Upcoming Events
Worship on Sundays at 10AM,
followed by Coffee Hour & Fellowship
When we say “ALL Are Welcome” we truly mean
ALL ARE WELCOME!
Whoever you are, wherever you are from, whatever your faith or your questions or your doubts…. YOU are welcome here.
Worship is recorded and posted on our YouTube Channel
Sunday School is at 10:00 AM. For information contact [email protected]
Book Club is held once a month at noon on a Thursday. For information contact Jennifer at [email protected]
Cooking for HOPE Community Services is once a month after worship on Sunday.
~ Martin Luther
Dear friends at St. Luke’s,
Many holidays feel like a lot of preparation for something that is over so fast. We spend hours preparing a feast that gets gobbled up in no time and then there’s a pile of dirty pots, pans, cups, and plates.
When we treat Easter as a basket of candy or Christmas as a pile of gifts, these can indeed be over as fast as we can tear wrappers and packages. But these are more than holidays, they are holy days. And they are more than a day, they are seasons.
As church we do not just gather for an hour on Sunday, we walk together through seasons. The season of Lent has us looking forward and preparing for Easter. Forty days to reflect and revisit our faith. Easter is a season of 50 days. Fifty days to dwell in the holy mysteries of a God who suffers and dies for us and is now Risen indeed! We are joined, Paul tells us, to Christ’s death and Resurrection in our baptism. Baptism is also not a one-time event. Baptism, Peter writes, still saves us here and now. We wake each morning grateful for our baptism, grateful that we are God’s beloved children filled with the Spirit, blessed with God’s gifts. We belong to God and “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
So Easter is a celebration that lasts over a month. Make an affirmation each day, give thanks for your baptism, see baptism as a daily reality which gives us Jesus’ victory over sin and death. We need God each day and God’s grace is a daily event freeing us for love and service. We can be transformed by God’s love but it needs to be a habit of thankfulness and praise as we still need God’s mercy and we love to hear the story as often as we can.
P.S. I just watched “Come Sunday” on Netflix. The story of Carlton Pearson who just died last November. In a world where there are so many very different ideas about how to follow Jesus, where there are churches with very different answers to the questions we face each day, I’d love to know what you think about this film. Watch it and send me your review: [email protected].
peace,
Pastor Jim O’Hanlon