“While I Have Breath” with Rev. Lisa Yebuah

If you were here with us last week,

over the last two weeks, you know that we are leaning into practices, practices that keep us open to the goodness and the spirit and the life-changing work of God.

You know, here at the Southeast Raleigh Table, for those of you who have been with us in this community for many years, or for those of you who might even be visiting us for the very first time, I am almost certain that the thing that you know about this church community is that we want to see goodness We want to see peace.

We want to see abundance.

We want to see justice.

We want to see righteousness reflected in this world.

We want the world to be not what it is, but what it could be in the imagination of God.

Now, we call this desire not that we are a community service arm.

We call this desire not being missionaries.

We call this desire that we have to live in the direction of a long obedience so that the world might bend in the ways in which God dreams.

We call this beautiful phenomenon social holiness.

Meaning that we believe that God is at work in our lives and also through our lives, that God who began a good work, God who created all things and invited us to be stewards of this earth, that it can actually be so, that the kingdom of heaven can come a little closer to earth through the work and our imagination for this world.

That justice becomes our love, the Southeast Raleigh table's love in action.

But might I also invite you to consider that social holiness for our church is not enough if we don't also have an imagination for ourselves.

It is hard to dream peace for the world

if you are not at peace within yourself.

It's hard for you to believe that grace can be mediated to the world if you do not believe grace can be mediated to you.

It is hard for you to believe in justice in the world if you are not just within yourself or just within your family.

There are some people, it's really hard to follow them because we see how they talk to the people who live under their roof.

To say no justice, no peace, and yet to not bear witness to justice or peace makes it really challenging for social holiness to be a reality if we do not also believe that God is still at work within us that we have not arrived.

So these practices that we are opening ourselves up to, the practices of prayer, the practice of rest, the practice of understanding how Christ carries a yoke alongside us, next week we'll talk about the practice of prayer.

It's not the practices in and of themselves that make us somehow like holy.

We're not seeking to be the moral elite.

Or to somehow say that we have arrived as it relates to holiness.

but that we believe that every single time we keep ourselves open to God's work in our lives, when we lean into the practices of our faith, they provide pathways for us to bump into the life-giving goodness of the most high God who knows you and also loves you.