Christmas has passed and it is back to the work week.  These are my final days of working at home.  Today, it is the guest room upstairs, an add-on over the garage.  There is not a chair to write on and there’s a small guest TV.  Two DVDs sit on top of it; Aviator and Gladiator, scream, “Watch me, Watch me!” like children going off a high dive.  I had to field another call meant for Ed at home, not Ed at work.  It is hard for me not to stop when asked to fill out some forms at home or to hug a child who is going to a friend’s for a couple of days.  It is just hard to focus and work and do those things.  So here we are on the last days of this officeless existence, moving to 409 River Street.

     We met there on Christmas Eve.  I do not think I have been in a warmer room with more deeply felt Christmas worship.  The colors, the lighting, the words, environment and truth, art and engineering – it was us worshiping God.  One friend who had gone into the offices, who goes to the Tara Community [she’s the wife of a longshoreman, a dockworker].  When she walked in she said, “What are you kidding me?  We’ve got ourselves a church!”

     I keep peeking at that horizon, Revolution Hall for worship, the space that we have on River Street, the children for classes.  I shake my head frankly in amazement at everything that has been done to make this happen- finding space, making deals, designing the space, cleaning, purchasing children’s and office furniture [DID YOU SEE THOSE CHILDREN’S ROOMS?] painting, setting up, and then there were all the pieces I did not see; all the rehearsals, the prayer time, the planning, and I realized we do have a church.  The place seems to matter little in one sense and very much in another.  Neither statement really belittles the other.  We just have to come to an understanding of what the church is.

     That is not an easy question to answer.  Luther said, “where the Word is, faith is; where faith is, the Church is.”  1500 hundred years before that, the Church was beginning to walk…just learning how to look at and follow the One ahead of us.

     So, I am back to work.  It the Book of Acts for me, not a bad gig if you can get it though it seems to tear at my soul about once a week; yet I do not think I would want to or could leave it.  Acts brings us to the church as real and present.  Acts takes us through what those who had followed and believed Jesus and his message and the reality of his resurrection did, what they saw revealed of God – what they embraced – what they reflected in voice and passion, in body and blood.  It will show us as the Christ goes, so the church follows.  It is a place we in this day, in this time need to desperately rediscover with focus and passion.  Acts is the Book that I believe God will use to help the church become a church centered on Christ again and not a church centered on Ecclesiology with an assumed Christology functionally taking the back seat.

     The prequel to the Book of Acts is the Gospel of Luke.  If you are on this site and get time and are interested, I think somewhere Phi has the sermons linked from that series.

       So, to me it falls backwards again, to me sitting at the computer trying more and more to open my soul and open my bible and write something down.

“Back to typing
Back to typing
All this living
Echoes of writing…”