Arapaho You Are Loved
The signs are affirmation that “love wins,” says Rev. Blair Thompson-White, pastor of Arapaho UMC in Dallas.
We begin. The year unfolds from its beginning, and as we enter 2022, we do so with anticipation of things yet to be discovered, revealed or accomplished. As we look at our calendars for the year ahead, we need marker events. Epiphany, the season of lights, or enlightenment, is included in our church calendar as a marker event. We recognize the weeks between the turning of the year through Ash Wednesday as a time of awakening, of suddenly seeing, of knowing beyond all doubt something that we need to know. We need to know several things as we begin: we need to know that we are following Christ. We need to know that God’s time is now, that the star of Bethlehem is in the sky, and that Christ’s message for our lives remains unchanged: you are loved; you are cared about; God is with you; you are a part of God’s great project on earth.
As people who have been called from the hedgerows of sacred and ordinary spaces, we need to know that we believe we can accomplish more together than apart, that we believe God calls us from our solitude into community. We need to see in this Epiphany Light that whether we are physically alone or physically together, we are emotionally and spiritually in communion with all of God’s people. We are thus strengthened to do God’s work without wavering.
We need to know that when we cannot see the Epiphany Light, we walk with others who companion us and help us. We need to know that we can trust ourselves in the darkness because “the light and the dark are the same to me” says the Lord. God is with us.
We need to know that in all things Christ reaches out to us, calling us, as John Wesley said, to be employed by Him or laid aside for Him, to be full or empty, to have all things, to have nothing. God is with us in it all. We need to know that we are people of God’s covenant, and that this covenant is carried by us out into the world, into the lives of our families, our friends, our co-workers and our world.
As I write this, I am sitting in my daughter Laurel’s apartment in Claremont, California -- I’ve spent a week here with her and her husband Kenny. My son Liam and his partner Morgan have been here too. This morning I heard Laurel preach at the Claremont UCC, and her sermon reminded us that of all the things we may not know, we can be assured that the Holy Spirit goes ahead of us into this new year, awakening us in this season of Epiphany to transform the false boundaries we set in place for others and ourselves. It takes some courage to allow ourselves to be transformed by the light of Christ, to know that immediately we are welcomed and embraced and that all ways we say people can’t be included, including when we sometimes say that about ourselves, have no bearing in God’s revelation in Christ.
We know this, inside the hidden well of our beings, because “as to one untimely born” Christ has appeared to each of us. Once this Epiphany light breaks into our deepest selves, our vision changes, and when we look to our moments, to our days and to the year ahead, we see the breathtaking expanse of the Kindom with us, within us, and ahead of us. And we know that which we need to serve in love. It no longer matters what the challenge is. We have been made ready. We have been gifted with steady certainty, “that all manner of things will be well,” because the entire cosmos is being redeemed by the One who has appeared to us.
The Rev. Dr. Mary Lautzenhiser Bellon serves as senior pastor at Collegiate UMC and Wesley Foundation in Ames, Iowa. "Abiding in Exile" is a spiritual support project of the Iowa Annual Conference.