[amc] a note from the pastor
- From: "garland robertson" <pastor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Austin Mennonite Church" <amc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 19:35:39 -0600
Members and Friends of Austin Mennonite Church
I pray the beauty and confidence of autumn refreshes and enriches you.
This next Sunday is Peace Sunday. One of our texts is from Deuteronomy,
chapter 9, wherein persons who desire to live in relationship with God are
directed to love both God and neighbor. Love, like truth and beauty, is an
objective presence. The foundation of love is not a sensation of sentiment
or attachment or a feeling of being 'drawn toward' some attraction. Love is
active and effective, a matter of working to make reciprocal and mutually
beneficial relationship with one's friends and enemies-being neighbor to
everyone who lives in the earth. Love nurtures justice here on earth.
Loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. The capacity to love is born
out of commitment to honor God's intention for the creation. This way of
living is our natural inheritance, yet in our world of confusion and
disruption loving is no longer our automatic response. To become lovers of
self and others and the world and God requires choosing a pattern of
behavior that looks beyond maneuvering for advantage and survival. To be a
loving person is a deliberate choice. And it is not a rational choice. To
love means being willing to be present to others without pretense or guile.
To love is a conversion to humanity-a willingness to participate with others
in the healing of broken lives and a broken world. To love is to make the
choice to experience life as a member of the human family, to be a partner
in the dance of creation. These thoughts will compose the sermon, 'Living
in the sanctuary of Eden.'
May it go well with you. Sincerely,
Garland Robertson
...always hold firmly to the thought that each one of us can do something to
bring some portion of misery to an end
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