Social Media team member Pastor Lauren Muratore has your daily digest here
| Mark 4:1, as quoted by Bishop Skrenes during a time of spiritual preparation
I’m grateful that our Synod Assembly has met in Ocean City for the past few years, mainly because I love everything about beach towns - the smells (fried dough and salt), sounds (too-loud, too-happy conversations and wind), excellent food (read: permission to eat whatever you want!), freedom to dress juuuust a little more casually (and go without shoes as deemed necessary).
This year, despite the consistent fog over the water, I’m particularly grateful that our assembly is meeting “by the sea.” Well, within eyeshot of the bay, actually, which flows out to the Atlantic Ocean. There is nothing like standing at the edge of a body of water that does not end to remind us of our place in the world. Small. Fragile. A little broken, like the sea glass and shells that have become the sand between our toes.
And it is this same water that completely hems us in. Rocks us by invisible rhythms. Asks us to consider an entire world beyond the one we’ve always known. Calls us forward. Out.
This water – it’s invitation and dare.
The Rev. David Daubert, our keynote speaker for day two of the 2016 Delaware-Maryland Synod assembly, posited that, as a church, we are standing not at the edge of the ocean, but on the margins of culture. A church no longer in the center of society. Small. Fragile. A little broken. Rather than a thing to be mourned, this is, perhaps, the theologically proper location for the church. Christ is always found in the margins and with the marginal, after all. And it is only from the outside of Christendom – no longer afraid of losing status or influence - that we can speak with the prophetic voice the Spirit is daring us to use.
And all of us have been invited to speak up.
We heard that prophetic voice in worship, where Maya Camille' and Colleen Carpenter-Gonia - two incredible young adult women, one Black and one White, neither one ordained, consecrated, or commissioned - brought the word to the assembly. Fire, they said. Spirit, they said. Die and rise again, church, they said. Amen.
We heard the prophetic good news proclaimed in and through the lives of eight candidates for Bishop, who ran ragged as they answered our questions, allayed our fears, and challenged us to imagine a church beyond the one we’ve always known. Amen.
We heard the prophetic then-and-now witness of the saints during our time of remembrance, as the names of those who have died were lifted up alongside the names of those who continue to serve this church. This church. This new thing God is doing. Amen.
This morning we’ll hear from the final two candidates for the office of Bishop in the Delaware-Maryland Synod of the ELCA, and then we’ll vote. In the Spirit, we’ll call a bishop to encourage, challenge, and lead us for the next six years. This is, in many ways, momentous. It is, simultaneously, only one small part of one expression of one church. One element of how we operate as people of God.
Paradox, friends. Sand and sea. Invitation and dare. Not just for the one we elect, but for all of us.
Lord, listen to your children praying.