The Good News
Our Monthly Newsletter
This is How We Love God and God’s People!
June 2023
From the Rector’s Study
Beloved,
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” – Frederick Buechner. While searching for this specific quote, I stumbled upon Ryan Pemberton’s website, www.calledthejourney.com. Pemberton argues that it is harder to put Buechner’s teaching into practice because 1) we focus too much on our deep gladness or 2) waiting around to hear the specific God’s affirming voice to pat on the shoulder. Being obsessed with these two, we ignore the desperate voice of the world’s deep hunger calling our names for help. We are a creature of my way or the highway. More often than not, we are more interested in how, what, and when to help on our terms than learning how we should serve better by listening to the voice crying out to us. We turn on the noise canceling to shut down any voice of inconvenience. Answering God’s Call does not work like the Rosetta Stone language learning app, which lets us study a foreign language in our own time, pace, and convenience. It’s always on God’s terms and throws us a curve ball. We read about how Apostle Peter repeatedly learned this lesson the hard way whenever he tried to tell Jesus what to do.
What is the world’s deep hunger crying out to us today? Let’s put our righteous minds aside and ask ourselves. What is the world’s deep hunger crying out to us today? Is it gun violence, poverty, racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ, ageism, ableism, pro-life, or pro-choice? Uh-oh, I can feel some heat from you or even imagine you say, “Can’t we all just get along? What does any of these have anything to do with Jesus?” Hold your horses, and please take a couple of deep breaths. Let me ask again.
What is the voice of the world’s deep hunger
desperately crying out to us today that we are ignoring?
Let’s face it. We all can point the finger at all the wrongs in the world though we may disagree about right and wrong. After all, isn’t that what we’ve been doing? But, underneath the layer of moral righteousness–where we become covertly judgmental, what do we notice? Can you see pain, frustration, rage, disgruntlement, or anything sugarcoated in so-called justice that validates your unloving, uncompassionate, judgmental, dismissive, or indifferent nature? Perhaps that ugly inner voice of discontentment we self-righteously tune out is the sound of the world’s deep hunger screaming at us. By courageously bringing ourselves to such voices of shame, we face our fear of God’s rejection honestly. Looking straight at our inner fear of rejection, we experience our deep gladness toward His ever-forgiving unconditional love, which God calls us to mirror and freely share in this troubled world. That’s why the true sense of ministry often throws us into a spiritual wilderness. It is uncomfortable, yet that is where God calls us to pay attention.“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
What is the voice of the world’s deep hunger
desperately crying out to us today that we can listen to together?
Faithfully,
Fr. Andrew
