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WRITE THIS DOWN

5/29/2016

Psalm 102:18-22
Write this down for the next generation so people not yet born will praise God: “God looked out from his high holy place; from heaven he surveyed the earth. He listened to the groans of the doomed, he opened the doors of their death cells.” Write it so the story can be told in Zion, so God’s praise will be sung in Jerusalem’s streets and wherever people gather together along with their rulers to worship him.

This is the second in our Summer Series looking at the books of the New Testament in the order in which they were written rather than the order in which they appear in most Bibles. We started, if you recall, last week by talking about communal memory and then skimming over the basic information that most people would have had access to prior to any written documents – the things that “everyone knew” before there was ever a written gospel.

Even though seven of Paul’s letters were the first to be written, we’re going to begin our study with the gospels, and then move back to Paul’s letters. We will begin next week with the first of the gospel accounts, which is Mark’s, followed in chronological order by Matthew, John, and Luke – which is considerably different from the order in which we are used to seeing them.

This week’s message is going to be pretty dry, I’m afraid – sorry about that, I can’t make it any more exciting – it’s necessary background information, but I think it’s stuff that is important for us to at least be aware of before we dig much deeper into the readings. It will get better, I promise.

I need to confess here that I am not a New Testament scholar myself -- not even close. It was not my field of passionate interest in seminary so I took the minimum requirements in biblical studies. I was much more interested in story and narrative and how we communicate ideas with each other than in dissecting biblical manuscripts. However, I am clever enough to know where I am lacking and to go straight to sources who do know such things.

So before we get into Mark’s gospel I want to take today to give you a very brief introduction to two other documents – ones you’ve probably never heard of. There are all sorts of non-canonical documents out there from this time period and even those that were never part of the bible have things to teach us about the early church. Chances are, unless you are thinking of going into New Testament studies in a big way, you will never have reason to know much about these particular two “documents.” The Q Source and the Didache were early Christian documents and both, in very different ways, had an effect on the writing of and the studying of the accepted New Testament books.

The first, the Q Source, or “Q” as it’s usually known, takes its name from the German word quelle, which means source. It is not even an actual document – it’s a hypothetical document of Jesus sayings - one that scholars believe must have existed at one time – pre-dating the gospels -- but they can’t prove it because no copies remain in existence today. The primary reason for this belief is the considerable amount of material that is found almost word for word in both Matthew and Luke.
We know that Matthew, especially, pulled from Mark, but there is too much other material in both Luke and Matthew that isn’t in Mark that scholars have been forced to ask “where did they get this?” and to conclude – because they are so identical – that both Matthew and Luke must have copied it from some other existing written source, not just word of mouth.

The existence of “Q” was posited around 1900 so it is a fairly recent theory and while widely accepted it does have it’s disbelievers. Before 1900 the church generally followed St. Augustine’s hypothesis that placed the writing order of the four gospels in the order we are familiar with – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. I’m not going to take time to explain this one - just that it used to be the way scholars looked at the gospels. It covered most of the bases but had enough holes in it to prompt deeper digging and eventually to the positing of the Q Source. So Q is a possible pre-gospel document which provided both Matthew and Luke with source material for their gospels. We will go more into this when we read about those two gospels.

The second document, the Didache, does exist – in several forms. Didache is Greek for teaching, and that’s what this document is – a series of teachings about a whole bunch of things. It is not a narrative – it doesn’t tell a story – no life of Jesus. It does contain a version of the Lord’s Prayer. We’ll get into that with Matthew’s gospel. What it mostly does is describe for us much of the life of the earliest Christian communities. It gives us a remarkable picture of how a scattered group of Jewish Jesus-followers morphed into the Christian church.

It was probably written late in the first century. And though it isn’t quoted directly in any of the other writings, since it is accepted as genuine, it had, and still has, power in its use as a check against disputed early documents. Much of what we think we know about baptism and communion – how they changed from casual gatherings in homes or on riverbanks into detailed church rituals – all that comes to us from the Didache.
It will probably not play much role in our summer explorations but I wanted you to know that such a document exists and helped shape our thinking of those earliest years or Christianity.

OK - that’s that’s the dry stuff out of the way. I just wanted to make the point that the New Testament writings did not stand alone as the only written records of the early church. Some of the other documents are important, some don’t seem to offer us much that is useful, many are only fragments – much as been lost to time.

