At some point in my conversation with new members, I say something like this: “I believe God has always given us everything we need at every moment to fulfill the mission God has given us as a church.” I then tell them how excited I am to learn what new thing God is asking of us because they have joined us.
I believe that what God requires, God provides. I believe in God’s abundance — something the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 in this Sunday’s Gospel lesson points us to. I believe the greatest impediment to our participation with God is the belief either that we are not enough as we are to be used by God, or that we don’t have what we need to make the effort.
For 69 years now, Wilshire has found a way. We like to use the phrase The Wilshire Way to denote equality in status, inclusion in service, generosity in giving, transparency in governance, and courage in spirit. These are marks of the way of Wilshire. By them, we believe we are always able to take up the mission of Wilshire, which is to build a community of faith shaped by the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
The announcement this week that we will (likely) NOT reopen the building for the remainder of 2020 was, as one member put it to me, “expected and yet a dagger in the heart.” We all feel the loss of being physically present with one another. But we have to focus now on what is, not on what we wish were the case — the Now Normal.
In his poem, Wild Geese, Wendell Berry ends this way:
And we pray, not for new earth or heaven,
but to be quiet in heart,
and in eye, clear.
What we need is here.
Wilshire, what we need is here. We have the one Spirit of God through the living Christ who binds us together. We have one another. We have the mission and the means.
Jesus taught us in the multiplication of loaves and fish miracle to focus on what we have, not on what we don’t have. Then give it, letting God make more of it.
I can’t wait for the leftovers.