THIS SUNDAY: The Community of Pilgrims Presbyterian Fellowship, Sunday, July 31, 2022, Eighth Sunday After Pentecost. Join us on Zoom at 4 pm. Contact me if you need a link. If you have any questions, or are interested in a conversation, contact Pastor Brett Webb-Mitchell (919) 444-9111; brettwebbmitchell@gmail.com and visit www.communityofpilgrims.com.
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Dear Community of Pilgrims,
For those of us living in the Pacific Northwest, the heat is on. It might hit 100 today in Portland, OR, and the 90s in Seattle. We understand it is 90 in Greenwich, NY today. New Mexico could be in the 90s today as well. Charlottesville, VA: 79 degrees with a thunderstorm coming your way. The one participant in the Community of Pilgrims, the Rev. Dr. Barham, has it best: Half Moon Bay, CA is 61 degrees today. Stay cool, for us, Father Michael.
The Scriptural focus this week is Colossians 3:1-11. Paul, or whoever wrote the letter to the Colossians, was talking about the early church community setting itself apart from the surrounding Roman-Greek culture by the simple practice of more controlled speech habits and other daily practices of life that would set the followers of the Way, Christians, different than from others in that context. The best way to understand what the writer was advocating was in this line: “(clothe) yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator” (3:10). Earlier in Roman 13:14, Paul wrote that the early church members should “put on Christ,” as one would put on new clothes. We know that when we put on a clothing company, team, college, university, city, state, or country t-shirt, emblazoned with words of the group we are supporting, along with a neat logo or symbol, we tell the world around us something about our loyalties. Same with this example. We are to clothe ourselves with a new self, which means a baptized self, a self that has been saved by God’s grace, clothed with Christ, in the world in which we live. That was a powerful move on the part of the early church in the Roman world in which they lived. And it is a powerful way for us to be the church in the world today, by metaphorically putting on Christ. Join us Sunday as we explore living a counter-cultural life in our world today.
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The Community of Pilgrims will celebrate our five-year anniversary on Sunday, Sept. 18, 2022! And you all are the Community of Pilgrims. Please mark this in your calendars. More details will be coming. This is a big anniversary for the Community of Pilgrims, and we look forward to celebrating it with one another, and with the world around us as we continue to serve and love God and serve and love neighbor in creative and meaningful ways.
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Events!
July 31, 4 pm, Gather and Devotion on Zoom.
Aug. 7, 4 pm, Gather and Devotion on Zoom.
Aug. 11, Holy Holiday.
Aug. 18, 4 pm, Gather and Devotion on Zoom and/or @ Rise Church.
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Prayers of Celebration and Concern
We pray to the Creator of all creation:
The upcoming marriage of Roxanne's friend.
Brett's daughter Adrienne's pregnancy and she is safely into her second trimester.
President Biden and his health.
Modern science and our ability to test ourselves.
Summer days like today.
Christian's niece who is also pregnant.
Brett's former partner Dean who is responding well to leukemia medications and now has Covid-19.
We are able to endure the coming heat waves.
The freedom to hold hearings like the January 6th hearings in this country.
Concerns for:
The people of Sri Lanka where their president has fled the country after mass unrest over an economic crisis.
The people of Afghanistan, Yemen, Myanmar, Syria, Ukraine, and Tunisia.
People coming down with Monkeypox. The World Health Organization declared the virus a public health emergency of global concern Saturday.
The gun culture in this country and all those who have died from suicides and homicides.
Climate change which is already affecting every country in multiple ways.
LGBTQIA2S+ people who are concerned about their rights coming under attack.
Protection for women's reproductive rights after Roe v Wade overturned.
Protection for same-sex marriage in the US.
Brett and Christian's neighbor's friend, Chris, who did a cannonball into the Chinook Lake off the back of a boat and never came up out of the water. He got snagged in the water and died.
God in your love, attend our prayers. Amen
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Poem
A New National Anthem, by Ada Limon (The new US Poet Laureate)
The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always, there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps,
the truth is, every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?
Buen Camino! Pastor Brett Webb-Mitchell and Karen Cornwell Fortlander