September 3, 2017 - Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Labor of Love for A Labor Day Weekend

Pastor Donna, the first of our three upcoming pulpit supply pastors presided today.

She is Pastor at West Linn Lutheran with her husband Tim and our two congregations share similar values and outlooks in how we view Christianity.

Pastor Michelle ensured the worships flowed smoothly by not only picking the pulpit supply pastors that would be right for Creator but also planning the music and asking Susan to do today's Children's time.

Susan told a story about how, during the construction of the church building, there was a cross above the sanctuary. She said as the builders of the church and congregation looked at the cross above them they prayed for the future pastors, children and people who would worship in this place.

Pastor Donna focused on a Christian centering on loving an enemy as a discipline. Not in merely acting out the what the love might look like to another but learning how to truly love the person to whom that does not come naturally to you.

She related the story of how a Pastor who was summing up his 55 year career and said "I think my career has been centered on what I learned as a child - Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so"

Pastor Donna preached that we should leave righting wrong to the Lord's will and we would do well to focus on spreading the news of God's love for all of us.

Certainly this is appealing on an emotional level and lines up with one of our desired relationships but there is something more that begs to be said.

Pastor Donna also preached that Jesus loved us as a parent loves a child, disciplining as needed. This is another relationship we desire but there is something to be said for Jesus as being a rupture to authority and the normal hierarchy that can easily slip out of the conversation if we are talking about love. Jesus follows the Jewish tradition and simultaneously disrupts it. The genealogy at the beginning of Matthew embeds Jesus in a holy lineage that ends with his father Joseph but  Joseph is not his father, God is. Jesus is both embedded in tradition and a radical departure from it.

This is a message I constantly se in the Bible. When God's will is done it rarely uses an authoritative hierarchy. God works thorough another kind of power.
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God loves us as we are but something else is happening and. like Bob Dylan's Mr. Jones, we don't know what it is.

Pastor Donna talked about this and encouraged us to perform a labor of love on this Labor Day weekend.