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Morning Meditation
August 25, 2025
Scripture: 1 Peter 4:8-11
Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
Meditation by Glenn Beamer
With the Redeemer’s program year approaching, I will diverge a bit from my typical meditation format and offer a prospectus for our children’s formation and church school program for the coming year. Our SHINE curriculum provides a three-year lesson plan focused on Peace – Peace with God, Peace with Creation, and Peace with ourselves and our communities. This year we will be learning about Peace with Creation.
We are blessed at Redeemer that our campus literally provides a natural and built peace refuge where we can come together in faith and in a supportive natural environment. Ironically the Redeemer’s campus peace is brought into stark relief by the kinetic traffic that’s on Lancaster and Montgomery Avenues eleven months of the year, August being the month the traffic shifts to the Atlantic City Expressway. This year we are planning lessons that will engage our campus and help our children understand that regardless of where they are geographically – from Brooklyn to Tucumcari – they have a responsibility for contributing to a sustainable and peaceful natural environment.
There is an inherent tension between people and their natural environments – there is a slippery progression from stewarding our land, water, air and resources toward exploiting what we perceive as ours but is rather God’s bequest. At the Redeemer, meaning 230 Pennswood Road, we have sustained a balance in that stewardship for over a century. By teaching about that stewardship to our kids, my personal hope is that they will understand that they can find ways to sustain their human communities while saving critical and beautiful parts and dimensions of God’s natural environment in perpetuity. Recognizing that some elements of nature could only be used once and are then gone forever.
A second motivation for developing peace with creation is that our reverence for God’s earth creates a healthy predicate that will extend to peace with our communities. Looking at the world today, with harsh wars in Ukraine and Gaza, we can recognize that when we envy land as territory or assets, or when we become overly ambitious about land that we perceive we need, we are embarking on a path that can lead to substantial, even ghastly, human destruction. I don’t mean to simplify or discount the issues surrounding the current conflicts. Rather I hope we can develop our children’s understanding that valuing our environments implies, indeed even impels, us to sustain our natural space and to respect our neighbors’ stewardship of their environments.
On a personal note, I have very much appreciated your patience and support this past year. My previous teaching experience involved explaining non-linear hazard models of steel mill shutdowns and present-value estimates for defined benefit pension plans to graduate students in political science and public policy. I knew I would need alternative material for our pre-K to grade 5 classes. Many of you have come to me with thoughtful suggestions, many of you have contributed in material ways and with good ideas, and many of you have relayed support for our endeavor. I am grateful.
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