Sacred Mysteries

Pastor’s Epistle—June, A.D. 2019 C

Most people, if they have really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise.

—C.S. Lewis

Every Sunday, the Risen Christ meets us, just as He promised.

Every Sunday, heaven comes down to earth, eternity breaks into time, and we have a foretaste of the feast to come, when all shall be at last set right and God will be all in all. Sunday is a moment of rest against a hectic and weary world, a balm of life amidst a culture of stress, consumption, division and death.

It is so easy to forget the higher things of life: spirituality, worship, humility, atonement. It is so easy to forget that beneath the ocean of bills and ads, activities and jobs, there is a great and profound stillness, a love that undergirds and uplifts all things in every moment of our being. We get so busy with the toilings of our lives that we forget what makes life worth living in the first place. And it isn’t entertainment, or plain brute pleasure.

The Church cannot be a stage, or a social club, or a political party. We have plenty of those already. We are awash with them, in fact. The Church can only be the Body of Christ; the place where God meets Man, where the divine enters into the profane, where the everyday is revealed as mysterious and glorious and pregnant with new life.

We cannot describe this reality merely in words. And so we preach it. We sing it. We taste and drink and eat it. We feel it in the waters, watch it dance within the flames. We speak in terms of poetry, mythology, and sacred history. We enter into it in liturgy, the great and holy mystery at the heart of everything. And so we are transformed—resurrected!—drowned and raised again. We enter into a level of reality where mundane distinctions between the literal and metaphorical break down and disappear.

I wish it were easier to communicate this, to make it obvious and wondrous and desirous for all. But then it wouldn’t be transcendent, would it, if we could sum it up in a quick faith statement or a political platform or an emotive repetitive song? On Sunday we are invited into the Sacred Mysteries of the Church of the Resurrected Christ. And Mystery, for the Christian, is defined as a reality that we can only begin to understand once we experience it for ourselves, once we start to live it out each day of our lives. And the more we enter in, the deeper the Mystery grows.

Come to Church this summer. Come to Christ, who comes to you. Come to the Font and the Altar, the Word and the water, the Body and the Blood. Come confess your sins and hear the sure promise of forgiveness. Come meet the living, Risen Christ—then go out so that others may find Him in you.

I don’t want to guilt you into worship in these lean summer months, though we need your talents and your treasures now more than ever. I won’t beg this congregation or this community to attend. I will simply be here, every Sunday, with the entire Body of Christ in St Peter’s Lutheran Church, setting the Table, welcoming the Guest, always preparing a place at the feast for you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.