Friday, July 12 ~ Day 6

"ONE Love”

Philippians 2:1-11

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus.

–Philippians 2:5

Discipleship is a commitment to imitate Jesus.  This week the mission team has tried to imitate Jesus in the way we cared for our neighbors here in Roanoke Rapids.  We have tried to imitate Jesus in the way we treated one another, prayed for one another, and encouraged one another.  The church community at home has tried to imitate Jesus in the way we prayed for our mission team, in the way we continued the important work of ministry in our home communities, in the way we treated our families and friends and neighbors.  But, now that this week is coming to an end…what’s next?  How do we as a mission team continue to imitate Jesus when we return home?  How do we at home continue to imitate Jesus as life continues?

Imitating Jesus, first and foremost, involves imitating Christ’s love.  In his letter to the Philippians, Paul puts it this way: “adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus” (2:5).  He goes on to say that Christ humbled himself out of pure love – being God he humbled himself by taking on human flesh and giving himself up to death for the sake of others.  This is the love that Christ has for us.  Self-sacrificial.  Self-giving.  Purposeful.  Grace-filled.  This is the love we are called to imitate.

As Christians we are united in this one great love of Jesus.  This love binds us together in community.  This love works within us so that we can love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength.  This love empowers us so that we can love our neighbors.  This love sent us on a mission to Roanoke Rapids.  And as we return home this love inspires us to surrender every day as an opportunity to be in mission – to imitate Christ in our schools, in our workplaces, in our hobbies, and in our relationships so that others might encounter this one love of Christ Jesus.

Paul offers a beautiful wish for the church community in Philippi.  He tells them: “If there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort in love, any sharing in the Spirit, any sympathy, complete my joy by thinking the same way, having the same love, being united, and agreeing with each other” (v. 1).  Today, Paul’s wish extends time and place and falls on us today.  As we return home to a mission field right in our very neighborhoods and schools and workplaces, may we have the same love that was in Christ Jesus – a love that has the power to transform this weary world into a place of hope and joy.

Rev. Laura Johnson

Thursday, July 11 ~ Day 5

“ONE Calling”

 

Exodus 31:1-5, 12-13

 

I have filled him with divine spirit, with ability, intelligence, and knowledge of every kind of craft.

–Exodus 31:3

Often when Christians think about someone being called, they assume it must be a clergy person, called to a specific kind of ministry in the church.  Pastors and preachers are called, maybe monks are called, even theologians!  But normal people just go to work, try to do the right thing, love their families, go to church, and support the “called people” when we can.  But the story of Bezalel reveals the truth about our lives as workers and called people:  We are called to worship God with our work, with our minds, our bodies, our hands.

When the Israelites had work to do building the Tabernacle where God would dwell among them, God said to Moses: “See I have called by name Bezalel… I have filled him with divine spirit, with ability, intelligence, and knowledge of every kind of craft.”  Bezalel was a workman and a designer.  He worked with his mind, his hands, with stone, brick, wood, and metal.  He was called, not to preach or prophecy, but to do his job in service to God.  In our society, so often, people who work with their hands are looked down on, but Bezalel was able to do his work because he was filled with divine spirit.  And so it is with all of us.  Our work, as students, teachers, mothers, fathers, woodworkers, lawyers, business people, doctors, nurses, farmers, mechanics, administrators, delivery people, assistants, leaders, can happen because God’s creative spirit, the one that moved over the waters at the beginning of creation is within us.  Each of us is called to use our skills to the glory of God to bring beauty and goodness into the world.

Why? Because when God created the world, God called it good.  This is why, just after talking about the work of building the tabernacle, God talks about Sabbath and how important it is.  We are called to find ways to offer our work to God’s kingdom, and we are also called to rest, to delight in the work we have done, that God has done through us, that God has done without our help at all.  Work and service, wonder and delight—this is our calling from God.  This is how we offer our whole lives to God.

Dave Swanson

Wednesday, July 10 ~ Day 4

“ONE World”

 

Jeremiah 29:4-7

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile.

Pray to the Lord for it, because your future depends on its welfare.

–Jeremiah 29:7

Although addressed by God to the exiled Israelite people in Babylon, these verses can speak to anyone who finds them-self living, working with, or serving other people in a place that is not their home. 

Prior to this passage, the LORD had told the prophet, Jeremiah, that the Israelites in exile would be (as God’s people) watched over and cared for, built up and not torn down, and returned to the land of Israel. There is no doubt that Jeremiah found great hope for his people in these promises, removed as the Israelites were from all that they found familiar. Being an Israelite captive of the Babylonians, Jeremiah likely hoped that the promise of being returned home would be one that God would fulfill quickly. After all, who wouldn’t, as a prisoner in a foreign land, hope to be returned to their home as soon as possible?

