PASTOR MIKE’S MEDITATIONS

Connecting in Isolation

May 2020

 This past Sunday we began a series of messages entitled New Community: Connecting in Isolation from the Book of Exodus.  This heart of this series is to wrestle with how we can nurture our connectedness in Christ amidst our present social isolation.  As I envisioned this series, I prayerfully reflected on God’s desire to create a people for himself that is at the heart of the story of scripture.  We see this in Genesis in the creation of Adam and Eve.  We see God’s desire to connect with a community of people in his call to Abraham who he blessed to be a blessing to others.  At first glance the apparent exclusivity of God’s love doesn’t seem very loving to us.  Doesn’t God love everybody?  Yes, he does.  It is clear that God loves all his creatures but that he also chooses people for himself in order to reach other people through them.

            This theme that we see first in Genesis in expanded in the Book of Exodus.  Interestingly, the book begins with the word “and.”  In other words, Exodus builds upon Genesis in reflecting God’s desire to build a community of people for Himself.  When we remember that God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existed as a being in community before time and creation as we know it began helps us make sense of the type of community he wants to create among people.  Both in relationship with Himself and with one another.  God shares the wealth of His love and connectedness with his creatures, He calls us into relationships of intimacy where we find our identity.  We have therefore, a longing for belonging, a connectional requirement that God has instilled within us.  Of course, that is part of what makes this time of social isolation so hard.  When we have experienced the depth and riches of Christian community we don’t want to settle for substitutes.  Other things, simply don’t satisfy.

            And so in the Exodus, where the Israelites experience the difficulty of enslavement by the Egyptians we might think they would become embittered and but actually an amazing thing happens.  We see that through their difficulty and hardship they somehow continued to grow and multiply as a people.  They show us that suffering can actually be the compost that helps create growth and maturity.  Rather than diminish us as a people our struggles can be the very conditions out of which God bears fruit through us.  Our calling, in times of crisis such as what we are experiencing right now related to the Covid (19) pandemic, is too choose to see that God is still with us and has greater plans and purposes for us, to rescue us and not harm us, to give us a hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11).  What God is birthing within us and between us as a community of Christ-followers remains to be seen.  But every day we can participate in God’s rescue and redemptive activity.  Too not allow ourselves to be bound by slavery to sin and death, but to delight in the knowledge and experience of God’s sovereignty in the midst of what otherwise doesn’t seem to make sense.  Out of the crisis of life, identity, belonging, and isolation we can cry out to God and trust that as our cries go up to God He remembers us and His desire for covenant relationship with us and is concerned about each and every one of us.  How do we know?  Because scripture is consistent in expressing God’s care and concern and desire to comfort His people.  And ultimately, He has come, in the person of His Son Jesus to join with us in our suffering as a result of sin in order to redeem us and free us.  Paul in his letter to the Galatians would say, that “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, then, and do not be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).  At a time when we may feel like we are being impinged upon and restricted God would remind us that through Christ we are free to be the new creatures and the new community He has called us to be.

With you on the journey,

Pastor Mike