Theme: Our of our comfort zone, and into the kingdom of God
Last Sunday before worship I was talking with someone who said that the night before and still that morning hey were feeling so rotten about everything, they almost decided not to come to church. I replied that when we're feeling rotten about things is probably exactly the right time to come to church.
But even as I said it, I realized that's not how we usually live it out -- not how we handle our feeling rotten about things, nor what we expect ourselves and others to be feeling and expressing when we come to church.
So many people stop coming to worship and to other things at church when they begin to feel rotten ... or when they begin to have real questions and doubts about their faith ... or when they have questions and doubts about the church itself, or out absome people in it.
When that happens they may find real peace and a satisfying spiritual home elsewhere, and how can we not to be glad for that progress in their spiritual journey?
But at the same time, it also means we are impoverished as a church because it's exactly the rotten feelings and the real questions and doubts that, when embraced and faced together, become the doorway to spiritual growth and deepened community both for them and for all of us together.
How can we make room in our worship and in our fellowship for the ways and times we and others feel rotten? For the questions that shake us? For the doubts we and others have about our faith, our church, ourselves, other people, and maybe even our God?
This Sunday's reading is the only story in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus leaves Jewish for Gentile territory -- journeying to "the other side" of Lake Galilee -- "the wrong side" of the human story and community. There he meets a really scary person torn apart by all kinds of conflicted influences, voices and demons in his life.
What do Jesus' disciples feel as they follow Jesus out of their comfort zone in exploring "the other side." When they meet the torn-apart person, do they feel at all akin to him? Feel sympathy with him? Or are they more simply glad not to seem as sick as he is?
What does it do to them and to their idea of what it means to be a faith community, when they see Jesus able to bring new wholeness, peace and an awareness of the fullness of God to such a person as that?
What's the take-away?
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