Emmaus

Think about the Walk to Emmaus passage (Luke 24:13-35).  Two of Jesus' followers are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus.  Jesus had just been crucified - the person in whom they had placed their hope was dead.  Set aside for a moment that they met Jesus as they walked and that at the end of the journey they rushed back to Jerusalem to tell their friends they had seen the risen Lord. Focus for a moment on what they were feeling as they walked away from Jerusalem. 

Devastated.  Alone. Hopeless.  Maybe abandoned. Maybe betrayed.

A few weekends ago, our Foundation sponsored the Level Up Conference of three United Methodist Annual Conferences.  The message at worship one morning was preached by Rachel Gilmore. Her message was based on the Luke passage I referenced above.  She explained that we don't really know where Emmaus the town was located.  Archeologists are looking for it, but they haven't found it.

She hopes they never do.  She believes that Emmaus is the place we go when we have no place to go.  When we don't know where to go.

Have you walked to Emmaus before? Have you been to that place?

Do you go to Emmaus to find and help the ones who are already there?

Have you represented Christ at Emmaus?

Concerning Food Sacrificed to Idols

Today I read I Corinthians 8:1-13.  It is essentially Paul telling some of the Christians in Corinth to not eat food sacrificed to idols if doing so will harm people who are young in the faith.  It's a great passage, and there are several parts that I want to highlight today:

1. Knowledge puffs up; but love builds up (8:1b) - Some of us, me included, like to learn, and like to share that knowledge.  Sometimes knowledge puffs up our ego - so that in our mind, we are saying, "I know more than you do, and therefore, I am better."  There is no love in that.  Love builds up. Amen.
2. Verse 9 says: "But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak."  Our freedom - our liberty - should come second in our minds when we are considering the welfare of others. A simple example: As parents of young people, we were free to have alcohol in the house and to drink when we wanted to, but we chose to not do that. We didn't want drinking alcohol to be an example to our kids - something that looked cool and grown up.  Now that they are adults, and have a healthy relationship to alcohol, we don't have that worry.
3. Verse 13: "Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall." What is our priority? Our freedom? Our desire to show off our knowledge? Or the welfare of those around us?  It is more loving, it is more edifying for others, if our priorty is other people's welfare ahead of our own.

It's a helpful passage to read.

Perspectives: Cat in the Way

 

Extro-activities

As I mentioned in a previous post, the weekend I'm writing this post I'm sponsoring the Level Up Conference to encourage churches to reach out in new ways to new places.  

What I want to write about this morning, though, isn't about this specific conference. It happens everywhere. This morning, one of the presenters, at the beginning his talk, asked everyone to turn to the person next to them, give them a high five, and say "Let's Level Up." 

I'm an introvert.  That doesn't mean I'm shy. It doesn't mean I don't want to be around people. It doesn't mean I don't have social skills.  I do - I like people, I like to talk to people. I like to do public speaking. I have social skills.  The difference between me and an extrovert is that all of that takes energy for me to do all of that, and an extrovert gains energy from all of that.  In order to continually do "people" time, I need to invest time in alone time.  I gain energy from being away from people.

Ok, with that background in  mind,  why do you think someone would have those gathered turn to their neighbor and give them a "high-five?"  I don't know - I"m not a much sought after public speaker😉 - but I imagine he does it to raise the energy level in the room. It makes me wonder if he is an extrovert 

For me, requests from speakers such as this one only cause anxiety and loss of energy.  The same thing that be said when a leader wants us to sing with hand motions, or go find a "partner" (read stranger) and have a deep discussion about faith.  I am calling them, as of today, "extro-activities."  It seems counterproductive to the speaker's intention.  And I don't like them.  I dread them.

Am I the only person who feels that way?

PS - Ironically  enough, while I was writing this, sitting at a quiet table, another sponsor, who obviously needed anther person, came by and sat with me for 1/2 an hour or more.  He needed the energy he gets from talking to others.  

Metaphor and Simplicity

Reading from Richard Rohr's book, Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent, I read this:

"Religion can only use the language of metaphor because we are pointing to transcendent things."

We certainly experience the use of metaphor in the Bible when we read the stories (parables) of Jesus, don't we? What about the creation story? Revelation?

I think it is important to notice the necessity of metaphor and to recognize it.

Do we really believe that God and God's kingdom are simple enough for us to understand if we just read the Bible? Do we think that is the case? Don't we recognize that it is so much more complicated than that? God does what God can to help us to see what God needs us to see, but even so, our minds and experience are so much less than God's - don't we believe that metaphor can help us to "see through the mirror" a little more than without?

And, with that said, I think we need to learn to recognize metaphor when we see it. If we take passages of the Bible literally - without the consideration that they could be metaphor - we do a disservice to the Word of God. Words have a purpose, and I believe we need to understand the purpose before we can understand the meaning.

If we think we have it figured out, we can rest assured that we do not.

 

Anything is PossibleSign

Sign in a church

 

Rejected from Community

 

Aransas Pass Lydia Point Lighthouse

In Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent, Richard Rohr (on December 19) talks about Jesus’ healing of people in the Gospels.  He most often healed lepers - he always touched them - and he usually sent them somewhere else.  Lepers weren’t necessarily those we would diagnose with leprosy today.  They were those who were deemed to be unacceptable in society - diseased, contagious, disabled.  When Jesus heals them, he “pulls them back to social acceptability.  That is the healing.  The lepers are no longer disposable.”

I thought that was a profound look at healing.  And then I read his next sentences.  When Jesus healed the lepers, he became unclean himself. He became unacceptable.  “He changes places with them.“

And then this:

“Barren women and lepers are, of course, stand-ins for all of us as classic ‘before’ pictures.”

