the The Newsletter for Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
January 2018
Celebrating Abundance
the
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New Years’ Day - Church Offices Closed Feast of Lights
Youth Ministry Retreat
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Martin Luther King Holiday Church Offices Closed
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Vestry Meeting
Women of Saint Michael Program
It’s a new year, and with a new year often comes the desire to live in new ways. We often call these desires resolutions. I’ve never been a fan of resolutions. I’m sure my lack of excitement about resolutions stems from the fact that I can never keep them even when I try. In the wake of another Christmas season come and gone, and in the middle of well-intentioned, yet doomed, shallow resolutions all around us, I remember one of my favorite maxims: A good life is one that celebrates abundance without attachment. So this year, rather than joining the throngs around us in untenable resolutions focused on our actions, what if we decided, as a Christian community, to focus on changing our hearts? It is easy to talk about blessings when we have the sense about us that we are blessed. When we look at our material world, the world in which we live and in which we have been trained to succeed, by any measure we are very comfortable. But if we aren’t intentional about how we live with our material wealth, with our abundance, we can begin to be attached to it. Or even worse, we can be controlled by it. Attachment can look like many different things. Some of us are attached to the security our abundance provides. Some of us are attached
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to the privilege and advantage our abundance affords. Many of us simply don’t think about our radical abundance because it’s all we’ve ever known and all we’ve ever been taught to want. Abundance is a part of our national identity and has been encouraged as a sign of success and achievement. For some, abundance is more than what we earn, it is our right. Yet I’m concerned about how that level of abundance affects our spirit over time. We know that we have been created in God’s image: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’… So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them (Gen 1:26-27).” continued on page 19