Next week we will start with Mark’s Gospel and take a look at how a gospel account takes shape and grows out of an existing community of believers – forty years after the events it describes.

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GUIDE US INTO ALL TRUTH

5/22/2016

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John 16:12-15 (The Message)

[Jesus said] I still have many things to tell you, but you can’t handle them now. But when the Counselor comes, the Spirit of the Truth, he will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. He won’t draw attention to himself, but will make sense out of what is about to happen and, indeed, out of all that I have done and said. He will honor me; he will take from me and deliver it to you. Everything the Father has is also mine. That is why I’ve said, ‘He takes from me and delivers to you.’

These words today from John’s gospel reminds us that we still have much to be taught - still have so much to learn. They also should remind us that the Spirit is continually revealing new truths to us as we grow to be able to take them in and start to understand them. We can’t take it all in at once – there’s just too much – we simply can’t hear it or comprehend it – and so it is revealed little by little, bit by bit, day by day, stone by stone ...

Three or four weeks ago when our scripture reading was from the book of Revelations I gave a very brief introduction to the writings of New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, specifically his work on reading the New Testament in the chronological order in which the various books had been written instead of the literary-style order in which they are usually presented.

In talking about this after church that day I suggested I was thinking of doing a summer sermon series on looking at the New Testament in this way and you all seemed interested, so ..... here we go.

This is bound to be more of a teaching series than a spiritual growth-type series but since these writings are the base of what we’re all about here, I can’t help but believe that the more we understand this book, the more we will understand who we are today as a result of these stories and how we got to be who and what we are. We’ll begin today with some basic information on the make-up of the New Testament and then head into Mark’s Gospel next week.

I touched lightly last week on oral history and community memory and how stories were retold within communities and that one community’s body of Jesus stories might contain different material than another community’s collection. Or they might have several of the same stories but with slightly different memories of just how the story went, so that before they were ever written down and codified, what you believed about Jesus might well depend on where you lived – whose stories we were raised with.

The earliest pieces to be written, it seems, in the New Testament were seven letters from Paul to various churches. These were all written without the benefit of any authorized ‘life of Christ’ to refer to – although there were still living witnesses, such as Peter and James, who had known and walked with Jesus himself. These early letters seem to be less about who Jesus was than about how we – the readers, should live our lives because of Jesus.

In the very first chapter of his book, Borg gave us a list of the things that most people would have known by word of mouth about Jesus prior to the first gospel account being written down. I’m going to paraphrase but this is all Borg’s list:

•   Jesus was born shortly before the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE and grew up in Nazareth, a peasant village.
•   In his mid to late 20's he heard a wilderness prophet named John and began, in some form, to follow him and his ascetic teachings. Sometime later John baptized Jesus and later yet, was arrested and executed. This was the time that Jesus began his own public ministry.
•   Jesus’ message was all about the kingdom of God – what it’s like and how we should live because of it.
•   The kingdom of God is about transforming this earth, not some future heaven.
•   He preached mostly to the peasant class out in the rural areas, avoiding cities, except for Jerusalem.
•   He taught in stories - brief, easily remembered and repeated stories and sayings.
•   He was a healer and exorcist. Most of the stories about him involved physical healing or casting out evil spirits.
•   He broke social boundaries, mingling with outcasts and women and ignoring purity laws.
•   His followers recognized him as anointed by the Spirit.
•   He went to Jerusalem at Passover in the year 30 and basically challenged those in authority there until they killed him.
•   Some of his followers experienced him after his death – not as a “ghost” but as a divine reality who shared qualities with God.

These are the things, in scholarly reckoning, that would have been fairly common knowledge about Jesus. The details might have differed greatly from place to place but this was the shared base of what people knew.

This is what Paul and the other evangelists took with them as they went out to convert the known world of their time. When we have finished with the gospels, if we have time we’ll look at the first seven of Paul’s letter’s – all written prior to the existence of any codified gospel. This pool of knowledge is what existed as a result of communal memory – memories of a man who made a huge impact on the world around him. In talking about oral tradition and communal memory Borg points out that “Early Christian communities wouldn’t have remembered a saying or story by Jesus or a story about something he did unless it mattered to them.”

