Rev. Deborah Rundlett is the pastor of The Meetinghouse | Ridgebury Congregational Church offering Sacred Commons for people and planet to flourish.

Reference:  Celebrate Me Home

Please, celebrate me home, Give me a number,
Please, celebrate me home Play me one more song,
That I'll always remember, And I can recall,
Whenever I find myself too all alone, I can sing me home.

~ Kenny Loggins (Columbia Records, 1997)

Reflection: The Journey is Our Home

Some will remember Kenny Loggins’ Christmas song, Celebrate Me Home. Haunting and filled with yearning, the song speaks of the hunger that is within us all to come home.  As philosopher Pascal reflects: “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every person which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”  As we become like Jesus, we come to know the yearning as a gift that nurtures our relationship with God in Christ. 

So also, we come to understand that we share a call to bear Christ into a world that is dislocated and displaced by change. Marjorie Zoet Bankson defines “call as an invitation to wholeness, a spiritual prompting to complete the work of love that we are here to do.”  She invites us to explore God’s call to build the new through a cycle that includes:

• Resistance What are the patterns of resistance in your life right now? What do these patterns have to tell you about call? 
• Reclaiming In reclaiming, we seek the form behind our skills - the original seed of call, the DNA of our souls. Reclaiming is not simply a process of reminiscence but of observation and action. What essential part of you is God calling you to reclaim??
• Revelation happens in the cusp between kairos and chronos time; it brings with it ambivalence and uncertainty, possibility, and potential danger. This is the way of new vision being born. What has God revealed to your heart?
• Crossing Over True revelation demands a response. It demands a “crossing over,” coupled with a willingness to be changed, healed, and expanded as we confront the barriers between belief and embodiment. To cross over we must confront our fears. To what must you attend in order to cross over?
• Risk Deep within us is planted the seed of new creation - dreams for a better world and wild hope that our visions can be realized. We need to act to make our dreams real. Risk is the courage to change. Risk requires that we be willing to fail as well as succeed, to be wrong as well as to be right. What is God calling you to risk?
• Relate Call cannot be fully manifested without community. Community that takes seriously God’s call understands the importance of shared purpose. Yet developing such community is neither easy nor orderly. To whom do you relate??
• Release Completing the cycle of soul work means integration, endings, and release. Release calls for generativity as we give call away and begin the cycle anew. Release is a stage of rest and listening. Learning when to let go and when to hang on is the essence of release. What aspect of your present call is God asking you to release in order to live forward?

Even as the cry of our hearts is to “please, celebrate me home,” we know that we are called to be Christ for the world and make the journey our home.  Even so, early church father Augustine assures us: “Ask not where our home is, because in the end we all come home to God.”
 
Blessings as you make the journey your home!

PRAYER

O Emmanuel, how our hearts long for you.
Please celebrate us home
that we might bear you into the world.
Amen.

New Prayer Requests:

We ask churches and church leaders to join us in the following prayers either by sharing them during worship, printing them in bulletins, or sharing them in some other way. To make a prayer request, please contact Drew Page at paged@sneucc.org

Prayers of Intercession:

• For the victims and their families of the 649 mass shootings already carried out in 2021
• For the families and friends of more than 776,000 who have died due to the Covid-19 disease
• For those affected by HIV and AIDS in all nations

Prayers of Joy and Thanksgiving:

• For those who innovate, take risks, and veer from stale traditions in order to find new paths to vitality in our churches

 This Week in History:

December 1, 1824 (197 years ago) The presidential election goes to the U.S. House of Representatives per the 12th Amendment. Andrew Jackson had received the most electoral votes at 99, well short of the 131 required to declare a winner. The House considered the top three electoral vote recipients: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and William Crawford. In February 1825, the House elected Adams as the 6th President of the United States.

“Study the past if you would define the future.”
— Confucius