Camp! - and 'Re-creation'

Monday morning three charter buses and a few cars will line up in our church parking lot, and carry 168 children, youth, and adults to Church Camp at Wesley Woods in Williams Bay, Wisconsin

As every year, we will share in outside activities like swimming and kayaking, archery, hiking and group games, and indoor ones like crafts and music and Bible study. There will be meals in the dining hall, evening special events and campfires; and in the midst of it all, surrounded by the beauty of woods and water and star-filled night skies, that underlying awareness that we are in God's creation.

It's good to be away, in a more rustic, natural setting, from time to time, to remember that we live, in every moment, in God's creation. The Bible begins with creation accounts, very possibly shared and developed as stories told under the desert stars thousands of year ago, that continue to open our eyes to who we are, and where we are. We are God's creation, those stories insist, bearing within us the "image of God," and so, at our depths, we are related to God, responsible to one another and creation and, with the rest of the created order, in ongoing need of restoration and renewal.

During the summer, I will be sharing sermons based on some of the stories from the book of Genesis that continue to shape our identity, beginning this Sunday with "Stories under the Stars: 'Created,'" drawn from Genesis 1:16-2:4.