15 May Ascension Sunday
Psalm 23, John 10: 1-10
Acts 2: 42-47
What brings the church to life?
On the question: “what brings the church to life?” I want to cut to the chase. There are several answers, but the one that makes the real difference is this: friendship.
People in this church are truly friendly to one another and newcomers. Not only are people here friendly with one another, people here have close friends in this church. We may not be bosom buddies with everybody around us, and yet dollars to donuts most people here has at least one close friend sitting in another spot. We saw this just yesterday on the social group outing to Smith Falls. It was great, it was fun, and people enjoyed being with friends.
Open communities like we demonstrated with Simon/Deborah open their hearts to embrace new friends. They are gracious and hospitable. And yet that is not enough for Luke or Paul. Or for us: people need, long for look for the deeper authentic friendship and connection of a faith community.
Such friendship is neither quick nor easy. It takes time, effort, attention, and continuing investment. Furthermore the perfect Christian community advocated in the New Testament in Acts and in Paul’s letters is something we can aim for, but we know we are too human to attain it.
Never mind that though: we do what we can, we can improve, we can meet the standards of Christian friendship in smaller groups or in smaller steps here is this church. We can because at the end of the day it not us alone creating this community, it is God creating us in His community. We are not alone.
Now having said that let’s look at the New Testament vision of the perfect Christian community of friends. The classic definition of friendship is this: "Friendship is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection".
Luke knew this and so we find these words in the Book of Acts about the first churches of Christianity:
"And they (meaning the first Christians) were committing themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the breaking bread and praying together.” The ancient reader would be alerted to the place of authentic friendship because you break bread and pray with your most intimate, personal and trusted friends.
This depth of relationship had a name, in Greek it is the koinonia...koinonia." Koinonia is just a fancy word for authentic deep communal friendship. Koinonia is like the fellowship we had yesterday at the Rail Road museum of Smith Falls.
And then Luke goes on to say that such mutual friendship means that: "All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need".
At this point in the church’s life, many persons have now joined the new “Jesus” movement. Luke and later Paul saw that it was their mutual friendship that was the basis upon which to build prayer, communion and common understanding of the apostles and Jesus. This was a mutuality that went far beyond potluck meals. This was a serious commitment to a common vision about a new reality and what the future with Jesus could mean to all humankind.
This is what Luke wanted Jerusalem to strive for.
Luke and Paul clearly give great descriptions of the friendship factors of the new church. It is like a check list of a report card and this morning I will to run through the check list.
Your task and homework is to decide what mark you want to give the saints in this check list. Will you give it an A plus?, a “B”, or are there real challenges here that require effort in order to get a passing grade? You be judge, this is your spiritual home. You know it well. How does it measure up to the ideals of the New Testament?
So here are the measuring sticks of the New Testament against which we can measure the foundation of this church:
1. Mutual unity and equality
2. Inclusivity
3. Obligation
Let me say it again:
1. Mutual unity and equality
2. Inclusivity
3. Obligation
The first criterion is this: koinonia involves mutual unity and equality. On a scale of 1 to 100 how do you want to score the saints? Do we provide equal opportunity for people to participate in all activities of the church? Do we share the workload equitability? Do we work in teams that respect the work of other teams? Are we united in our desires and dreams for this community? Do we know what dreams and hopes we have in common? Is Jesus the Son of God received in our hearts and minds in authentic friendship? When we go out after church do we have peace of God so deep within our hearts that others may wonder about it? Do we reach out to each other in mutual respect and wrap our prayers around each other like the wings of the angels? Do we step up to the plate to help each other in our needs, our losses and bereavements, regardless of the colour of our skin or the size of our bank accounts?
So how do you score “the saints” on this first measuring stick?
The second criterion is this: inclusivity. This is a radical measure, one that would have shocked the early church ground as it was lived in a culture of a rigid class structure. Lowly-mindedness was fit only for the slaves, not for the nobles or chief priests. Humility could be understood positively only in light of the experience of the crucified and raised Messiah Jesus
Neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, slave nor free have privileges in the authentic koinonia of the first church in Jerusalem.
On a scale of 1 to 100 how do you want to score the saints? Do we welcome people regardless of their place of birth? Do we reach out and give a true voice and influence to leaders regardless of their vocation? Do we consider new ideas, trying them on to see how they work? Do we respect traditions and long held practices of then church out of respect for the value they hold in the hearts of charter members? Do we discard outdate practices and language?
How do you score “the saints” on this second measuring stick?