I have to say that when I first read that last statement it was a “well, duh!” moment for me. It’s so obvious once I read it, but I don’t know if I ever articulated it that clearly to myself before. The stories about Jesus that came down to us through oral tradition and made it into written gospel accounts weren’t just little news flashes of “what Jesus said or did today,“ – the stories we know down to our present day were remembered because they were about things that mattered to Jesus’ earliest followers. Think about that for a minute .....

I’m sure that in three years of preaching and teaching Jesus said a whole lot more than what is contained in the slim few pages that make up the gospels. All four together really make up a very tiny body of work. All that we have received down twenty centuries are the things that were important enough to the early Christians to remember – without any written texts to remind them – for forty years after Jesus’ death. Mark’s gospel – the first to be written down – was written at least forty years after all these things happened. We will most likely never know what has been lost to us but what we do have are the stories that changed the world by changing the people who first remembered them and then told them to the rest of the world.

And then told them to us ..... and here we are.

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THE MANY LANGUAGES OF GOD’S PEOPLE

5/15/2016

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Acts 2:1-6

   When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

   Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.

Today is Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost is another of those special days, like Palm Sunday and Easter, that can drive me to a moment or two of despair because they come around every year, not just once every three-years, and after 20 or so years I begin to feel like I really have said it all...several times. This is a story we all know – we’ve read the scripture, heard the sermons. Oh, woe is me.

But then I am reminded that this is God’s story, not mine. This is the church’s story, not mine. And this is Luke’s story, not mine, and I think we need to begin there. We’ve spoken lately about Acts being simply the direct continuation of Luke’s gospel and that Luke/Acts is dated as having been written between 60 and 80 years after the Easter event when historical memory might be getting a little shaky, to say the least.

But Luke is never about historical facticity - Luke’s narrative is a record of how the emerging church felt as a result of the events he describes. It was Luke after all who gave us the highly detailed Nativity story that we love so much at Christmas time - a story complete with a sky filled with singing angels – that no one seemed to notice or remember later. Luke isn’t describing something as it really happened. He describes the event’s effect on believers and on their future perceptions. In Luke’s vision the birth of Jesus into the human world was such a momentous event it deserved to have choirs of angels – that’s how important it was. That’s the truth rather than the fact of that story.

And so to Pentecost. Since Jesus’ departure the Jesus community has been quiet. They don’t appear to have done anything much but they are doing something – they are praying, and they are waiting for God to act ..... and then a wind begins to blow. A wind just like the wind that blew over the waters of chaos in the very first moment of creation – the wind of the Spirit of God. The similarity here is no coincidence. Jesus had promised a “new thing.” Luke is making it crystal clear – to those with ears to hear – that it is a new creation that is happening with the winds of Pentecost.

Have you ever just had a really great day – a GREAT day – one you look back on with a golden glow of happiness – a truly special day? And have you looked back later and realized that what happened that day was kinda ordinary except that somehow everything was perfect – somehow you remember it as bigger than maybe it really was – the perfect time and place with the perfect people – when everything came together just as it always should have been?

Sixty to eighty years after the fact, this is how the emerging church felt on looking back at the first Pentecost day. Is it a factual story? Luke doesn’t care, and neither should we. This is the story the church had to tell about how it all began. This is what it felt like to them when the Spirit was in their midst and moved among them.

Suddenly the people were emboldened to speak freely and tell the story they knew – the story of God’s love for all humankind and God’s great gift to the world through Jesus and the Spirit. Suddenly the people were on fire with God’s word. So on fire that they somehow made themselves understood by others around them and the story they had to share moved like wildfire through the whole world.

Last Tuesday Hilary and I attended another meeting of our Regional Ministries Council as representatives of our Church Off the Center cluster group. It’s the beginning of a new term and so half the people there were returning, like Hilary and me, and half were new to the council – including the new Chair – so he asked us to go around and each tell briefly what it is we represent there and what we are doing in our group. As I listened, I realized that this was a perfect Pentecost story playing out in that small room.

Probably the thing that catches the most attention in Luke’s story is the whole “speaking in tongues” thing. What is assumed, but never stated outright, is that whatever language they spoke or were heard in they were all telling the same story – each in their own words.

What I realized I was hearing, last Tuesday in an upper room in an office building in San Ramon, California, was the church telling it’s story – each of us speaking a different language – but telling the very same story of love for others and service to others and a striving to be Jesus’ hands and voice in this world. Some of us spoke a language of Camp - shaping places and opportunities for youth and families to grow and learn and love God. Some of us spoke a language of Reconciliation, working in our communities to eradicate racism and bring justice to all God’s people together.

