DownloadJuly 19 issue
Faith handed down, yet new
By Isaac S. VillegasPage:
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BOONSBORO, Md. — A handful of people file into the nursery on Tuesday morning for prayer at Mount Zion Mennonite Church. I take a seat in the circle, in a rocking chair with a changing table for babies at my back.
Villegas
Praying in a nursery seems exactly right. We are all children, dependent on the God who shares with us the Spirit’s breath of life.
“God,” Gene prays during our time together, “You supply all our needs, and that’s real nice.”
His intimate, frank style hints at a long history of conversation with God. Gene continues, although I hear an edge of frustration in his voice, as if he has been praying this prayer for the past week and is tired of it: “We pray that BP Oil will get that well plugged up so that your beauty won’t be messed up anymore.”
His prayer resonates with many in the circle, who whisper their amens. The suffering in and around the Gulf of Mexico seems like an alien world compared to the gentle beauty of Maryland’s Cumberland Valley. Yet the prayers at Mount Zion invite that distant place into our lives.
In this church nursery we pray ourselves into the connections of God’s creation, into the tissues of grace that hold the world together in God’s hands.
The prayers echo the early Anabaptist teachings about how the Word of God is preached through all of creation.
“The gospel of all creatures is about nothing other than simply Christ the crucified one,” wrote Hans Hut in the 16th century. “The whole Christ suffers in all members.” Creatures continue to bear “the affliction of Christ” and reveal how Jesus “will also be crucified until the end of the world.”
With Christ’s creatures of the Gulf of Mexico in our mind, we prayed our way from the fields of Mount Zion Mennonite Church into the abyss in the sea, into the presence of the crucified Christ.
From the window of the nursery I can see the cemetery that stretches across the hill alongside the church — a field planted with rectangular stones to mark the graves of the faithful: Stauffer, Newcomer, Reiff, Funk. A couple of centuries of weather have made the older headstones undecipherable.
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