I love jigsaw puzzles. The harder the better. (One of my favorites, in high school, was 1000 pieces, round, and solid yellow.) There’s something so satisfying, to me, about that moment when a piece fits snugly into place: one small step toward the final picture!
I love jigsaw puzzles so much that you won’t often see one out in our house. I can’t walk by an uncompleted puzzle without pausing to find just one more piece … OK, maybe just two … or three … Maybe you can relate?
I’m guessing that the Apostle Paul would have like jigsaw puzzles, too, given the way he often described the early Christian community as the Body of Christ, with each person a different part of that body. In first Corinthians 12: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ… Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” Live your part, Paul encouraged the early Christians, and respect that other’s differing parts are what make the whole body possible.
Our joining together completes the full picture of Christ’s presence on earth in ways that none of us can as individuals. One of my greatest joys as a pastor is when I can help someone discover their place in the body of Christ — how their particular gifts and graces are a piece in the jigsaw puzzle of church (to mix metaphors). When a congregation celebrates, really celebrates, the differing and complementing gifts of its members, and connects all into a loving, grace-full, justice-seeking whole: that is the closest that I’ve come to experiencing the full kin-dom of God.
This Sunday we’ll be launching our 2024 Stewardship Campaign: “Building Beloved Community.” Over the next four Sundays, we’ll explore particular practices that support the spiritual and social connections of a Beloved Community. We’ll learn how each of us is a connected into the jigsaw puzzle of Harvard-Epworth Church, in our specific passions and talents. We’ll hear stories from members of the congregation about their giving to the church, financially and in other areas of service and caring, that make our particular expression of Beloved Community possible, in person and online.
I invite you to come along on this journey of Building Beloved Community. Together we’ll explore, create, and celebrate the many connections that create a loving presence that is far more than the sum of each of our parts. With each other and with God, in joyful service and giving and grace, we build a beloved community that offers healing and life to our divided — and beautiful, God-created — world.