We have been healed.  We have been made acceptable-if not in society, then in the kingdom of God.  Jesus has taken our place.  Who around us has been rejected from community?  Who have you rejected from community?

I am part of the United Methodist Church.  There are some of us who have rejected those whose sexual orientation or gender identity is different than our own.  Truthfully, I don’t think it matters what your viewpoint is on this matter when I say that none of us are empowered to reject people from our community? Where are you healing people?

(Don’t misunderstand me - I do think it matters what your viewpoint is on this matter in the larger picture, but even if you hold a traditional viewpoint, rejected is not allowed, is it?)

What About Epiphany?

 During Sunday school the day after epiphany, we spent the lesson talking about the visit of the "wise men" to see Jesus. We dug deep into some of the details of the story - How many men were there? When did they arrive? What about the star? Were they wise men, kings, magi?

And then someone said, "This isn't the important part of the story." And someone else said, "Why does this story even matter?"

Good questions, both of them.

What is important in the story?

• Both the wise men and the shepherds were outsiders. The wise men were not Israelites. They were foreigners. The shepherds weren't foreigners, but were they accepted in society? So much so that we would choose them to be the first witness to the incarnation of God? We should learn that God is for everyone. That Christ came for all of us.
• I thought about that star. There is lots of debate regarding what it was. I don't think it matters. I think what matters is that God will lead us where God wants us to go, if we watch and maybe wait.
• The gifts seem important. Gifts for a king. Gifts that foreshadow Christ's death.
• Think about the wise men and Herod. Part of the wisdom of the wise men was the ability to discern where to place their trust. The didn't place it with Herod, did they? We need to be wise - not only to discern God's will, but to discern who to trust.

Last night, at our church council meeting, the devotional was based on the video below. What does the story matter? Because it gives us an opportunity to ponder how the birth of Christ can transform our lives.

Perspectives: Marking my Place?

 If we mark that many spots, are we marking anything at all?  Although I do love the clothespins.

Self-Image

Richard Rohr writes in Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent, "One of the major problems in the spiritual life is our attachment to our own self-image - either positively or negatively created."

We all have a self-image, right? Sometimes we think too highly of ourselves. I can imagine this would be an obstacle to coming close to God. If we have no humility, no sense of our own sinfulness, no idea that we are not better than others - if we rank ourselves equal with God, then it would be hard to accept our need for God.

But, if we judge ourselves too harshly, if we see ourselves as "bad" and despicable, if we have no respect for God's creation in us, then it would be difficult to believe that God (or anyone else) can love us at all.

Rohr goes on to say, "Fortunately, that is what the Spirit has to strip away from us so that we can find our 'triumph and glory,' as Isaiah says, in God's image of us rather than in our image of ourselves...."

We often say we are made in God's image, created in God's image.  I've never connected it to self-image before, though. Think about the work of the Holy Spirit, removing our own self-image and replacing it with God's image in us and of us. We would see our need for God and also accept that God loves us, completely and without hesitation. 

Imagine.

 

Epiphany look back

 Since we are so close to Epiphany (yesterday), I thought I would reshare a story I wrote for our Breakfast with the Wise Men program at church.  It's three posts if you want to read the whole thing; there is a link at the bottom of posts 1 and 2 to go to the next one.

Breakfast with the Wise Men 

Perspectives: The Real Barrier

 "The real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge" 

Chuck Yeager

This was on part of the construction fence around the Air and Space museum when we visited this May.

Reading Stats 2023

For the past two years, I have shared my reading stats.  Maybe it makes me a little nerdy - but I'm not.  I'm very nerdy, and I like statistics.  So here we go for 2023. 

I read a total of 52 books in 2023.  This compares to 56 books in 2021 and 35 in 2022.  In 2021, I was preparing to teach a CLM course.  I'm not sure why this year is higher than last year, but yippee.

Here are how the stats worked out:

Question 1: What was the format of the book?  Hard copy? Kindle? Audiobook?  Audiobook is the winner, at 71%.  I read a lot as I drive to work, using audiobooks, so this is not surprising.  It's down from last year (91%); books I read for classes are usually kindle or paperbacks.  

Question 2: Had I read the book before?  This year, to make sure I didn't get in a rut of only re-reading books, I set a goal of at least 30% new books.  This was not hard to achieve.  69% were new books to me.  This is up from 57% in 2023 and a 50/50 split in 2021.

Question 3: What was the genre of the books I read?    The winner this year was mystery, at 32%.  Last year's  "winner" was fantasy.  Another one of my goals for 2023 was to read at least 4 "spiritual development" books.  I read 14; that category came in at 27% .

Question 4: When were the books published?  50 percent of the books I read were published between 2020 and 2023; the rest were spread out between 2019 and 1975.   I'm re-reading the Elizabeth Peters books which were published beginning in 1975.  The second largest category was 1990-1999, at 17%.  

Question 5: This is a new one.  I gave each book a star rating of 1-5.  I gave each star rating a definition (which is too much stuff to share in this post) - fiction and non-fiction had different rating definitions.  My average rating was 4.1, which the median and mode at 4.0.  My lowest rating was 2.5, and the highest was 5.  

This is my Goodreads profile if you are interested in seeing what I've read.  This page is my Blog Library.  I list faith books here (or other books I've blogged about) with links to the posts.

Happy New Year

 Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow (and 2024) is a new day (or year); begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day (or year) is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on yesterdays. (Ralph Waldo Emerson with parenthetical additions by me). Happy New Year - it is full of grace.