In answer to the kindness so many of you have passed my way, yes, my face seems to have healed fine, my pinky still needs attention, and I have so far in the past month managed to avoid play-chasing little boys. So, all that part of my life seems to be in place.
At the same time, of course, we are all to one degree or another traumatized by the image of the United States Capitol being occupied and the public instability that that seems to convey. We enter 2021 where we ended 2020: needing to capture the spirit with which we begin every worship service, that
“Our help is in the name of the Lord,
who made heaven and earth."
My concern is that we remember that. In fact, the theme with which I want us to enter 2021 is that of remembering. When Psalm 103 begins
Bless the LORD, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits,
we are alerted to the fact that we are equally good at “forgetting” and “remembering” but mixed up in what we choose to forget and remember. We far too easily remember our anxieties, our fears, our coveted things, and our hurts. We struggle to remember the gracious benefits of a heavenly Father.
There are past benefits to call to mind, both God’s redemptive work as well as his specific daily mercies. And this can be so hard to do when the world and our worlds seem to be coming apart at the seams. It strikes me, though, that we are to remember future things as well, things that are not yet but so certain that we live toward them and act in anticipation of them.
That the church exists for our remembrance is, ironically, one of the benefits we too easily forget. My messages this month are aimed at helping us remember what we are to be as the church, and why the church should occupy such an exalted place in our hearts. The church is the place where we remember the gospel, yes. But we must remember as well the blessing the church is in the life-giving necessity of worship, the importance of community, and the priority of hospitality.
Forgetting these things, we easily embrace the thinking that the church is an optional, mildly compelling, but largely irrelevant piece of modern life, instead of the one thing in modern life against which the gates of hell will never prevail. The church is a gift in a tottering world, the one place where we are invited to lament and laugh and hope in the face of a world gone mad.
I pray that we as God’s people, the precious members and friends of Covenant Presbyterian Church, would come to see the church with greater depth and commitment. It will take far more than my preaching to do so and so I ask that you pray with me that God’s Spirit might shape us all that the conviction framed so well by Timothy Dwight, then president of Yale, would be our own.
I love thy church, O God:
her walls before thee stand,
dear as the apple of thine eye,
and graven on thy hand. For her my tears shall fall,
for her my prayers ascend;
to her my cares and toils be giv’n,
till toils and cares shall end.
