Send your Spirit

O Lord, you have taught us that without love, all our deeds are worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the true bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whoever lives is counted dead before you; grant this for the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

It is officially fall, y’all. When it comes down to it, the beginning of the fall season has nothing to do with how it feels outside (because we all know we were sweating yesterday) or when Starbucks starts selling pumpkin spice lattes or whether people have constructed inflatable Frankenstein’s in their front lawn. Autumn Equinox has everything to do with the earth’s axis and rotation and position as it relates to the sun. And yesterday, those incredibly complex factors changed in such a way that we are now in a different season.

I’m at four decades now of Autumn Equinoxes and the first 3o some of them went largely unnoticed for the most part. It is only recently that I am drawn into awe and wonder by the almost impossibility of the world and our existence. But God. Before you think that I’m also reading horoscopes, let me be clear: I am not. What I am very into is a more zoomed out picture of my little life here on earth so that I can better (more rightly?) glorify the God of the universe.
 
Recently, Redeemer celebrated 10 whole years of meeting in a building and looking like a big kid church out here in the world. I wasn’t there in the beginning– in the living rooms. But, when we showed up with a 4 day old baby, very tired from church hunting and baby birthing in a city where we were strangers, we had folks in our living room within the week. We were fed and hugged and cared for without any questions. None of it was grand or trendy or hashtaggable. It was just regular people being willing to enter our regular lives to search our cupboards for silverware and sit for Zella’s zesty 3-year-old conversation and celebrate us like we weren’t strangers anymore.

It may be tempting to yearn for the more organic, early days of Redeemer when it was always yes and pancakes and open houses and potlucks where every soul shows up. But, as we join together in the Collect this week, we lay down how we picture our deeds done for God and pick up love. We confess all the doing we have done outside of that love and commit that whatever we do in love counts. Whether it is setting up chairs on Sunday or showing up to pray against the spirit of darkness on Tuesday, whatever is done in love is done in Christ.

As we listened to Mary and Josh and Kristie speak of God’s faithfulness to Redeemer, I kept thinking about the zoomed out picture. That, though we are living all the minutes of every day, God sees all the minutes of all of time. We experience each change of leaves and the moment someone dons a sweater, every neighbor showing up with needs on our doorsteps and every need we show up with on someone else’s. “Many are the plans of a man’s heart, but the Lord directs His steps,” we read from Proverbs 16:9. And we remember that God is delighted and ready to pour out charity, true peace and all virtues through the Holy Spirit because He knows that what comes from His gifts is always good. We pray together that we would submit our acts of faith to Him in love.  Knowing that we never see the full picture that God is at work repairing, but we do know that only what is done in love is worth something.