Who Do You Think you We Are?

Some Thoughts on Our Life Together

I’ve been thinking about who we are, we who call ourselves Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church, and I’ve jotted down some thoughts. Some of what I say here is simply descriptive, some aspirational. They’re MY thoughts, so you might not agree. That’s OK. If they seem simplistic or shallow, well, consider the source. If they get you thinking about how YOU would define Glenn, then my efforts have been successful.

I’ll start with a truth I DARE you to challenge. If you know Glenn Church, you know I’m right. We are a strange bunch of people. Actually, I’ll go further. We are beautifully, wonderfully strange.

At the heart of who we are and all we do is good news, and the heart of the good news is love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:16-17).
We wrestle with Christ’s call to love. I’m continually challenged by some words from Jesus in Matthew 5:
43“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Holy moley.

Difficult? Perhaps. Nevertheless, we love. That means seeking the good of the other, and that means we will seem kind of strange in this day and age. In a time of division and anger, winners and losers, we dare to love all, welcome all, care for all.
We love all because Christ loves us and everybody else. And so we WELCOME all. Our job is to share Christ’s love, hope, and grace with all. We don’t get to decide who qualifies for God’s amazing grace or whom God chooses to call beloved. The greatest testimony to the work of the Holy Spirit in the church is a church of all kinds of people. I can list all the different “kinds,” but I won’t, because it comes down to this: They all love each other with the love of Christ, with a gracious, caring, deeply accepting, love. These days that can seem downright unnatural.
We are a people called to grow in God’s love. We do that by worshiping together, studying, praying, and serving together. We do that by living together even when we’re kind of sick of each other. It’s about inwardness, this Christian life; it’s about outwardness; it’s about every nook and cranny of who we are.
We invite others to see what this strange life we share is all about. It matters little if we accept all, if we don’t invite all. Our evangelism comes down to a simple invitation from John’s Gospel: “Come and see.”
We are all in this together. More specifically, we’re one in Christ, baptized into Christ’s eternal life and grace. We seek together to make our home in Christ, to be one with the one who is one with God, to be one with the one who is the way, truth, and life.
There is always room for questions, doubts, even disagreements in this life together. We listen to each other, have conversations and discussions, and grow together in our understanding. And, through it all, we love one another; we’re there for each other; we pray for each other. We “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.”
We are one also with people we’ll never meet, out there beyond the walls of Glenn. We are United Methodists, part of a connectional church that spans the world, and we are part of the great universal church, one in Christ’s love and mission.
As United Methodists, we are “Wesleyans.” We seek “holiness of heart and life,” which means we pray to love God with all we are and love our neighbors as God loves them. Love is more than a warm fuzzy feeling; it is a decision; it is action; it is a goal, a work always in process.
We have a legacy that goes back beyond Wesley’s England, back through the rich traditions of the Western and Eastern Churches, back through the home-churches of the Roman Empire, back to a little corner of that Empire called Palestine—a faith with deep roots in Judaism. It’s an amazing family tree. And, by the way, we seek common ground with other faiths, too. We seek mutual understanding. We seek opportunities to serve peace, justice, and our community together AS community.
Go back into our story, into the book of Acts, and you’ll find one of the first names for the Christian movement—“the Way.” Beautiful and simple. Christ is the way to God, and Christ’s way of living is the way worth living right now. We are people of “the Way.”
“The way” of Christ is a way of mercy and grace. It is a way of life grounded in the promise that God’s will for justice, wholeness, and peace will be fulfilled.
Now, we know the WAY TO justice, wholeness, and peace is to SERVE justice, wholeness, and peace. Together, we stand with, advocate for, and serve generously those who are hurting and those who suffer because of the world’s (and our) actions and structures. We seek to transform those structures and our own errant ways.
We are a church of memory and hope. We at Glenn have our own rich history, our own holy memories and traditions that stretch back before your or my births. We are also a people with a future. Our history in fact teaches us that the Holy Spirit has a way of calling us, wooing us, sometimes dragging us, into God’s future and God’s will for us and the world.
As we chart a path into that future, we have much to draw on. I hope we who are Glenn Memorial will draw on our identity as United Methodists and as Wesleyan Christians to find a way of living that is wholistic, healing, gracious, loving, inviting, and, yes, beautifully, wonderfully strange.

With you in Christ,

Mark