Pastor's Letter

Dear Friends in Christ,

As we come back to the regular parish schedule after the summer break, I always think it is useful to remind ourselves as to why we are doing all this, why we are Christians. Church is not the point of Church--that is Churchism, not Christianity. Jesus is not the point of Jesus--that is just superstition. The real point of Jesus is God--Jesus wants to reveal to us the nature of God so that our lives can be renewed. For Jesus, the "nature of God" is not a theoretical issue--it is sheer pragmatism. We have been worshipping the wrong God and the result is that we have become the wrong people. God, for Jesus, is an instrumental issue. God is the pathway to life.

Sister Maria Jose Hobday gets this. To ask "who should I worship" is just a way of asking "how should I live?" She finds us falling short of the glory of God. She does this out of her ministry among Native Americans: "I would say that basically almost all Indian tribes that I know value hospitality over possession. Now I'd say that's a principle that you need to think about. Most Native American people feel that the most difficult thing American people have to work with is something in their blood that wants more than they need whether other people have anything or not. Greed is another word for it..."

Perhaps this is why Jesus insists that you cannot serve God and money. They are rival deities. Both want our utter devotion. As soon as money becomes God, people become commodities and everything gets messed up. We can live without a qualm with our wealth while children starve. If children are starving while our garbage cans are full, it is probably a matter of a false God in our lives. That's the prophetic message. Jesus goes beyond prophetic indignation, however, to a concern for us as well as for those starving children. Jesus sees that the rich and the full are starving too. They are suffering from spiritual malnourishment. The ONE campaign, the Millennium Development Goals, is a campaign for the welfare of us all.

The Roman poet, Ovid, once said "Cherishers are cherished." Moving from a possession ethic to a love ethic saves us all. Those we cherish with our help get to survive and grow, but we also benefit--we become human. Selfishness dehumanizes us. We shrivel up spiritually. This is why we are starting up our full fall schedule again. It is not ecclesiastical busy work. It is an engagement with spiritual disciplines of prayer, study, action (Care, Teach, Serve) as our proper worship, which leads us to our real, whole selves. I look forward to working with you again this year on proclaiming Gospel. We point ourselves and our lost and lonely culture to the worship of the true God, the God called Love, in whom we live and move and have our being. This God will recreate us, save us, fill us with life. What a great adventure we are called to in something as ordinary sounding as a parish schedule!

Yours in Christ,

--Pastor Bastien