The Beloved Community UMC

We will be online tomorrow (first Sunday of the month) and having a special observance of the USA's 250th year. You can participate, LIVE, right here at 10am EDT.

What do we love when we love our country 0 and what does that love ask of us?

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." - Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865

On this upcoming 6th Sunday of Easter, we hold in one hand the risen Christ's Easter promise — that no one is abandoned — and in the other, three overlapping invitations. We celebrate mothers and all women whose labor of love, seen and unseen, holds the world together. We honor every child in foster care who has known the fear of not belonging, and every caregiver who has said yes. And we hear Paul in Athens, standing before an altar to an Unknown God, saying: the One who made you already knows your name. Sacred belonging is not earned. It is given. Our task is to extend what God has already declared.