We heard about those whose calling is to foster and nurture New Church development. We heard about the Men’s Ministry cluster and the things they have planned to minister specifically to the needs of men and boys. Hilary and I were there to speak for small, out-of-the-mainstream, off-the-center congregations and the challenges we face in being active in the wider church, as well as the blessings to be discovered in this particular kind of small group ministry and outreach to the immediate community. Each representative was there because they passionately love the work they are doing – the language they particularly speak in and to the larger church.

The point is that we are all, in our own way telling the same story of love in community but telling it in different languages so that our story is understood by those we are speaking with.

Many of you here do this everyday but you may not think of it that way. For the people you meet, God’s story often sounds like a kind word, a sandwich, a warm coat, a listening ear and heart. Some of you stack cans at a food pantry to tell your story. Some care for deeply sick people. The languages are limitless. When we let that wind blow through us and let it fan the sparks into a flame of action and speech, we are telling the same story the early disciples told on the long-ago day, in all kinds of different languages - the story that we are loved and called to love in return.

We may never know who and how many are impacted by our story - whatever language we speak. All we have to do is allow the Spirit to move in us, to use us. When we let the Spirit flow, lives are changed. Let us continue to speak out in our many and various tongues and let us tell our story – the church’s story – the age old, ever new story, that death and fear are defeated, that the reign of God is here and now within our midst. The story that says that love will always – always – win.

Holy Spirit, come. Fill us with your fire that we may continue to speak your love in all the languages of the world. Amen.

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WHO DO YOU SAY I AM?

5/8/2016

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Luke 9:18-20

Once when Jesus was praying alone, with only the disciples near him, he asked them, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” They answered, “John the Baptist; but others, Elijah; and still others, that one of the ancient prophets has arisen.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “The Messiah of God.”

The reading I’ve chosen for today is not a standard lectionary choice for this season. It’s one that is most often read during Lent, as we are approaching Easter, not after. But this season we are talking about the earliest beginnings of what we today know as Christianity in all its multitudinous forms, and this little snippet of the New Testament seems to me to be ground zero for much that has risen out of it over the past 2000 years.

We call ourselves Christians, “little Christs” – followers of Jesus, followers of his way – and so it seems to me that it is of major importance that we be somewhat clear as to just who it is we claim to follow.

I chose to use the version from Luke’s gospel because we are reading Luke this year in the lectionary cycle, but this is one of the handful of stories that appears in all three of the synoptic gospels - Matthew, Mark, and Luke – and it’s there in almost identical form in all three.

The scripture is often quoted as the definitive answer to who Jesus is – “he’s the Messiah” – and yet how many of us understand what we are saying when we say those words? Just as there are roughly as many definitions for the word “Christian” as there are Christians – even in our small group here I imagine that we pretty much all agree on a big-picture definition of “Christian” but when we parse it down further I’d guess we each mean something slightly different when we say we are a Christian – so too, that word, messiah, has many, many meanings.

In the earliest stories of the Hebrew scriptures it’s clear that any messianic expectation was centered in a future event, not a person. It was God who would act – directly -- by shaping world events to benefit the Hebrew people and fulfill God’s promises to Abraham. Centuries later, when the people moved from their nomadic lifestyle to a settled urban/agricultural life, when they had demanded that God give them a king so they could be like the neighbors, the idea of a messiah began to be focused on the royal line. David and Solomon did for awhile raise them to that peak of freedom and international power and security that they associated with the promised messiah, but then things slowly fell apart and they returned to the idea of a messiah as one who would rescue them from slavery. One who would restore them to their former glory.

It is after the collapse of this flourishing kingdom and of the Davidic line itself, when the people are once again enslaved and scattered, that the idea of the Messiah begins to be fine-tuned into something in which we can begin to recognize Jesus when he comes. But even here there are multiple descriptions and we show a depressing tendency to pick and choose just the ones that match the Messiah we want.

