SERMON SNAPSHOT: Sunday, February 11, 2024

Gore Vidal was a prolific American novelist, essayist and provocateur who identified at the beginning of this century a ‘condition’ he articulated as “today’s passion for the immediate and the casual.” One could say that this passion for instantaneous information, access or gratification in a culture that is saturated with hits and bits of contact makes for relationships with each other and with our God a “hit and run” affair that is incapable of depth and richness.

What a state! It’s so much easier for me to observe this in others and in the world around me than to see it in the mirror. I don’t have the time to… what?! You fill in the blank. Care for and love my family? Read scripture? Pray? Or do I? Our time allotted is the same – it’s how we choose to use it that differs.

Eugene Peterson addressed this issue over 25 years ago: “There are some things that don’t change. God doesn’t change: God seeks and saves. And our response as God is revealed in Jesus doesn’t change: we listen and we follow… or we don’t.” Peterson insists that to follow Jesus, to be agents of God’s justice and love, requires what used to be known as apprenticeship. It is by this apprenticeship that we come to know Jesus and that is where faith begins.

Come this Sunday as we welcome new members Catrina and Adam Murphy, baptize Thomas Noel Mellen, and imagine what it is to be apprenticed to the bearer of the greatest power of the cosmos – the love of Jesus.