So, What Do We Do With NEW LIFE!
I’m just back from a week’s vacation in the rolling hills of Upstate New York where my family has been vacationing for more than 100 years—since a group of pastors and seminary professors built a colony on the shore of a beautiful lake and began passing the legacy on to six generations.
It is always refreshing to revisit the past amid God’s beauty. Reinvigorating! New life!
“New life” is a concept dear to Christians of many denominations. We celebrate it. We preach it. We say we value it.
But what do we do with it?
The new life which was gifted to us in the Resurrection is supposed to free us. We are free to worship and free to serve, free to think and free to interpret, free to tell.
What do we do with all this freedom?
Sometimes all we do is create new boxes, new restraints. We see it as creating order or tradition. Not bad, by any means.
But “order” can become confining. Soon the order we create defines our lives. We begin to serve the order.
The Resurrection freed us.
And so we worship on Sunday mornings, in much the same way our grandparents worshiped. We spend our offerings the same way. We maintain. We repair. We hold one potluck supper after another.
We pray for the whole people of God and hope that does the trick. Suffering will end. Disease will be cured. The poor will be fed, clothed and housed. What has been ravaged by man or nature will be rebuilt. Justice will prevail without a struggle. Our leaders will be wise.
How will this will get done? Who knows! We did our part. We prayed.
Time, perhaps, for the Church to take a vacation and rediscover “new life.”