In the writings of the prophets, the messiah is sometimes described like a leader of an army, a general who would lead the people as they march back in to forcibly re-take what is theirs. Our Palm Sunday story refers obliquely to these prophecies and points out the huge difference between what the people expected and what they got. In the 100 years or so before Jesus’ birth there had been a great up-welling in expectation of and longing for this military/political Messiah. The people were longing for revolution – bloody if necessary. What they got was Jesus and very few recognized them as the messiah they had been waiting for.

Our idea of Jesus suffering and dying for our sins comes from Isaiah in the time of the great exile with the Suffering Servant prophecies, but in rabbinic interpretation the “suffering Servant” is Israel itself – the whole nation suffering for the world – rather than any single person. Christians, however, read backwards into this prophecy and find Jesus there.

So the meaning of the word messiah has changed according to time and place and circumstance – just as almost all meanings change over time. All this matters to us because when we call ourselves Christians, this is what we are saying. Messiah and Christ are the same word – one in Hebrew, one in Greek – both technically mean “the anointed one” – and rather than clearing anything up this just clutters the conversation even more.

Anointing has been used for centuries in various cultures and is still used for a variety of reasons. We anoint priests, we anoint kings, we anoint the sick and the dying. Many denominations anoint babies and anyone being baptized. We anoint those we are sending out into special ministries and we anoint each other in our role as servants of Christ. Ancient anointings were full scale dousings in oil. Today we tend to stick with tidy dabs – but anointing is an ancient symbol. Calling Jesus “the Anointed One” still doesn’t help us a whole lot.

So with all these words we are back to Jesus and his question: “Who do you say I am?” When we call ourselves Christian have we really put some thought into what we mean? Are we talking about being a church member or do we mean something deeper? Do we think Jesus was a good guy or do we truly strive to live our own lives following the path Jesus laid out for us? Living our lives as Jesus lived his?

I’m not saying everyone needs to do all the technical biblical and theological studying – all you will get there anyway is what other people think. But -- have you ever sat down with Jesus and just said, “I like what I think I know of you. I want to follow you and your way. I want to do your work. I’m pretty sure I need you – whoever and whatever you are – in my own heart, in my own life”?

When Jesus asks: Who do you say I am? do you have an answer?

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DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE

5/1/2016

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Acts 16:9-15

   One night Paul had a dream: A Macedonian stood on the far shore and called across the sea, “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” The dream gave Paul his map. We went to work at once getting things ready to cross over to Macedonia. All the pieces had come together. We knew now for sure that God had called us to preach the good news to the Europeans.

   Putting out from the harbor at Troas, we made a straight run for Samothrace. The next day we tied up at New City and walked from there to Philippi, the main city in that part of Macedonia and, even more importantly, a Roman colony. We lingered there several days.

   On the Sabbath, we left the city and went down along the river where we had heard there was to be a prayer meeting. We took our place with the women who had gathered there and talked with them. One woman, Lydia, was from Thyatira and a dealer in expensive textiles, known to be a God-fearing woman. As she listened with intensity to what was being said, the Master gave her a trusting heart—and she believed!

   After she was baptized, along with everyone in her household, she said in a surge of hospitality, “If you’re confident that I’m in this with you and believe in the Master truly, come home with me and be my guests.” We hesitated, but she wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.

In the weeks immediately following Easter the readings tend to focus on the earliest Christians and the founding of the Christian churches ... and I have to stop right here before I even get going and point out that my opening statement is not accurate. First, the people then did not call themselves “Christians” - nor did anyone else – not for several decades – and it would never have occurred to them that they were founding a new faith, a new “church.”

For most of them, Jesus was a teacher - a marvelous teacher who taught them that they could experience God’s plan for the world right here and now. They were, at first, simply living a new way of being good Jews ... God’s people. They were followers of Jesus’ Way. They hadn’t left off being Jews to go be something else. They were just following a new path within Judaism. It was a long, slow process while they figured out who Jesus must be to be so “alive” in their midst when he had clearly been crucified.

And they would not have called their gatherings “church.” They met to share their lives. They gathered to share their worldly goods. But most of all they met to talk about Jesus. There was no liturgy as we know it. If they sang hymns they were the Psalms they had sung all their lives. Our use of the words “Christian” and “church” are for our linguistic convenience and have nothing to do with historical fact. These words are anachronisms and subconsciously lead us into inaccurate ideas about those earliest years - so probably we should just stop doing it.

Today’s story comes from one of Paul’s missionary journeys – specifically a journey occasioned by a dream, a vision, that moved Paul and those traveling with him to go to Macedonia, in northern Greece. It is the story of who and what he found there. And what they did together.

