To remember. To be remembered. Sometimes the power of memory is a gift. Sometimes it feels like a curse. Reading the Bible is a kind of remembering, of being remembered.

WorshipWell is excited to offer you two series for the summer months.

Being included is great, don’t get me wrong, and the work that so many are doing to dismantle the limited and limiting systems and attitudes of exclusion is important. Beyond that goal, however, or perhaps wound up in it, there is this matter of invitation–of being sought and asked after, of being both wanted and welcome.

So stay with me, held in my arms
Like branches of a tree
They’ll shelter you for many years.
-Don MacDonald

“Jesus’ sermon is an open invitation to envision a new world as God intended it. Without a new driving vision and without allowing for such an imaginative process to take place, the world will spiral into chaos. Without vision, nations go astray. It is in this time of immense challenges that imaginative faith rises to discover the endless possibilities that lie therein.” - Mitri Raheb

The moment we cease to see each other as equally human, the moment we lose faith in the dignity and honor inherent in the beautiful blackness of our neighbors’ bodies, the chaos which God’s loving act of creation spun into a space of vibrant and delight-filled life–that chaos rises within us and around us.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.
-Martin Luther

As we witness and participate in the current coming apart of the world, and hear God’s call to be builders and participants in its eventual reconstruction, we do well to heed Brother Dietrich’s witness, and hear his words about the community of saints, of which we are members.

God’s mercy found us at some point, of course. Perhaps it was a moment, maybe a gentle stream of moments over time. That past action continues. It keeps meeting and finding and flowing, and as it does it carries us beyond where we once were.

Today’s devotion is in the form of a poem by theologian John Shea. May his words find you where you need to be found today, and offer your soul a few moments of resurrection sunlight.