As a result, an encouragement from the LORD to settle down, build houses, plant vegetable gardens, and start families in Babylon was probably the complete opposite of what Jeremiah wanted to hear. The hoped-for exile of several weeks at the most actually became 70 years in Babylon. 70 years! In 29:47, God intended for his people to live among the Babylonians for several generations, seeking to live in that city as if it were their own. They were to pray for their captors, seeking for Babylon to do well in all that it was doing, finding their own life, hope, and success bound up with the success of those who had imprisoned them.

What God had commanded the Israelites to do was a challenge to what they had hoped for. They were a people stolen away from the place that they called home, a city which they longed for in their hearts and whispered of in the quiet evening hours. And yet, here God was telling the Israelites to set aside those longings and those memories, to stop living in the past. God was making it clear that it was not the Babylonians who carried the Israelites into exile, but rather God Himself. The Israelites being taken away from their homes and put into this new place was not something to blame on those people in whose strange land they now lived – rather, the LORD Himself was responsible for these changes, and He intended it for Israel’s good! And, to top it off, God was making it clear that His plan to bless the Israelites was not wrapped up in their returning to Jerusalem – instead, Israel’s blessing was to be found in their seeking to bless, pray for, and invest in the lives of the Babylonians around them.

In a world and a Christian experience where we are often told to ‘remember the good times’ or hope for the future, we can often miss the opportunities that the LORD places before us in the here and now. Rather than being a people focused on some distant heavenly experience or the good memories of our pasts, may we too listen to God’s encouragement to the people whom He loves:

Dig in. Get comfortable. Live life to the full. And pray for those around you. Seek to bless and encourage them, for in their being blessed, so too will you be. See your God at work here and now, no matter how strange or unusual your situation may be. Your expectations of how this is supposed to work aren’t necessarily God’s plans for how it will actually happen. Deal with that. You are God’s people, and He loves you. He has a hope, a plan, and a future for you. But, it doesn’t involve you ignoring the present – instead, it is in living, loving, and working here and now that God desires to share His bounty in your life and the lives of others.

Adam Baker

It rained!

   It rained...12 inches in 24 hours. It rained 12 inches in twenty-four hours not in some far and distant land a long, long time ago. It rained 12 inches in twenty-four hours in Roanoke Rapids, NC on August 25, 2012.

   Our homeowner was awakened abruptly that morning by his neighbor, "Wake up, wake up, you need to get out of your house!" When he jumped out of his bed he jumped into two feet of water, ...in his house, in his bedroom. When he stepped off his porch, he stepped into water up to his shoulders. "I never would have made it without my neighbor. I have COPD and the cold water took away any little bit of breath I had. My neighbor made sure that I made it out safe and sound."

   How could such a thing happen? Well, it rained and rained and rained and the city was so sure their new storm sewer system constructed in this neighborhood after the last flood would work , that they actually pumped water from other parts of the city into the neighborhood. And then there was the railroad track--the railroad track that became a dam keeping all the water in this neighborhood from having any other way of getting away...that's how it happened.

   His home had been constructed in 1933 by his father and uncle. He had lived in the house his whole life. Now, living on disability, somehow he would have to find a new place to live, and oh yes, he would have to find the money to pay rent.

   That's how it happened.


                                                                                                                     Rich Greenway

Tuesday, July 9 ~ Day 3

 “ONE Hope”

 

Romans 5:1-11

                                                                                                                                        

We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory…This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

–Romans 5:2,5

 

Paul’s words to the Romans in chapter 5 announce something new. The beginning of chapter 5 - “Therefore” - tells us that something new has happened because of Jesus’ death and resurrection (Romans 4:24-25). We have been brought into a new life, a life marked by righteousness. (The word for “justified” can also mean “righteous”). Because we have been made righteous, we have hope that we will share in the glory of God (v. 2). But what happens in the time between? Paul talks about what has happened already, and he talks about the salvation that will come in the future, but what do we do now? This hope that we have, the hope of sharing the Glory of God, is active. As Christians, we are called to proclaim the Kingdom of God, and that Kingdom has already been established in Jesus. Yet we still live in the hope of that Kingdom to come in its fullness. Therefore, doing justice and loving mercy (Micah 6:8) now in our lives bears witness to the hope we have of the future coming Kingdom.

This week in Roanoke Rapids, we have an opportunity to proclaim the hope we have by showing the love that God has poured into our hearths through the Holy Spirit. As we work this week, we work as citizens of God’s Kingdom established in Jesus Christ. When we are discouraged by the amount of work or the overwhelming amount of need we see in our lives, we can remember that, even though we were weak and sinful, Christ died for us to make us righteous. It is the death and resurrection of Christ that has established God’s Kingdom, and it is the power of the Holy Spirit that works in us to live out our hope.