The third criterion is this: genuine obligation one to another. Paul defines this in this way. Genuine obligation is a community that is committed to think together, that is not burdened by envy, organizational adversity, or conceit. He was clear that competition and arrogance are attitudes that will destroy genuine friendship. This is the friendship that looks first to "the things of others" before "the things of themselves".
On a scale of 1 to 100 how do you want to score the saints? Do the various organizations of the church like session and the board of managers cooperate and pull together in the same direction? Do we consider the needs of others such as those who rent from us in humility and tolerance? Do we make it easy for the next person or group to use the kitchen? Do we thank those who count the offering, sing in the choir? Do we consider how we can support those programs in which we are not involved?
How do you score the saints on criteria number three?
So there it is: the challenge of the community of the body of Christ. Friendship makes it work. And that friendship demands three things:
1. Mutual unity and equality
2. Inclusivity
3. Obligation
Finally, even though we are flawed human creatures God so loves us that it is God who saves and grows the community. Working with faith as a team, God has and will work in and through those of us willing to listen, learn and act. God has it in mind for us to hear his love, know his Holy Spirit and through the grace of the Son we will believe in, and we will perform. At the end of the day, like the early church in Jerusalem we will see the signs, know the wonders, feel authentic friendship, and be the church in this community.
Let us pray…
Despite the challenges, hardship and our own foibles, O God, we know you have reached out to the body of Christ since the earliest days in Jerusalem. We seek your presence as we strive to understand what it is we can do to improve, grow and be the love and connections for which we yearn. Amen
Matthew 28:1-11
John 20: 10-18
We fear not
Since Christmas, we’ve been studying the life, ministry, and death of Jesus through the eyes of the great gospel writer Matthew.
Matthew, as we understand it today, was writing to the very earliest Jewish Christian Church, before the great final destruction of the Jewish temple in 70 AD. Matthew was writing with urgency, because for Matthew, the end time was immanent, very close. Matthew believed that Jesus would return before the final days of the 12 apostles. Matthew’s mission was to write such a compelling story that a maximum number of people, young, old, male female, Jews and non-Jews would come to see God as an immediate intimate presence felt through this man from Jerusalem. Matthew was desperately trying to show as many people as possible of the new way that God was with his creation: a way without the structure of institutions, a way without the mediation of priests, a way direct without the need for perfect obedience, a way filled with compassion, life, intimate, and direct connection.
We saw that god talk in the birth stories, we saw in the sermon on the mount, in the beatitudes. It showed up in the miracles of healing, especially tied to the restoration of sight, and the raising of the dead.
And we see it once again in Matthew’s story of the first Easter morning. Make no mistake, for Matthew this shift in how God can be experienced in the world is so radical and so new, that he reports an earthquake right at the beginning of the account. We have come to understand that Matthew is absolutely convinced that Jesus changed the meaning of all language, including such basic terms as death and life.
Matthew teaches us that all throughout the life of Jesus He had been teaching his disciples, men and women, Jew or not, to see with new eyes...to look at God and the world differently from the way seen before. Jesus showed them the world of the Beatitudes, where the poor in spirit, the mourners, the merciful, the hungry and persecuted turn out to be recipients of a new more excellent way to be with God.
He showed them a world where people did not exchange an eye for an eye in revenge, but offered passive nonviolent protest as a more excellent way.
He showed them the world where loving your neighbour may be right and is easy to do, but then showed them the more excellent way that included the capacity to love your enemy.
He showed them the more excellent way of being in the world with compassion, acceptance, tolerance.
He showed them that an active sustainable faith does not exist from a place of fear, but authentic belief comes from within and is based on a more excellent way.
Jesus showed them that even swords, priests, elders, emperors, liars, and fear-mongers do not have the last word against truth, love, compassion, and God: A most excellent way.
And so it should be no surprise to us to read that those closest to Jesus, the two Marys and the disciples actually got it. They do not react to the empty tomb with fear. Rather they react with faith, awe, and wonder.
Matthew does not spend many words on the resurrection itself. He does not want the power of God able to create life out of death to be something to be feared. It is as if Matthew wants the resurrection to be something of awe, something to be to marvel, like the grand canyon, or the Mona Lisa. This is the oh wow that lies within the mystery of God. Matthew accepted the unprecedented act by which God raised Jesus from the dead could not be reduced, that it was not susceptible to analysis nor could be articulated by mere language.
Matthew is much more concerned with the god talk about the new temple, the New Testament, the new way God touches us his creation from beyond existence itself.
