The Rev. Dr. Timothy Downs,Conference Minister for the Southeast Conference of the United Church of Christ, was the special guest of Open Table yesterday, and he preached yesterday's sermon. We were honored by his visit and appreciative of his encouragement to us as we continue to grow as a new church in the UCC. Rather than posting one of my sermons today, I'm sharing my own brief reflection based on yesterday's Epistle lesson from Ephesians.
Text: Ephesians 4: 31-5:2
31Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, 32and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. 5Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, 2and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
“Be ye kind” was the first Bible verse I memorized (in the KJV) when I was a child. “Be kind” is a six-letter version of the Golden Rule, which The Charter of Compassion[i] believes expresses the essence of all major religions. Being kind is, according to the writer of Ephesians, the way we imitate God and live in love.
If it seems an impossible goal to live one’s entire life in a state of compassion, we might make a start at kindly living by dedicating the first moments of our next day to the practice of loving kindness. Mary Oliver’s poem “Why I Wake Early” is good inspiration to “start the day in happiness, in kindness.”
[i] The Charter of Compassion, https://www.facebook.com/CharterforCompassion, The Charter is a call to restore the Golden Rule to the center of religious, moral and civic life. The path to a just economy and a peaceful world requires listening, understanding and treating all others as we wish to be treated ourselves.The Charter for Compassion is a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but, more important, compassionate action to the center of religious, moral and political life. Compassion is the principled determination to put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and lies at the heart of all religious and ethical systems. One of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to build a global community where men and women of all races, nations and ideologies can live together in peace. In our globalized world, everybody has become our neighbor, and the Golden Rule has become an urgent necessity.The Charter for Compassion is not simply a statement of principle; it is above all a summons to creative, practical and sustained action to meet the political, moral, religious, social and cultural problems of our time.
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