Jonathan Tuttle

Monday, July 8 ~ Day 2

 

“ONE Mission”

 

Matthew 28:16-20

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you.

–Matthew 28:19-20

 

It was only days after Jesus’ resurrection.  The disciples were gathered at a mountain in Galilee.  Days before, the resurrected Jesus told Mary Magdalene and another Mary to tell the disciples to meet him there.  And they did as they were told.  But some doubted.  They had survived a trying few days – Jesus’ arrest, trial, and death.  Everything the disciples had hoped in – Jesus’ future – was squelched within a day.  And now – this.  This waiting to see if Jesus was actually alive.  Could it be?  What would this mean for their future?  What would Jesus tell them to do next?

And then Jesus appeared.  Resurrected, he came in power.  “I have received all authority in heaven and on earth,” he told them (v. 18).   His mission was not over.  Jesus is the Lord of all.  He is the hope of the world.  And he would now trust his disciples to carry on his work.  “Go and make disciples” (v. 19).  Go.  Go and tell people the hope of the gospel – of salvation and resurrection and healing.  Go and make a difference in this world so people can know the love and power of God.  Go.

Jesus trusts us to carry on this work of going and making disciples.  The mission statement of the United Methodist Church is “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.”  Christians all over the world are united in this one mission. We are to go into the world and make disciples through our words and actions.  We are to invite people to know God’s love.  We are to witness to the might of God’s power.  We are to be living examples of God’s faithfulness.  We are to go and help people walk as followers of Jesus. 

After their encounter with the resurrected Jesus, the disciples were so convinced in the hope of Jesus that they traveled throughout the world to make disciples.  They healed people, they taught people, they loved people, they helped people.  These people who were once afraid and foolish became walking witnesses of Jesus and forever changed the world.

We often fear this mission.  We don’t know how to make disciples.  We don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.  We feel like we are still figuring out how to be a disciple ourselves.  How then can we go and make disciples?  

The disciples learned the secret of continuing Jesus’ work – they weren’t doing it alone.  Jesus promised them, “I myself will be with you every day” (v. 20).  The Holy Spirit, Jesus’ presence with us, empowered them.  In spite of themselves, the Holy Spirit worked through their words and actions so people saw Christ in them.  May we take comfort in this promise: this is Jesus’ mission.  Jesus is working in and through us as individuals and as a community as we go and make disciples.  Thanks be to God.

Rev. Laura Johnson

Sunday, July 7 ~ Day 1

Sunday, July 7 ~ Day 1

“ONE Body”

1 Corinthians 12:12-27

 

You are the body of Christ and parts of each other.

–1 Corinthians 12:27 

When I get hungry, I get grumpy.  It all starts when my belly growls.  And then my head starts to hurt.  And then my eyes start to dry out.  And then my mind gets irritable.  And then my shoulders tense up.  And then my back starts to ache.  And then I get snappy.  It is just like the ripple effect that happens when a pebble is tossed into a still pond.  The ripple starts with an innocent stomach pang, and before I know it has grown so wide as to impact my actions. 

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul likens the Church, the Christian community, to the human body.  “Christ is just like the human body,” he writes – “a body is a unit and has many parts; and all the parts of the body are one body, even though there are many” (v. 12).  Each part of the body impacts the rest of the body.  Just as my stomach impacts my entire being, so Paul tells us: “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part gets the glory, all the parts celebrate with it” (v. 26). 

Oftentimes as members of a Christian community we may not realize how much we impact others in our community.  We may be tempted to think that our private decisions have no effect on our brothers and sisters in Christ.  We may be tempted to think that we don’t really matter – that if we left tomorrow nothing would change in the community.  But Paul tells us otherwise.  “You are the body of Christ and parts of each other” (v. 27).  Once we become part of a Christian community, we become a part of each person in the community – whether we realize it or not.  We become connected in a spiritual way that makes us stronger together than if we were separated.    

This week the mission team and Union Grove UMC will function as one body in Christ.  Some of us have great skills for carpentry and painting.  Some of us know nothing about tools, but we are experts at connecting with people and can reach out with God’s love to the people of Roanoke Rapids.  Some of us will not be able to travel on the mission trip, but will be able to pray, encourage the work team, and continue the important ministry we are doing in Hillsborough.  We can’t say to each other, “we don’t need you.”  For together, we make a strong team.  Together we can be walking witnesses of Christ’s love.

As a mission team and as a church, we are called to remember that our lives, our decisions, our attitudes affect the rest of the Body of Christ.  Our goal is to be a unified walking witness of Christ.  If we can glory in the beauty of our oneness in diversity, Christ’s love can shine through us in powerful and tangible ways.  As a part of this Christian body, how might your actions and decisions be impacting the whole community?  How might you live in such a way as to strengthen the other parts of this body?

Rev. Laura Johnson