Before we get into Paul and Lydia, there is one more point I need to explain. We’ve talked recently about Luke’s Gospel and Acts being one story bisected into two books but what we haven’t mentioned yet is that Luke’s gospel – regardless of where it sits in our Bibles – is the last of the four gospels to be written. Traditional thinking until recently has been that Luke-Acts was written around 90 AD but more current thinking is leaning toward as late as 110 AD. That means these books could have been written down a full 80 years after the life of Jesus.

You can take about 15 years off that 80 years for the time of Paul’s visit in Macedonia - making it perhaps 65 years from Paul’s part of the story to the writing, but the things written about Jesus were still from 80 years in the past. My point being that the stories we read in the New Testament were carried in the communal memory for anywhere from 25 to 80 years before they were written down. Some of Paul’s letters were written earlier – the earliest dating put the first writings at about 70 to 80 AD with the last dating as late as 130 AD.

So what we have here is less an historical record than a narrative telling what various groups of people remembered and experienced in these years. These were also not universal writings. When they were written down they were written by one group for one group with one group’s particular understanding and point of view. The letters and gospels that make up the NT are stories of various communities and their growth in understanding in who Jesus was and who they were in response. I keep hammering on this because it truly does make a difference in what we hear within our own minds when we read these writings.

Now – after all that, we can finally get to Paul and Lydia. Paul and Luke and the others arrived in Philippi and just hung out for a few days but then, on the Sabbath, found their way down to the river where a group of people, apparently largely women, were holding a prayer meeting. It’s interesting that they didn’t go into the heart of the city and immediately beginning preaching in the civic center, as it appears they did in other places and times. Here they simply joined the group, listened for awhile, and then talked with them. The story they had to tell was so powerful, so honest, that Lydia was converted and asked to be baptized - right there on the spot.

It doesn’t require pomp and circumstance and massive church structures. It doesn’t require high liturgies. It doesn’t even require choir singing. The truth that Jesus taught us all is so simple yet so incredibly moving and powerful that it can touch hearts and changes lives in a moment.

So, if simply being themselves and telling their honest stories about Jesus was all that was necessary in those early days – what does that tell us about our responsibilities today?

Peter and Paul and Silas and Barnabas and Luke and all those who traveled far from their homes – as well as those who stayed closer to home in Israel and Judah – had no written texts or special vestments, no hi-def multi-media screens – they had no tools at all except the love they carried in their own hearts and their bone deep conviction that Jesus had somehow touched something in them, changed something in them, and they could never be the same again. And that “something” moved them so they were compelled to tell others about it.

They freely gave their stories and sometimes they gave healing, or reassurance, or comfort and hope. When they gathered they shared whatever food they had with each other. And they shared all this with any who came to them seeking, with any who came with minds and hearts open to receive. They didn’t check credentials. They didn’t check bank accounts. They didn’t check gender or race or nation of origin. They just shared this amazing Jesus who had somehow ended up touching their lives.

We today are called to do the same – nothing has changed. We are called to be the people God created us to be – to be ourselves. We are not called to raise armies or build monster churches that seat thousands. We are called to share who we are and what Jesus has done in our lives. We are simply to share the amazing fact that we are – each of us – loved.

Paul shared what he had - his knowledge of Jesus, and he used the rhetorical skill he possessed to make people stop and hear him. Paul has a reputation in our day (mostly undeserved) as a grumpy, misogynistic hard-nosed so and so. From the descriptions we have of him, he was not a beautiful person, not the guy anyone would expect to draw a crowd. And yet his love for and faith in Jesus - the one he acknowledged as “Lord” – shone through his rough exterior and moved hearts wherever he went. And because of what they saw in Paul, others were moved to meet Jesus for themselves and begin to live in “the Way” Jesus showed us.

That’s our calling too. To say what is in our hearts and to live in the way Jesus lived. To share what we have with others. To be kind in all situations. To love without judgment - especially those who are the least lovable. To do what is in front of us with what we have to hand. In the words of the prophet Micah, to “do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with God.”

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WRITE THIS DOWN

GUIDE US INTO ALL TRUTH

THE MANY LANGUAGES OF GOD’S PEOPLE

WHO DO YOU SAY I AM?

DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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