Need a Charge (Page 7)

My dad gave us a couple of flashlights that don’t have a replaceable battery. You pull a little crank out and turn it a couple dozen times and it charges up the little battery and you can switch on the light. I like it because I’m cheap and I don’t have to buy batteries. But I also like the ritual of cranking the thing and charging it. I’m weird.

And I promise that story has a point!

I’ve purposefully not made a big deal out of it, but I’ve been preaching a series of sermons with one-word titles since I’ve arrived. The title of the series is “Words to Live by” and that graphic has been on the bulletin for weeks with all the different words on there. The idea is that we throw around words in church a lot without ever really stopping to define them. Words like “Repentance” or “Sabbath” or “Communion.” Others are words that are common in our everyday world, but have more meaning than we give credit for: words like “Hospitality” and “Faith” or “Neighbor.”

I thought it would be a good thing, at the outset of our journey together, to sort define the terms that we’ll be throwing around. We might say that we’re charging them up. My goal in our work together over these Sundays is to charge these words with meaning. When we talk about loving our neighbor, hopefully the word ‘neighbor’ triggers us to think broad and wide. When we take communion, we remember that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses cheering us on.

At the end of September we’ll end this little informal sermon series, but really the idea won’t go away. Worship is about charging us up, filling our lives with meaning. So that when we are out and about in the world, we are full and ready to shine God’s light around.