Greetings friends,
What a wonderful celebration of worship we have enjoyed in this season of 150 years in ministry at Manchaca UMC. Our former pastors who have joined us to preach and celebrate along the way have truly blessed us. Yesterday, as Rev. Laura Adam was preaching, I was struck deeply by the imagery she shared about a place not far from where she grew up in Nebraska. She called it Ash Hollow.
In her description of this place and in combination with her message of Abram and Sarai in Genesis 12, Pastor Laura invited us to experience the journey of our faith ancestors who listened and obeyed the message of YWHW. This message included the invitation to go where they were sent! As they were sent into a new land even in their old age, Abram and Sarai received blessing after blessing from YHWH. They were able to assemble their family and dependents and travel faithfully into the future God promised for them. And as Rev. Adam shared, "they left the land inherited from their fathers, to journey into a land inherited from God."
In Ash Hollow, travelers we now call wagon pioneers, made their way along the Oregon Trail to a future of promise. They stopped in the hollow to rest and regroup, restore their health, take on water, adjust their belongings, and prepare for the next stage of their journey. As I listened to our retired colleague and former pastor preach yesterday, a particular hymn came to mind which helped me visualize the journey she described and the place she knows as Ash Hollow.
Abram and Sarai marked their stops with the building of altars for worship and remembrance of the promise of YHWH. Each marker was an ebenezer, a commemoration of divine assistance, marking the location of an important experience with God along the way. The hymn that came to my mind is titled, "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing." I sing this hymn with joy remembering the journey my parents set out upon with their family. I journey in faith because of their faith I go where I am sent (by the bishop) because of an ecclesiastical understanding passed to me from my family.
Come thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace; streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above. Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it, mount of thy redeeming love. Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by thy help I'm come; and I hope, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home. Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God; he, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious blood. O to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be! Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee. Prone to wander, lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.
Robert Robinson, 1758; found as #400 the UMC Hymbook, 1989.
Ash Hollow was a place where those on the Oregon Trail waited for the next step of their journey. To me, in the context of our guest preacher's story, Ash Hollow became an analogy of the journey we are now experiencing as United Methodists. We have journeyed far together, we have stopped to regroup, and now we are called to continue along the way as we are sent in the promise of YHWH. Let us mark this 150th year in ministry as an ebenezer to the Lord. And let us journey forth in faith from this time into the next phase of ministry as the people called Methodist gathered and assembled as Manchaca United Methodist Church.
Along the Way
Pastor Paul
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