Before he left for a camping trip this weekend, Jamie showed me the new t-shirt design for this year’s High Country Bus Festival. That’s the Volkswagen campout he organizes every year that happens on the last weekend of July on the New River. 2016 was its 20th year, and I think Jamie’s been involved for the last twelve.
We started bus camping when Emma was not quite six months old, packing up the sleeping bags, coffee pot and cookware and joining VW friends in their buses at VW campouts that happen all up and down the East Coast and in Canada. Jamie always goes to a few more campouts than I do, but High Country is the one that both girls and I will make sure we make. This year, when we get there, we’ll reunite with friends, and say a final goodbye to our chocolate lab Heidi who loved nothing more than chasing a stick or a ball into the river.
One of my favorite times at these campouts happens after the sun sets and people set up their camping chairs around the fire pit, and the ones who are musical bring their instruments, and someone brings a bag of marshmallows and chocolate bars and graham crackers and we sit, circled around the firepit remembering the day’s adventures and telling stories. I think I could sit there all night with the lulling hum of conversations all around me.
If you see photographs from High Country, you see people on bicycles, in golf carts, on river rafts and in kayaks; teenagers and twenty-something’s, young families with newborns and toddlers, and grandparents and grandchildren; American flags mixed in with Grateful Dead stickers and tie dye. We bring different backgrounds, educations, work lives and experiences with us and we have different ways of looking at the world, but under a wide blue sky on the riverbank, we are a gathered community. And if someone is in need, the whole community steps up and responds.
In those moments, it’s a whole lot like church, a gathered community united by a common faith.
Our shared lives are the marks of a community, and in Psalm 67, the Psalmist is reminding us that we are drawn together as a community because we share in God’s blessing.
The Psalms are songs that are written down as in a prayer book, and this one, which is only seven verses, begins and ends with words of blessing that we hear in our own worship:
In verse 1,
1 May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us…
And in verse 7,
7 May God continue to bless us; let all the ends of the earth revere him.
In Scripture, God’s face is a metaphor for the presence of God. The Psalmist witnesses to us that God is not abstract and distant, but present with us. “God is blessing us with God’s own self.”[i]
In today’s gospel, Jesus delivers this same message to his disciples when he tells them about the resurrection. We are not abandoned or alone; God is with us and the Holy Spirit is speaking into our lives, leading and directing us.
But if we only hear the praise and confidence in God’s blessing, and bask in the radiance of God’s face shining on us, we aren’t paying attention.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his book Life Together:[ii]
It is by the grace of God that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly in this world to share God's Word and sacrament.Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who helped found the Confessing Church, a resistance movement that defied Hitler during World War II. He was executed in April 1945 as the Nazi regime was collapsing. Bonhoeffer was insistent that our faith calls us to engage in the world and act in it.
As a community of God’s people, we are not simply given God’s blessing for our own benefit. God’s blessing to us and our community is inseparable from God’s blessing for the world.
Receiving God’s blessing and promises,
as the gathered community of God’s people,
we are given a responsibility to live among all the nations and all peoples as representatives of God’s kingdom,
as reconcilers in the world.
When conflict and disagreement happens, we are called to make God’s ways “known upon the earth”.
As one preacher wrote, as Christians we are, “people who can hold on to hope in the midst of despair and trust through times of loss and desolation.”[iii]
Telling the story of Jesus who himself was unjustly executed and made a scapegoat, we offer God’s healing to a neighborhood torn apart by hate or violence.
Meeting basic human needs for shelter, food and hygiene, we offer God’s healing to people who have only known neglect and scarcity.
Remembering how Jesus wept at the death of Lazarus, we offer God’s healing to those who are grieving, confident that God is with us even when the world feels broken.
Each of us who has experienced God’s increase in our lives is called to share that blessing with others. Sharing our blessing also means sharing our lives because it is through God’s people that the world comes to know God.
We are called to share our lives
with the person who is suffering,
who is out of sync with the world around them,
who is disconnected by shame, anxiety or sorrow;
with the person who cannot hear or see the face of God shining on them, or recognize the promise of hope that we all have through Christ;
with the person experiencing “the dark night of the soul”,
who cannot imagine the unconditional love of God;
For the sake of these people – our family and neighbors and strangers – we are called to bring healing to our community.
We offer refuge and safe spaces where people can be restored, regain hope.
We offer forgiveness and mercy, remembering the mercy we are shown every day.
We offer the comfort of an embrace, knowing God’s love is boundless.
Sharing our lives, we can awaken a joy for living that soothes aching hearts and shadowed souls.
Wherever we share our lives - whether it’s around a campfire, or a dinner table; in the dining room or the library, or in a phone call or a handwritten card, when we share our lives, we share God’s blessing in our lives.
Living out of gratitude for the abundance in our lives,
and remembering the great stretch of God’s saving love,
we can help others meet Jesus and fulfill “the deepest longing of the human heart, to know with assurance the loving, living abiding presence of God.”[iv]
Let us pray…
Lord God,
We give you thanks for Your Son who shows us Your love and teaches us to love others;
Forgive us when we are self-centered or turn inward on ourselves,
forgetting that your blessing is meant to be shared;
Confident in your promises and Your presence with us,
make us bold witnesses to Your abundant and merciful love.
We pray in the name of Jesus, our Lord and Savior. Amen.
[i] Bartlett, David L.. Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 2: Lent through Eastertide . Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition. Location 17094.
[ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Life Together.
[iii] Bartlett, Location 17088.
[iv] Bartlett. Location 17102.
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