Comfort & Joy

The theme for our December 1 Advent worship was Comfort and Joy.

A quilt is a blanket with a heartbeat.

Some of you might ask what spiritual relevance we can read into a quilt this morning.

Community – every piece individual and unique, but together a whole.

Diversity – all the quilts distinctly different, but united into a common cloth.

  Comfort.  Warmth.

Does that not reflect who we try to be?  For me, the quilt is a wonderful metaphor for a church community.  We are a quilt.  We are there with a hot meal or a ride, a hug, a phone call or simply a listening ear when times are tough.  We are colorful and diverse.

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Quilts represent our everyday lives:  our need for warmth and beauty, for creative expression.  Quilts express the moods and the colors and the designs of life’s joys, pains and realities.  Quilts call us to memories and to remembering.  In God’s design, even the smallest scraps or most frayed fragments can be fashioned into something new, complete, comfort-giving and beautiful.  In the same way God takes the bits and pieces of our disjointed lives and puts them together to form something new and useful.

This morning we find ourselves surrounded by the beauty, the creative spirit that has inspired so many people, particularly women, to create these quilts and share them with loved ones and with us this morning.  Thread is essential for quilting and is also a symbol of connectedness.  It is a reminder of the many incredible ways that we here at Covenant and elsewhere are all woven together into the fabric of life.

Andrew Hill says it well.  “Worship is a patchwork quilt of people of different shapes and characters, different sizes, different prejudices and colors, different enthusiasms and ages.  It is a quilt to creep from under and to experience the quilt’s warmth of companionship, wholeness and love.  It is to leave the quilt’s warm cosiness for the openness, opportunity and challenge of the wider world – a quilt in the vast interdependent patchwork of creation.”

Prayer: We give you thanks loving God, for the work we can do for others thru organizations such as MCC.  Today we give thanks that we can be your hands and your heart, as we touch the lives of families all over the world with practical things to help them – be it kits, blankets or quilts.  Teach us to find balance in our lives, a balance that contains time with you God and time for others and ourselves.  May our prayers and actions be centered in your love and care for this world.  Amen

by Joyce Bergen