Who are we?
In times of change, or in the wake of great transition, we look around and wonder. Who are we?
Big changes often change us. When our health or the health of a loved one degrades, and there’s no returning to how it was before. When our lives are turned upside down by divorce or death, and there is no getting back that old life. And it’s easy, when things change, to become afraid. Here in this place, we become afraid that we won’t have enough money to take care of our roof or our HVAC system or our plumbing. Afraid that our ministries don’t have enough people to do the work. Afraid that there is not ever enough. We are not enough.
But the story of God across time and space and generations is always the same: Love is always enough.
John’s first letter today is brimming with love—abundant, overflowing love. God IS Love! He says. And there is no fear in love. But John is equally clear that abiding-in-God-love isn’t just a feeling, a warm, fuzzy “I’m happy” sort of love. The love of abiding-in-God is an action—it means we actively care for our brothers and sisters, because when we love one another, God is alive in us. And loving makes us more fully alive.
Jesus is even more explicit in our Gospel reading this morning. To abide in God, to live in the love of Jesus, means to bear fruit. It means to actively work to feed others, to care for the least, the forgotten, the abandoned among us. We are the branches of Jesus’ vine, reaching outward and upward to those around us in need, to feed and provide for them. And doing that makes us more fully alive.
We at St. Timothy’s have listened to this story, over and over again. We have heard God’s call, over and over again. We have loved—in action—over and over again. We started The Closet in the 1970s. We started the first homeless shelter in Fairfax County in 1984. In the 1990s we started mission trips to help the poorest in our state, in Dungannon, Virginia. In 2003 we were called to help the poorest in our country, in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. And in 2011, after the earthquake, we went to the poorest in our hemisphere, in Chapoteau, Haiti.
This year we went to Haiti and, as we do each year, we took photos of our 25 sponsored children. We handed out the photos we took of them last year – the only photos of themselves they or their families ever see. We took soccer balls, to replace the plastic bottles filled with water they were kicking around. We took vitamins – nine thousand of them to last our 25 children a whole year. We took a video of St. Timothy’s children singing Jesus Loves Me to them in Haitian Creole. We took the Godly Play story of Noah and the Ark.
In Haiti we have built a garden, latrines, and begun repair of the school foundation. We have educated more than 70 children and enabled one special young man, Wilpha Pierre, to get a college education. We have given the people of Chapoteau—parents, teachers, and children—a reason to believe they are loved by Christians thousands of miles away, and a hope for their future.
We have always served the poor and we continue to do it, whatever fears we have, because that is what abiding-in-God-love means. It means when we fear we are not enough, we hold on to the sure knowledge that Love is enough. Enough to spread hope and faith in the darkest places. And in doing so, we become more fully alive.
I was on the Vestry – twice. I know the fears and pressures we face, and have faced, for nearly the entire 150 years St. Timothy’s has been around. And I’ve gone through tough financial times personally. And there are sometimes hard decisions to be made about money and time and space and resources.
But our readings today, our readings every Sunday, assure us that if we are listening for, and living into the abiding-in-God-love that serves others, we need not fear. We will bear fruit. We will be fully alive.
Who are we? Is this is still the place we thought it was?
When we become afraid that there is not enough, that we are not enough — we are given these words: “If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”
This is who we are. This is us.
Amen.