You and I have been hearing the stores of Jesus, most of us for all our lives. We have lived through countless sermons, hymns, and readings of the life, death, and the resurrection of this Jesus. We, like the women and the disciples, are close to Jesus. We know him, we’ve listened to him, and not only that we have the ears to hear and the eyes to see.
We have become committed in one way or another to this amazing new system of god talk. We are committed to some degree or other to believe in the new temple, the second Adam, to believe in Jesus the man who is God. We, like the disciples, like the women, we get it and we are not afraid of the empty tombs in our own lives.
Restoration, renewal, resurrection, and new starts for us is nurtured by the greatest resurrection story of history and it does not scare us. We find it as we move from one stage of life to another, from being single to married, or from being married to widowed, or divorces. We find it as we move from student to employed, and from employed to unemployed or retired. We find it in the celebrations of new babies or the celebration of life come and gone, found in funerals, tragedy and loss.
We find it in recovery from illness and we find it in end stages of this life. We are truly blessed to be free from anxiety and wrapped in the loving wings of those angels of the gospels
We have going for us a powerful tool of hope and resiliency, we have a faith that not only withstands the death of our saviour, but more than that, a faith that lifts us out of despair to awe and wonder.
In this more excellent way we see beyond the sensationalism of the day, we get beyond the destruction, blaming, insulting and other common shortcomings to see a more excellent way. We have a belief that we can devote our enormous resources, amazing intelligent, our faith, and creative energies to finding solutions that will take us towards the kingdom of heaven in earth as promised in Matthew. Matthew was wrong about the timing, but he was not wrong with his vision about the capacity for experiencing the kingdom of heaven.
We will move beyond Matthew’s gospel in the coming weeks and we will miss Matthew. We move on now to the work and god talk of Paul and the earliest Christians. But we will miss Matthew because he has been one great teacher. He showed us that we have going for us a faith that pushes back the frontiers so much so that today we believe sin, death, abandonment have lost their power over us. Matthew has taught us that we are free to believe in age that has potential. He showed us that we have going for us a faith that pushes back the frontiers so much so that we can capitalize constructively on instant comprehensive and complete dialogue with all the peoples of our planet.
We have going for us a faith that pushes back the frontiers so much so that we believe in an age when we will be cancer free. We have going for us a faith that pushes back the frontiers so much so that we believe we will use sources of energy that will sustain and preserve our environment. We have going for us a powerful faith that pushes the frontiers back so much so that we believe in an age when weapons of mass destruction will be turned into tools to eliminate illiteracy, poverty, thirst, and famine.
Here in 2011 we are truly blessed for we have been living with this earthshaking insight for a long time. We have been blessed to know the awe and respect and wonder of the empty tomb for all our lives. We are indeed blessed to know most of us from our birth that fear of God was not the focus for Mary Madeleine or the other Mary or the disciples, rather it was love of God.
But it was not so for the first fledging Christians. They had to learn to let go of fear and learn that the empty tomb was something to be respected in awe, and wonder. Can you imagine how difficult it was for them to give up the god talk of their birth? Imagine, they had to learn that fear only belonged to the soldiers who lived within the old system of faith by fear.
Matthew wanted the newly found Christian church to know that Mary et al lived to marvel at the empty tomb. Matthew wanted the early church to understand unequivocally that the apostles and the women truly comprehended the enormity of what they were seeing and hearing. Matthew wanted the early church to know that the apostles and the women were so moved by this earthquake like insight that they were compelled to do something about it. So not only did they give up the faith of their birth, they adopted a mission to share the good news, spread the good news, proclaim the good news, in other words to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. This became their life’s work.
In effect Matthew was telling those early Christians: "Easter will not dawn for you until you feel the earth move, hear the angel, and want to teach everybody about what you have learned.”
My question then for our own community of faith, given that we get it, given we have lived in it for many years, given the power of faith is such an amazing tool for good, creativity, and wellbeing how can we chose to do anything less but teach others about those things we have learned?
Let us pray:
We are deeply and profoundly grateful for your servant our teacher the author of the Gospel of Matthew. Through his eyes we have come to see with new eyes the story that your sacrifice has meant we are free from the fear of guilt, sin, shortcomings and yes even death for evermore. In the resurrection, in the new temple, the New Testament, fear has given way to love, respect, awe and wonderment. Help us deal well with the earthshattering insight about authentic presence of God deep within our souls. Amen
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29, Matthew 21: 1-11
The double entendre
Palm Sunday is a conundrum. It is a real problem. Matthew’s account of Jesus entry into Jerusalem just before his execution is filled with double meanings. Meanings that should confuse us, the modern readers. We could get around the conundrum by calling this Sunday Passion Sunday and just read about the events of the last supper, betrayal, and the garden of Gethsemane. These ar the events where Jesus is left alone, arrested, tortured, ridiculed, and summarily executed comprise what we call the Passion of Jesus. We could, but we are not.
