| Q. | What is the mission of the Church? |
| A. | The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. |
Dear People of St. David’s,
Bill and I were married at St. David’s 41 years ago this week. Someone told me it was 104 degrees outside at the time of our wedding, which took place in the then un-airconditioned Chapel, now the blissfully climate-controlled Allen Hall. It’s hard to remember our hot wedding when I am standing in that cool room!
My father-in-law offered a toast at our wedding rehearsal—a list of wishes for us. I can still hear his sweet voice breaking as he said, “I wish you sorrow, that you may better measure joy.”
Hot and cold. Sorrow and joy. These are binaries. Man and woman; light and dark; good and evil: so much of what we write and sing and dream about are binaries. Sometimes a binary is so strong that the feeling of one blots out the memory of the other. It’s hard for me to remember my wedding when I am not hot and sticky! Sometimes noticing the binary helps to define a preference. I know that Dad did not really want us to be sad, but he absolutely wanted us to notice and live into our joy.
The coming week will be a week of binaries as we say good-bye to our interim rector and welcome our new rector. Good-bye and hello. Tears and smiles. Anxiety and relief. Sad and happy. Life has all these contradictions and more. Do you know what else contains a lot of contradiction? We good people of St. David’s. We are men and women; old and young; conservative and liberal; working and retired; rich and poor; healthy and ill. Some of us come to church because it’s a cool spot for meditation and some of us come to be fired up into social action! Yet, it’s right there in our prayer book—our mission as a church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. This is our hope as Christians: one day our bumbling humanity may be drawn into the perfect life of God.
The Bible is full of the stories of God’s people trying to do just that. We notice God’s love and we are drawn to it, but time and again our self-interest catches our attention, and we forget God. Noah, David, Jonah, and Peter are just a few of the famous Biblical heroes who follow uneven paths to righteousness. How do we individualistic Americans of the twenty-first century claim the hope today?
There is one binary that sums up all the others for me: human and divine. Jesus is God’s greatest gift to us, born a vulnerable human child, yet bursting with the full radiance of divinity. Living a human life as son and friend, yet without sin. Feeding, healing, and touching others, yet put to death for threatening human authority. The biggest binary-buster of all is rising out of death into life that keeps living. That is Christ: God at once human and divine.
On a cool day in a sizzling summer, when our hearts are simultaneously sorry to say good-bye and happy to say hello, we can rejoice to know Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine. Jesus understands our human tendency to rely on binaries but does not define us by them. How can we be true to our total selves and still draw closer to God? We follow Jesus, who knows God and who knows us.
And so, with Jesus ahead of us, we gather, different and differing individuals, and together, we are the church: a bumbling bundle of binaries busily becoming one with God.
Faithfully,
Nancy+
The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud
Priest Associate
Photo: The Rev. Rudy Moore asks who presents Nancy Webb to be married to Bill Stroud. 8/20/83
Published on August 22, 2024