HELLO!

Are you an early morning person, a “night hawk”, who likes to stay up late, or something in-between, like my Kim who gets up at 6 am and goes to sleep at 10 pm, no exceptions. In the family of five I called home for the first 20 years of my life, the males were all nighthawks, and my mother was an early morning person. My Dad rose early for work on weekdays and compensated by falling asleep in front of the television after supper. When we three boys would be asleep, and needed to get up for school, our father (on his way out to catch the bus) would sing, “It’s time to get up, it’s time to get up in the morning”. Then he would go to the washroom, wet three facecloths, and throw one at each of us as he walked down the hallway to the stairs, singing the whole time.

In the family Kim called home for 20 years, no one was allowed to sleep in. Her mother believed there was so much going on, in the morning, you needed to wake up, engage, see what you would be missing otherwise. The Apostle Paul, in the reading (Romans 13:8-14) I will be preaching on today, is urging his followers to have that same deep sense of urgency, "Wake up, get up," he writes. “Live in the light of the day! What has happened that has Paul so excited, so passionate? In short, everything. Saul was an enforcer, who arrested, tortured, and in some cases, killed those who dared challenge the Roman Empire. In a moment of clarity Saul loses his sight and hears a voice, “why do you persecute me?” Coming to his senses Saul believes he has heard the voice of God, he commits at that moment to start over, love the people he once hated. To witness to this change, his name is no longer Saul, but now Paul. He was blind, but now he sees. And seeing things anew has created an urgency, life is short, it is time to get busy. Paul tells others what he has experienced.

A large part of Paul's message to the church in Rome, and to most of the churches to whom he wrote, was to encourage the people in how to live, how to behave, and in what to do in response to God's gracious gift to them, to the world. It seemed clear to him that if you live your life as if you are going to meet God face to face anytime, if you live your life confident that God's kin-dom has begun, if you live your life knowing that the relationship you have with God is more important than any other thing in your life, well, if you live your life that way, then your behaviour ought to reflect that this is what you believe. It wasn't about doing something right in order to win God's approval. (Paul would never have said our actions change how God loves us.) It was about faith, faith in God's actions, faith in God's love, and faith in God's promise of steadfast relationship with us! But faith is not just believing. Faith is also about doing, acting, and working in God's kin-dom here and now, doing the work of Jesus in the place where we are, responding to that free gift of God's love that we can do nothing to earn, but we can do everything to reveal.

Every day is a new adventure in God's good news. We can spend a lifetime wondering why the world is not the way we want it to be, why there is injustice and suffering, even death. I personally think worrying about why we can’t get what we want is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do feel worrying about injustice is reason to live out our faith as instruments of God’s love. We need to “get busy” as we are awake in love. Peace, Kevin

PS We got up early this morning to make our way to the Alderney Market.