Palm Sunday on the other hand focuses on this amazing celebration when with great excitement, when the whole city is stirred up, Jesus arrives in a way reminiscent of a great conquering King, with one notable exception, he rides in on a donkey. The modern day equivalent would be a parade with bands, with Jesus riding in the back of a beat up Volkswagen beetle convertible.
To help us understand Matthew’s account, we need to think about two meanings in everything written. This is a brilliantly constructed section of double meanings everywhere. Dan Brown used the same idea of two meanings and codes in his very popular books such as the Da Vinci Code.
First of all, Matthew’s account is ground in two Old Testament proclamations about the coming of the Messiah: Zechariah 9:9 and Isaiah 62:11. Matthew quotes these, but he either got them wrong, or he deliberately alters them to take the first readers in a different direction. It is ludicrous to think that Matthew just made a mistake and so one has to conclude the alterations in the quote are there for good reason.
In the same way, consider the crowd, and make no mistake this was a real crowd. The whole city was stirred up. We know only too well what brings out huge numbers of excited people: protest and victory celebrations. We know from Matthew that this was a crowd ready to over throw the occupying Roman Army and their allies in the synagogue. We know they believed that this man of the line of David, the very founder of Israel could be the new King. This was a crowd declaring Jesus the king of the Jews. The problem we are faced that this very same crowd a few day later seemed to support the death penalty for this very same man. Is Matthew telling us that the crowd is stupid, and easily manipulated? Was this crowd in fact stupid and easily manipulated? How can Matthew see the very center of this story: the enthusiasm of the crowd as a trivial momentary outburst of misplaced trust? It is clear that Matthew deeply honours the crowd as the people who saw the real Jesus like the blind men did, unlike the Synagogue leaders. So either Matthew has no integrity or he deliberately wrote it up this way for good reason.
It is the same thing with the double animals of burden. Matthew has Jesus riding two beasts at the same time: a donkey and young immature animal called a colt. What do we make of this? People do not ride colts with dignity or success. People do not sit on two animals at the same time and expect things to remain orderly or triumphant. Maybe Matthew was just an incompetent or clumsy writer. Maybe he was just playing with the Old Testament texts with disrespect. Or maybe Matthew wrote it up deliberately in this way for good reason.
The doubling of the animals is actually a very deliberate attempt to show us the essence of this parade. It forces the student to look very carefully at the prophets and see what Matthew has done with them. It forced the early church to reflect deeply on the true meaning of what happened to Jesus in Jerusalem. When they did that they would find amazing substitutions and omissions in Matthew. These substitutions and omissions pointed to a new reality. God was now present for humankind in a way never before clearly understood.
Jesus was not to be understood as a mere re-incarnation of David the founder of the nation. Jesus is much more than that. Jesus is a reshaping of our understanding of how God is with us. In David God works by being the God of gods, the strongest biggest sole Creator who is to be appeased by obedience of rules, and rigid ceremonies. In Jesus, God works by selfless sacrifice and with his/her own compassion for the weaknesses of the creation.
Matthew’s Jesus knew that He was truly God coming to Jerusalem as a sacrifice to free us from our ourselves. Matthew gives the crowd the benefit of insight, like the blind men, so much so the crowd was affirming, accepting, celebrating and reinterpreting the presence of God as Jesus coming to their city as a sacrifice to free us from our own shortcomings.
Matthew has the crowd knowing that the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem would be tied directly to his exit from Jerusalem. On the surface there seems to be a shocking disconnect between the triumphant entry of Jesus and his shameful exit from Jerusalem. And yet look deeper: Matthew has some unknown woman of the crowd anointing the head of Jesus as if he were already dead. That shocking dissonance disappears “poof” as if we understand that the triumphant palms Sunday parade was a funeral parade, a celebration of the life and work of the sacrificial lamb. It is as if this crowd knew that this Jesus was a king in a way never before experienced.
Read the text: When the city is aroused (literally "shaken") by Jesus' entry to ask "Who is this?", the crowds accompanying Jesus cry out: "This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee." There is no David like messianic title here. There is no super naturalistic claim here.
