Message from Pastor Max . . .


Pastor Max Lynn and family


In life and in death we belong to God.

I suppose arriving at your 100th birthday is not all that different from any other day. We are a day older than yesterday, a year older than last year. Then again, it is a great excuse to give thanks, to reflect back and to look forward. We at St. John’s are children of the Creator God, disciples of Christ Jesus, cleansed and empowered by the Spirit, both as individuals and as a community to love one another and work for peace and justice in the world. Basically, our faith serves two functions: liberation of each individual soul, and liberation of community and Creation. We meet the holiness and pure love of God and sing out, Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come; Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.

“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

These words of Christ on the cross are good news for each of us, and also a critique of power. While the Church has, over two millennium been used as an opiate, co-opted by worldly power to justify injustice and violence of the status quo, the Gospel will ever break free and call us to a better day. Jack Miles, reflecting on these words of Christ on the cross in his book “Christ,” writes, “One of the implications of the (Gospel) story has been that in the West no regime can declare itself above review. All power is conditional; and when the powerless rise, God may be with them . . . As his executioners nail him to the cross, Jesus prays . . . Wherever lines like these or the ideas behind them have spread, human authority has begun to lose its grip on unimpeachable legitimacy. In the West, any criminal may be Christ, and therefore any prosecutor, Pilate. As the abolitionist poet, James Russell Lowell put it:

"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne –
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow; keeping watch above his own.”

We have been through much, and look forward to how God will use us tomorrow. And yet we can be confident that our purpose will remain the same. “When we’ve been here ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun.”

Happy Birthday, St. John’s.