More on Salt and Light

For every sermon, there's always more to say than I can fit into 20 minutes! Two things stand out in my mind about last week's sermon that didn't quite make the cut....

1.  "Salt of the earth" was originally a very powerful image--so powerful that it has become a common idiom to mean a good person, a solid person.  To capture the surprising force of the original, Interpretation (my favourite commentary set, by the way) suggests substituting another seasoning:  “You are red hot pepper for the whole earth!”

2. One of the songs we sang on Sunday was "Light of the world, you stepped down into darkness"--that's a reference to Jesus' incarnation, since Jesus himself is the Light of the world (John 8:12, 9:5).  Compared to Jesus, we are very little lights!  One commentator says that we are like windows, with the True Light shining through.

May 19, 2009 at 10:22 PM

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Home

I've been thinking a lot about "home" lately, partly because we've been very much occupied with moving from house to townhouse over the last while, and partly because of what I've been learning about the 8 million (!) Palestinian refugees who have no place to call home. As a response to the refugee sponsorship information meeting earlier this week, I wrote the following poem/prayer/summary using some of the images and phrases that were part of the presentation by Gloria Nafziger and others working with refugee concerns:

A child peers out from a tent in the desert--

where is the world?

A man still bears the scars of brutal torture--

where is the world?

A woman tells of waiting weeks and months and years--

where is the world?

Is it really that much easier to fly to Mars, or even up to heaven?

Yet we have seen a garden planted in the desert,

and we have heard the children's cry:

"make our pains happiness forever"

"make our dreams truth forever"

"please help us"

May God have mercy.

May Christ have mercy.

Amen.

May 13, 2009 at 3:04 PM

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View and Vision: from the balcony

Thanks to Monika and SOCK leading our worship service yesterday, I was able to sit with Gary where he usually sits up in the balcony.

I noticed our council chair also upstairs yesterday morning and thought again about his experiment sitting in different spots in the church.  Have you tried it yet?

Looking across the 40 or so people up in the balcony, and also down and across the congregation in the main part of the sanctuary, I could see that for all our talk about aging (and we all are!), we are still very much an intergenerational congregation.  I could see youth and younger children and babes in arms, young adults, middle-agers, and older adults, people of different cultural backgrounds and different stages of faith.  As we move forward in the next 5 years and beyond, this is part of my vision for Emmanuel, to be and grow as a vibrant intergenerational and multicultural church, united by God's Spirit as disciples of Jesus. 

Within that, I think there's considerable room for diversity--for a variety of worship music and styles; for many different kinds of small group gatherings for study, support, service, worship, and fellowship; for a wide range of missions and service involvements like volunteering for MCC or Gleaners, Extreme Weather Shelter ministry, raising funds for a sewing machine project in El Salvador or housing for elderly women in Nepal. 

At the same time as I welcome that kind of diversity, I also realize that Emmanuel as a church cannot be all things to all people--ironically, as we have sharpened our sense of identity over the last number of years, I know that some who have visited or who have been part of the church for a time have chosen not to stay.  Some say, the church is "too Mennonite"--when that's meant as a comment about our identity as a peace church, I see that directly related to part of our vision as a church that is very basic to who we are; when that's meant as a comment about not feeling welcomed or acknowledged by people in the church foyer, that's also related to vision, only in that case it's more of a negative vision that I would hope we could work on and change.

There's lots more that I could say, and that we could all say about any of this, so I encourage everyone to be part of the visioning process--there are two questionnaires on our home page that you can fill out, and/or feel free to invite Phil and Char to meet with your group.  But  enough from me for now--I look forward to our continuing visioning and re-visioning!  

May 4, 2009 at 6:43 AM

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