This is the crowd that cries out with the affirmation of faith that Jerusalem's king, is this real historical person who is entering the city to die for them.
This is the crowd that cries out with the affirmation of faith that the world’s king, is this real historical man who is entering the city to die for them.
This is the Christians of the early church that cried out with the affirmation of faith that the fulfiller of all those seeking salvation, is this real historical person who is entered the city to die for them.
This is us crying out with the affirmation of faith that the One who is God’s immanent presence among us is this real historical person who is entering the city to die for us.
Matthew is writing with compelling force about the substance of what has happened in Jerusalem and who this man truly was. He is pointing to the God who paraded into Jerusalem deliberately towards torture, ridicule, summary trial and the cruellest execution. Matthew is pointing to a new expression of God’s presence in the consciousness of humankind. Matthew is pointing to a presence so wild, so radical so different as to be either totally unbelievable or an act of un conditional compassion. This radical, wild , unexpected, juxtaposition of death and life, darkness and light, obedience and freedom is way beyond our comprehension as human beings. And yet here we stand at the center of this conundrum, this cross, the holiest of mysteries as we enter with palms waving the funeral parade of Holy week.
This is our annual opportunity to reflect deeply on our own salvation, humility, and our relationship with this mysterious God who acts with absolute unexpected compassion with a world prone to its self-destruction and horrible violence.
This is our annual opportunity to re-affirm our belief; to dig down deep into our foundation, our center in such a way we can role model love optimism, and hope to ourselves, our neighbours and our God….And there it is, our task for the week. This is the week we can come to church three days out of seven. This is the week we can celebrate the ritual of the last supper sitting around a table and reflect on what it was like to be at that table the night in which he was betrayed. This is the week we can experience through the dramatic story the execution of Jesus our God, and know its meaning, know its power.
This is the week we can end with the presence of God that is so powerful it will pull the halleluiahs right out of our lips. This is the week of Our Lord, enjoy it, bathe in it, talk about it, and let it take you to the peace, and love and connection and solutions that overcome everything bad.
Let us pray…
We have reached the mountain top of our Christian voyage through the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth. We thank you for the new temple that takes us out of the old way of rigidity, barriers, and rules. Help us embrace with all our heart and soul the love of God that has caused us to march relentlessly towards the darkness of crucifixion, the passion of this man’s trials, the final promises, and the greatest moment of freedom from death through the resurrection of this man who is God. Amen
Readings: Psalm 130, John 11: 38-45
Minister: Ezekiel 37: 1-14
Easter is getting past Mass Graves
Our journey through Lent this year keeps taking us into the dark bits of human experience. A few weeks ago we looked at the fears that stop people from trying on new things. We called them the three I’s: Ignorance, Inclusion, and Impotence.
We then struggled with the mystery of overwhelming suffering. Last week we prayed about living with our faith not out of fear, but because faith gives us love and life in abundance. Our homework this past week was to consider the freedom to let go of rule based devotion in favour of the beauty of faith based on freely chosen creativity, risk, warmth, and connections.
What has emerged in our god talk these last few weeks is the waxing and waning of life patterns in history and in our own lives. Like the tides things ebb and flow, but unlike the tides the ebbs and flows are unpredictable. There are great cycles difficulty, challenge, then positive vision, hope followed by real change and new life.
Our most precious reading from Ezekiel about dem dry bones this morning takes us into the killing fields of our world and of our own lives. This reading has been used for centuries as a Lenten reading because the history is filled with painful, demanding, powerful challenges as we struggle to see, to know, and to find God’s peace in our hearts.
The problem is that we have to walk through graveyards to get there. It is not easy for us to go from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, we would rather just skip to the trumpets of Easter morning. And yet we have the maturity and experience to know we have to hang on to each other as we walk through the dark graveyards of living telling each other every resurrection story that we can think of. Life takes into the killing fields and the valley of dried bones.
The valley of dry bones in Ezekiel vision, reminds us of the unfortunate atrocities of our own time. A western Christianity that enslaved, then shunned people from the black races of Africa. A western Christianity that for centuries hated Jews a racial prejudice that led to the holocaust.
We are part of a world that saw the slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis simply because they were not Hutu. This was the same world that stood ideally by watching this unfold while people like General Dallaird begged the west, begged the UN to protect the inevitable holocaust.
The valley of dry bones is no artificial superstitious place on earth, it exists in the mass graves of Vietnam, in the mass graves of the second war in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Russia. The dry bones are found in the mass graves of Rwanda, the Ivory Coast, Croatia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Japan.
