Love letters

Philippians 1: 3-11
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
December 9, 2018 – Second Sunday in Advent

Have you ever received a love letter? Have you ever sent one? It was handwritten, wasn’t it? That seems to be one of the qualifications, according to those who responded to this question on a Facebook post of mine. Some friends said their letters contained poetry, song lyrics, candid honest feelings. Some were written in code so as not to be discovered. Some letters described the mundane things done during a day. Some were from a beloved serving in the military or a childhood sweetheart. What makes a love letter so precious is the overwhelming feeling of having someone’s complete attention and affection focused on you and you alone.



Many folks who have received a love letter have kept them. I have every anniversary, Valentine’s, and birthday card that David has ever given me. Even though he did not write every word in the card, David knows how to pick just the right card with just the right message to melt my heart. So I can imagine him standing in front of the card section in a store and reading cards one by one until he finds the one that makes him think of me.

Sometimes a love letter can be from someone you’ve never met. One friend in New Jersey received the following letter from a neighbor: “Dear neighbors, I hope this isn’t too odd, but I just wanted to relay a quick message of gratitude to you. I moved to [this town] a little more than a year ago from [where I grew up]. The area I had grown up in was much more diverse and accepting than [this town] (which I quickly learned). It was very hard to stay positive in such a conservative town. However, on days walking to and from my bus stop, I would notice your house in particular. The stickers on your car would always put a smile on my face and I thank you for that! More recently I noticed the sign on your lawn that reads ‘No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor’. The first day I saw this I was overwhelmed with joy to see such a thing in [this town]. So I just wanted to say thank you for openly expressing your beliefs and giving me a strong sense of hope and happiness in these trying times.”



Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi is just such a love letter: one that was intended to give a strong sense of hope and happiness in trying times. Paul has great affection for this community of faith, so much so that the very thought of them sustains him while he is in prison and moves him to write them this letter. In fact, this is the happiest of Paul’s letters. Eugene Peterson, in his introduction of Philippians in his paraphrase The Message, writes, “Paul doesn’t tell us that we can be happy, or how to be happy. He simply and unmistakably is happy. None of his circumstances contribute to his joy: he wrote from a jail cell, his work was under attack by competitors, and after twenty years or so of hard traveling in the service of Jesus, he was tired and would have welcomed some relief.”



This church has spent 39 years in service to Jesus and a good number of those years have been spent in hard traveling—packing up everything needed for Sunday, unpacking it at the Masonic lodge or in the basement of Calvary Baptist or at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, unfolding and folding up chairs, then packing it all back up again for next Sunday. And yet you continued to be church and joyfully so. I’ve done my own share of traveling and serving Jesus, having preached in 24 congregations alone in the Connecticut conference, never staying long enough to have a real and lasting relationship with a faith community as their pastor.



Until now. I’ve been your pastor for five years now, and I think it’s high time I wrote you a love letter, to let you know how much I love you and appreciate you.



What first attracted me to you is that you are an Open and Affirming church and that you have been for most of your life together. The United Church of Christ became ONA in 1985; you became an ONA congregation in 1990, only eleven years after your founding. And I love our ONA statement and that you revisited it in 2011 to keep it current.

The second thing that attracted me is your solar panels. In an instant you communicated to me that you are a church that cares deeply about the environment and takes climate change seriously. I love that this church doesn’t look like a church. I love that you purposefully did not have a building for many years and when you did decide to be a bricks-and-mortar church, you chose to re-purpose a building rather than build new construction.

Putting together Go Bags

I love that you took 6 months out of your search process to deal with some significant conflict. No community of faith is ever free of conflict; even now I would bet there are still some residual feelings or at least some painful memories. And yet think of your own relationships and friendships in which there has been conflict and pain and yet you are still in relationship with at least some of those persons. That alone speaks to the strength of covenantal relationships and the power of forgiveness, which is a continual process.

Perler bead ornaments

I love that you make most decisions by discernment and consensus rather than by vote. You value every voice and listen to every opinion, even when you disagree with it. Sometimes you will say you talk things to death but that’s not it at all. Life lived in community is a form of evolution in and of itself, and evolution takes the time it needs. And I love that you are still evolving.

Creating the Advent icon 

I love that this is a community, a culture of individuals. No one can pigeon-hole or assume anything about anyone. We say that people are unique but as people are in relationship together, we know how friends or spouses or even a group of people can become homogenous, can begin to resemble each other over time. But not you. Each of you has kept your fierce uniqueness and yet softened each other’s edges with love and compassion and forgiveness and acceptance.

I love that justice work is the fire of your service to Jesus. You disrupt your lives in the service of others, whether it is volunteering at the Empowerment Center or cooking and serving a meal at Hope Dining Room or spending part or all of your evening for Code Purple or putting together Go-Bags or giving some time at Community Day or at the Delaware Food Bank or the Clothing Bank in Wilmington or at Pride in Dover, or marching for our lives or for women’s rights or for climate change awareness and action or with our Sikh neighbors and our Muslim friends and our Jewish siblings.



I love that you have quarterly meetings together and that the congregation as it is gathered that day is the decision-making body of the church. I love that you select rather than elect officers and committee members. And I love that you do not use Robert’s Rules of Order.

Easter cupcakes

I love that in 39 years you have developed some cherished traditions, such as the Festival of Light at the end of the Christmas Eve service and Soup and Sharing before the service. I love Easter cupcakes and the flower cross. I love that you come forward for Communion and tear the bread, that you have both wine and grape juice. I love Perler beads at the Advent party. I love cheese and crackers on Celebration Sunday. I love the seafood feast and the Christmas party. I love that we make time to eat together; I would love us to do more that! I love that you have made room for some new traditions, like the Advent icon and Beer and Carols.

Easter flower cross

I love that when you could’ve chosen to be anything, you chose to be a congregation of the United Church of Christ, especially given that in northern Delaware we are an outpost of the UCC. I love that our life together isn’t perfect or seamless, that our flaws are just as visible as our virtues. I love that when we have guests in worship, you immediately introduce yourselves after worship and engage them in conversation. I love looking around Wells Hall or the Christmas party or the seafood feast and see everyone talking to everyone, no one a stranger.

I wrote this love letter to you to remind you that you, you are the love letter: to each other, to yourselves, to this community, to the places where you live and work, to your friends and your families; indeed you are a love letter to the world. Handwritten with your hands, delivered with your feet, your time, your energy, your heart, your mind, enfleshed in your body. For Jesus was God’s love letter to humanity and to all the earth, and it is Jesus, love incarnate, love enfleshed who overflows from within us into our lives and our life together, because Love can’t help but do that. That’s what love does: it knits the world back together, one life at a time. And sustains us while we do it. Because there is no limit to love. We make it as we go along. Much love to you, Church.