Rooted and Grounded in Love

The news is filled with it—stories of another terror attack, this time close to home, in Manhattan. A man drives a rented truck into the bike lanes trying to kill as many people as he can. There is a sad familiarity to it, echoed not just in other stories about terror attacks, but other stories about the ways human beings deliberately try to hurt each other, or turn a blind eye to the pain of other people. It’s hard to know what to do about any of it, but it’s clear how all the stories can leave us feeling. They can leave us feeling afraid. “Lock the doors. Get a better security system. Buy a gun,” we’re told.

There is an antidote to the fear, and it is administered in religious communities like Central Church. Oh, I know that religion has a lot for which to answer that is not good, but in the process of pointing out the failures, the important contributions of religious communities have been overlooked. As the Apostle Paul put it long ago, the Church is to be a place where people “are being rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17), and there is ample evidence that in mature religious communities like Central Church, that is exactly what happens, just as there is ample evidence that, in the rush away from such communities, people are left a bit rootless, ungrounded in anything but fear.

You don’t have to live that way. Our doors are open you, your family. And if you aren’t around here, my guess is that there is a church just like us near to where you are. It might seem a bit old fashioned, but if you look again, that’s really just a sign of the maturity of being rooted and grounded in something deeper than today’s headlines.

--Pastor Don Steele