September 30, 2022
Gathering: From Sweden to Corinth to First Covenant—Part 1
Autumn is a season of gathering. Farmers harvest their crops gathering them for storage or for sale. Students who have been dispersed over the summer gather in classrooms again. In northern Europe in pre-Christian times, it was a time of gathering with your clan, living and dead. The cooler, greyer, less vibrant days of the year’s end marked the end of growing season. People’s lives moved indoors, bringing families physically closer together. Those shorter darker days also led those people to consider what we now call November to be a season of the dead. Christians turned that time of remembering the dead into what we know as “All Saints Day” applying the hope of Christ’s resurrection to a season of remembering and grief. As a church, we are gathering again in greater numbers as our summer travels are subsiding and we settle into life in Seattle in shorter, less sunny days. So we open this more robust season of our church’s life and ministry by gathering on “Welcome Home” Sunday.
This Sunday when we gather to worship, we will gather around the Table for communion with one another in Christ, and gather around another table for sweets and coffee afterwards as friends and family. Later many of us will reconvene at T-Mobile Field to (we hope) celebrate the Mariners arrival in the playoffs—Lord, may it be so! It should be a great welcome home for us all.
We will have also gathered the day before. On Saturday we will gather to remember Paul Smedberg, thanking God for his life, surrounding the gathered Smedberg clan and their friends with the love and hope that comes through our church from Christ. The purpose of this gathering is to declare Paul is being gathered into the presence of God following the path of that great cloud of witnesses that has gone before him. (Hebrews 12:1)
We will end our week by gathering tonight, Friday, for Craft Night, and return to our regular gatherings for prayer and Bible study next week. At month's end, on the 29th and 30th, we will gather apples on Saturday and gather to remember those who gave their lives for the reform of the Church on Sunday. After worship that Sunday will be our Fall Fest when we will gather our younger ones for Trunk or Treat and all for a celebrative meal. The following Sunday we will gather with “saints above and saints below” on All Saints Sunday to proclaim the promise and hope of Christ that has spoken to the living, the dead, and the grieving through the ages.
Autumn is a season of gathering. And so we have in Autumns past, and so we will again.
To be continued,
Pastor Todd