Alex Stone - November 21, 2021
Everyone Who Belongs
Reign of Christ Sunday is a marker for the end of the liturgical year. It is a way of saying we wrap up a year’s worth of worship by claiming again whose we are. We reiterate our mission – to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. The emphasis this week is in the middle – “of Jesus Christ.” That is the kind of disciple that we are. We aren’t disciples of our own wisdom; we aren’t disciples following the winds of this world. We are disciples of Jesus Christ.
From Series: "A Life That Matters"
We end this liturgical year with a short series from the gospels. We’ve covered a lot of ground in this Year B and 2020-21. And rightly so; it has been a tumultuous time. Even here, as Year B comes to an end and the calendar year is almost done as well, we still feel that unsettledness of a world reeling and everything changing. Our call has been to get back to normal, though we knew normal is not our true goal. At least the normal of the way the world had been. There is too much that we needed to leave behind, too much that we needed to overcome – and still do. It has always been the mission of the church to bring transformation, so being unsettled shouldn’t be odd to us. But it was odd, and it is odd. We get in our routines and our habits just like everyone else. Maybe it has been good for us to be so shaken. Maybe it has been useful for us to reexamine our practices and our patterns in order to move into the new world that is coming into being around us. Maybe the church that has been isn’t the church that is needed today. And our task is to discern that new community and new disciples and how we live into that new promise and new hope. So, what would this new understanding of the life of discipleship look like? What are some of the markers that help us grow into a life that matters, as individuals and as a community of faith and transformation? This series is designed to give some answers to these questions. It is not, however, supposed to be exhaustive; there are a lot of other markers that might be included in such a list. But, guided by the lectionary-assigned gospel texts for these three Sundays in November 2021, we discover three elements out of many that go to make up “A Life that Matters.”
