Wesley Church

People Blessing People

Daily Devotional September 21

As a reminder, friends: we’ll hold another of our outdoor Twilight Communion services tonight, Monday September 21, at 6:30 PM in our church parking lot. Please join us! Make sure to bring your communion elements (bread and grape juice), something to sit on, and a face mask. Come to the table of grace!

Christ invites all to his table:
all who love him,
all who strive to turn from sin and grow in grace,
all who seek to live in peace with one another.

-A Communion Liturgy for Covid-Tide

My daughter loves a picnic. If she had things her way, we’d never eat our meals while sitting at an actual table. We would always eat our meals while sitting on a checkered blanket spread over the grass.

As Christians, part of the practice of our faith includes eating a meal — a ritual meal, a holy meal. It has been one of our distinctive and enduring practices since… well, since the beginning. We are — we have always been — people who gather at Christ’s Table. 

Here at Wesley Church, in the time before covid-tide, the table was a literal one: the large, solid, gleaming wooden table dotted with squares of color from the light streaming through the stained glass. Now, in covid-tide, the table has been re-imagined. As we gather for drive-up or outdoor communion services, Christ’s “table” may now take the form of a car dashboard, or a tupperware container balanced precariously on a lap, or even a checkered blanket spread over the grass (to Ellie’s delight).  

For the time being, the Table has changed… but the invitation has not. Christ still invites us, all of us, not just the holiest or most learned or most selfless among us. Christ still invites all of us — all who love him, all who strive to turn from sin and grow in grace, all who seek to live in peace with one another. Christ still invites us to his Table. The Table may have changed, but the gracious, inclusive invitation to that Table has not. That invitation remains untouched by covid-tide.

I don’t know about you, church… but in this time of rapid and sometimes overwhelming change, I find myself comforted by the very thought that some things — perhaps even the most important things — never change.

Blessings,
Pastor Candy

Hear his invitation, friends, and remember:

Our God is bigger than coronavirus. 
Our vision is bigger than coronavirus, too. 
We are people blessing people. 
We are Wesley Church.   

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