As a chaplain working with our modern soldiers suffering with shell shock, I was invited to the souls where they stored the broken bits of their traumas. There they showed me the things that had seen, things that no human being should ever see. For them the dreaded, dead, dusty forlorn hopeless valley that Ezekiel saw was no abstraction from a long long time ago. It is real in their hearts and it is real in our poor, war torn, weary planet.
It is no wonder that this image was so chanted by a people stolen, beaten, robbed, raped, dehumanized in one of the great African-American Spiritual of all time.
This is an image that came from another race of people, similarly stolen, beating, robbed, raped and dehumanized. Israelites in the land of their captivity, exiled, the hope of having a homeland completely eradicated.
And yet in spite of this complete destitution and hopeless of these ancient mass grave, we read of a people who had visions of hope and so wrote with such passion and conviction that other slaves 3000 years later have been inspired. Such as these know, with reasons that we cannot not fully understand, that God will send a restoration spirit from the four corners of the world. And once restored, God will then restore them to a land of their own: "and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land" says the prophet Ezekiel.
The Babylonians had conquered Judah, destroyed the Temple, and took many Jews to Babylonia as prisoners. Inspired by the prophet Ezekiel, the Israelites hung onto ancestral god, the African-American slaves in their unprecedented departure from their home land grabbed onto this vision of restoration and made it their own, not just in their heads as you and I are likely to do today, but physically. They felt this hope deep in their hearts and bodies through a musical rhythm of the resurrection. It showed up in worship, with rhythms, dances, trance like preaching, animated, clapping, and powerful enthusiastic energetic singing.
That’s the bodily felt hope that Ezekiel saw when the bones came back to life, when flesh sinews, tendons, and internal organs were added as this vision unfolded in a powerful symbol of resurrection. This was not some academic intellectual exercise, no this was truly and perhaps most importantly filled with movement, life, emotion, feelings, and dance.
The white west European way of restrained emotions and culturally practiced reserved systematic intellectualism has given the world great gifts. Yet living with reason alone leaves us short of the great experience of living wholly and abundantly. Reason alone leaves us without a felt sense of things, without intuition, without romance, music, art, and without faith. Experiencing hope as if it were pure reason or pure thought without any emotional attributes hope is tied to probabilities, actuary tables and risk analysis. Such an experience of hope makes it very hard to hold onto it without law and intellectual reminders Furthermore all the evidence suggests that holding onto hope by reason alone is not enough. If that were the experience of the Israelites in exile, or the disciples on Good Friday, they would have given up in despair. And yet hope lived within them like a power in itself in defiance of the odds.
Hope is experienced in different ways by different people.
Hope for those in suffering, for those in the valley of the dry bones is a declaration that the status quo will change for something that is better. Those in suffering, under duress, in difficulty, are great at hoping, because they see and feel and believe in visions like Ezekiel’s of resurrection and a better tomorrow.
So for people such as these it’s worth taking about life’s changes and how temporary bad things can be. It’s worth for them to tell the stories of resurrection, often, with passion.
On the other hand for those who are not suffering, for those for whom there is good health, good income, good housing and freedoms, hope is far less somatic, and far more intellectual.
So for such people such as these it’s worth talking about life’s changes and how temporary security can be. It’s worth for them to listen to the stories of resurrection, often, intentionally.
Let me stop there as it is a perfect introduction to our homework for the week. We all have the maturity to know that nothing remains constant. We are always a body in motion, and it shifts size and shape over time. Changes in technology, in thought, in political agendas, and in world god talk are with us all the time. For homework, it’s worth reflecting on the place of hope within the ever changing landscapes of living. If we are in a very secure and happy stage of life, hope, recovery, and resurrection stories deeply heard will give us enough security that when we are forced into something new, we will be ready.
On the other hand if we are in a difficult stage of life, hope is not as important as an idea as it is a sensation felt deep in our hearts, once again hope, recovery, and resurrection stories genuinely recited will give us enough energy that we will move out of the dead dry valley of bones into a valley teeming with life.
Let us pray…
We thank you, creator, redeemer, the author of new beginnings, for showing us all the new beginnings of our lives. We thank you for understanding that change is constant and the cycles of life are like unpredictable tides of the sea. When we are in good spaces, help us hear the stories of renewal and resurrection often so that when the time comes we may feel the hope that ordinates with you,
When we are in stressful situations, help us tell each other stories of renewal and resurrections often so that we may know in our hearts the hope that originates with you. Amen