One of the gifts of online worship is the variety of pastors and sermons, like this one, that the synod provides when, as in this case, the pastors are all involved in something like the Bishop's Convocation that happened during this week.
There were two times I felt a strong connection during the sermon, one from Pastor DeLong and the other from Pastor Rowland
Creator and how the congregation sees their collective identity during the pandemic has been on my mind recently. The first connection I felt was when Pastor DeLong talked about the standard definition of compassion. The Latin root for the word compassion is pati, which means to suffer, and the prefix com- means with. Compassion, originating from compati, literally means to suffer with. The connection of suffering with another person brings compassion beyond sympathy into the realm of empathy.
Recently the congregation has showed this compassion differently than before the pandemic. This is not just Creator. The congregation is responding to something in the air with Black Lives Matter, climate change (that many feel is one of the contributing causes to the wildfires we experienced this summer) and the job loss caused by the pandemic made many focus on poverty and hunger.
Pastor Rowland told the story of a young child who has a cat that died. Everyone was telling her that her cat was now in heaven but that did not console her. She finally went to her grandmother and asked why God would not give her the kitten back. Instead of saying anything, her grandmother just held her and cried with her. "My grandmother was just a lap, a place of refuge". When we make a lap for others we are creating a Christ space in our lives,
Simultaneously complaint is much more prevalent during this season at Creator as well. The constant frustration that communication and gathering is constrained becomes very hard to bear. And I think there is something in reading the Bible right now that addresses both compassion and complaint.
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