestyles, like quitting smoking, eating more healthy, exercising more, and the most popular losing ten pounds.  If you are like me those resolutions stay around about as long as a slice of pecan pie sitting on a dining room table.  It seems to me that making the change in our habits and our behavior is not the difficult part; the difficult part is losing those things which were a huge part of our life.

 If you smoke, or eat pie, or sit around and watch television, those things give us pleasure and we enjoy them.  To stop smoking, eating pie and watching TV, means that we have lost those things which give us pleasure.  No one likes to lose anything in life, especially those things which give us comfort and happiness.  If this is true of small things like whether or not to light up, or get a slice of pie at the restaurant or even whether you pick up a book instead of the remote, then how difficult will it be for us to give up or lose the big things in our lives.  Like our grudges, our anger and bitterness and most importantly our fear. 

 If we can’t resist the temptation to not eat the chocolate cake, then how are we ever going to resist the temptation to blame others, to marginalize the different, and to be afraid when someone threatens our livelihood?  If we have no chance at changing our eating habits then how are we ever going to stop being afraid of others taking our way of life away? 

 The only way is to know that there is one thing in this world which no one can take away.  I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, now powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)  Once we are aware that our true happiness, our true felicity, our true joy comes to us through Christ Jesus, then all of the others in this world can be stripped away and we will still have the love of God in Christ Jesus.

 The world can take our health insurance, take our land, take our jobs, take our retirement, take our families, even take our lives, but the world can never, never, never take away the love of God in Christ Jesus.  This is how change comes about, that we stop clinging to our food or chemicals to bring us imperfect felicity and imperfect joy, and start clinging to Jesus to bring us true felicity and true joy.  Then all of those other imperfect things will slowly be stripped away.  We won’t need them anymore, because we have Jesus. 

 What are you desperately clinging to that is a source of comfort and joy for you?  Food, chemicals, sex, money, material things?  The Gospel is that we no longer have to cling to those worldly things to give us happiness, we now have a person to cling to; and not even death can take him away from us.  Alleluia, Alleluia!

 Rev. Mark