Weekday Email to New Members and Friends – 2021-01-11
Monday, January 11th, 2021
A weekday e-mailer from
Matt Matthews
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church
Champaign, Illinois
Friends,
Today I need to be reminded of what’s at the center of my life. The following affirmation of faith from our Book of Confessions directs my gaze towards the heart of the faith. This is a Trinitarian creed, and this shorted version focuses on the work of the Holy Spirit.
Affirmation of Faith/from A Brief Statement of Faith
In life and in death we belong to God.
Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit,
we trust in the one triune God, the Holy One of Israel,
whom alone we worship and serve.
We trust in God the Holy Spirit,
everywhere the giver and renewer of life.
The Spirit justifies us by grace through faith,
sets us free to accept ourselves and to love God and neighbor,
and binds us together with all believers
in the one body of Christ, the Church.
The same Spirit
who inspired the prophets and apostles
rules our faith and life in Christ through Scripture,
engages us through the Word proclaimed,
claims us in the waters of baptism,
feeds us with the bread of life and the cup of salvation,
and calls women and men to all ministries of the Church.
In a broken and fearful world
the Spirit gives us courage
to pray without ceasing,
to witness among all peoples to Christ as Lord and Savior,
to unmask idolatries in Church and culture,
to hear the voices of peoples long silenced,
and to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.
In gratitude to God, empowered by the Spirit,
we strive to serve Christ in our daily tasks
and to live holy and joyful lives,
even as we watch for God’s new heaven and new earth,
praying, “Come, Lord Jesus!”
With believers in every time and place,
we rejoice that nothing in life or in death
can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son,
and to the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
News
While it feels like much in our nation is turning upside down, your church has a week full of meetings and ordinary preparations. Marcia is on vacation this week. We have a special surprise for worship next week, and we’ll spend half a day Wednesday getting it ready, then half a day later in the week editing. Your Worship and Finance committees meet this week, as does the DREAAM Board and our SEA Groups. All of this is to say, please pray for your church as we keep on keeping on, to the Glory of God!
* * *
ESL is doing great things, including a Zoom Café. Here’s the info and the link:
ESL Café Time
First Pres members are invited to join us for our monthly Zoom café time on January 14th at 10am. This would be a great time for you to get to know some of our students and tutors. If you’ve ever wondered what the ESL program is like, this is a great place to find out. We will be split into small groups so that we can discuss with each other. Bring your favorite hot drink and a snack to our Zoom Café Time.
We will have a Zoom Café Time every second Thursday of the month. For the link, email esl@firstpres.church.
If you have any questions, please email the ESL Director, Jeanette Pyne, at jeanette@firstpres.church.
Humor (Hard times really need godly laughter):
What’s black and white and blue all over? A zebra in the freezer.
(HELP! With some jokes!)
Good Word:
I LOVE YOU, O LORD, MY STRENGTH.
2 The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer,
my God, my rock in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
3 I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised,
so I shall be saved from my enemies.
4 The cords of death encompassed me;
the torrents of perdition assailed me;
5 the cords of Sheol entangled me;
the snares of death confronted me.
6 In my distress I called upon the Lord;
to my God I cried for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears.
Let us pray:
Allen Huff shared this prayer with me last Wednesday night late. I needed it after the madness unleashed on and around the Capitol that day. Consider praying this slowly. It you have a moment to linger over this prayer, filling in its edges with your own words and silences, you might experience a blessing—as I did last week when I first prayed it.
Allen is a gifted minister, thoughtful song and story writer, and soulful friend.
Most Holy and Merciful God,
How do we even begin to pray right now? We can pray for our nation. We can pray for the families of those who died on Epiphany in Washington. We can pray for lawmakers, law enforcement, the military, and first responders. We can pray for our children, and their future. We can pray for enemies across the globe and across the aisle.
Yes, we can pray these things; and indeed, we do.
But Lord, if our prayers are words alone, they will do little more than clutter the air and numb our minds with lament, anxiety, fury, and sanctimony. And they will never be enough.
So, give human ears our prayers, O God. Help us to listen to those with whom we so passionately disagree. Help us to do more than to “agree to disagree,” for that is simply to quit listening, to write off others as not worth our time, our effort, our honesty and love. And we have so thoroughly written off ‘the other’ these days that contempt has become a norm. And contempt is a fatal deafness.
Give human eyes to our prayers, O God. Help us to see beyond appearances. Help us to search our hearts and the hearts of others the way the Magi searched the skies and trusted what they saw. Help us to see the signs of your presence in a hurting and hurtful world and in all the lives around us—black lives, brown lives, white lives, poor lives, sick lives, comfortable lives, young lives, old lives, grateful and gracious lives, terrified and angry lives. If we cannot see the holiness of the lives around us, we cannot see it in ourselves. And not to see You in ourselves and in others is a fatal blindness.
Give human hands and feet to our prayers, O God. Help us to unclench our fists and to reach out in humble service to those most wounded by our communal pride, and greed, and fear. And help us to serve. Help us to follow Jesus, to trust Jesus, to love him and to share him, to walk where he walks. This is hard, and for some of us almost impossible, for our culture, even our Christmas culture, tells us that we are entitled to material excess and to violence. But these are the enticements of the world’s selfish Caesars and brutal Herods who tempt us with shiny things, with mawkish platitudes, and promises of greatness and glory—things that must be held, carried, and protected with the hands and feet you have given us for lives of embodied prayer. To give into those temptations is to lose the reach of arm and hand, and the carriage of leg and foot. And such inaction is a fatal paralysis.
And Lord, give to our prayers the beating, fearless, human heart of Jesus who did not shy away from truth-telling, from challenging those who led the temple with self-serving piety, and from vexing those who led Jerusalem with resentment and intimidation. Saturate our hearts with your Christ that they may push his own life-giving breath, your Holy Spirit, through our arteries and veins that we may raise our voices for peace, for righteousness, for justice, and equality throughout the earth and throughout this Creation which is so shaken, troubled, holy, and good. For not to live courageously and not to speak prophetically is a fatal silence.
God, help us make our prayers more than words. Help us make our prayers our living, our doing, our seeing, our hearing, and our speaking. Help us to claim our Belovedness in Christ, and to acknowledge that same Belovedness in all that you have made. Turn us that we might follow Jesus as his humble disciples, as redeemed and redeeming servants, and as loving neighbors.
Lord in your mercy, do more than hear our prayer. Resurrect us into embodied prayers for ourselves, our families, our neighbors, our communities, our nation, your Church, and your world. Amen.
* * *
Much, much love to you all.
Matt Matthews
Cell: 864.386.9138
Matt@FirstPres.Church
