As I was walking back to my office today, I noticed that there was a light on in room 4. I immediately started to wonder who was having a meeting today. But as I passed, I saw the beautiful quilt that we have been putting together since our family retreat in January, out at the camp.
You might remember that we have been asking families to make a “family crest” that we could patch together into a quilt. You will see that quilt unveiled in worship today, and we will try to have a picture of it posted on the website for you to see. When you look at it, you will be drawn to all of the individual crests that make up the quilt, because they are beautiful, each in their own way.
The variety of vision and gifts in our church is really a beautiful thing. But you might not be drawn to what is holding those crests together, and you might not be drawn to how the crests are organized. The quilt is held together because of people like Susan Shoopman, Winnie Sapp, and Susan Regan, who worked hard at sewing the crests together. And because some people made their crests vertically and some horizontally, and because they were each of a different size, arranging them was not an easy thing to do, but they were able to do it.
When we think about our church, there are many parallels. Each of us comes to worship, Sunday School, LifeTree Café, and other church functions with our family crest, the collection of gifts, talents and experiences that make us who we are. And we each look at our faith from a different angle: some horizontally, and some vertically, and, to be sure, some diagonally. But what holds us together as a church, some of us might forget, is the Holy Spirit, who in mysterious ways, binds us together and arranges us into a beautiful quilt.
Of course, there are some of us that are glad we are not arranged close to other crests, and there are some that we might look at and think are ugly, or not well done, but the beauty and the promise of our faith is that it is not up to us to determine the arrangement, or who gets included. It is up to the Holy Spirit, who pulls us together, and makes us One. 1 Corinthians 12: 12-13 tells us: “ For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
I hope that your worship today is something that moves you, and that opens you up to the presence of God at work in this place.