Archive for February, 2012

Wednesday, February 29th

Scripture: Psalm 77

¹I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, that he may hear me.
²In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted.

³I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints. Selah

⁴You keep my eyelids from closing; I am so troubled that I cannot speak.

⁵I consider the days of old, and remember the years of long ago.

⁶I commune with my heart in the night; I meditate and search my spirit:

⁷“Will the Lord spurn forever, and never again be favorable?

⁸Has his steadfast love ceased forever? Are his promises at an end for all time?

⁹Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” Selah

¹⁰And I say, “It is my grief that the right hand of the Most High has changed.”

¹¹I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord; I will remember your wonders of old.

¹²I will meditate on all your work, and muse on your mighty deeds.

¹³Your way, O God, is holy. What god is so great as our God?

¹⁴You are the God who works wonders; you have displayed your might among the peoples.¹⁵With your strong arm you redeemed your people, the descendants of Jacob and Joseph. Selah ⁶When the waters saw you, O God, when the waters saw you, they were afraid; the very deep trembled. ¹⁷The clouds poured out water; the skies thundered; your arrows flashed on every side. ¹⁸The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind; your lightnings lit up the world; the earth trembled and shook.

¹⁹Your way was through the sea, your path, through the mighty waters; yet your footprints were unseen. ²⁰You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

Reflection:

This passage can, in my opinion, be viewed in two ways:  1)in the way it was written or 2) in the way we read it.  If we are to look at it from the first approach, this psalm was written by someone expressing the personal distress of an ‘all’.  It is a petition from a community that also recalls God’s past fidelity to the nation.  This is a community that is in distress, but that also draws strength from their memory of God’s mighty works. In verses 11-20 the author is poetically describing the Exodus from Egypt, a time when God’s power was felt even amidst turmoil.

However, if we use the second approach, we can very easily see it’s relevance in our 21st Century, American lives.  We are human, and I dare say there isn’t a single one of us who has not suffered, or been in distress, and at least for a moment questioned God’s will.  This psalm is a poem of fear, of sadness, and of a poet doing his (or her) best to find hope and faith in a dark time.  And despite the author’s seemingly debilitating distress, they do, in fact, find hope.  The author finds hope in their memory of God, and so can we in our dark times.  God has done great things, therefore God must do great things again.  We are all Christians because we have felt God’s love.  We have seen God to great things in the world, in our lives, and/or in our hearts.  No matter our suffering, deep down we know God’s power.  Sometimes we just need to remember it.

Doubt is OK.  My theology professor once said: “If someone tells you they have no doubts about this [God], then they are either in denial or insane.”

But like the writer in Psalm 77, despite our doubts and fears, we must remember.  Remember love.  Remember our deliverance.  Remember God.

By Julia Humenik

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Tuesday, February 28th

Monday, February 27th

Sunday, February 26, 2012
Holy Covenant UMC
Rev. Matthew Johnson, preaching

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Genesis 22:1-13

Take your son, your only son Isaac, the beloved, and offer him as a burnt offering on a mountain that I will show you.

This is a bizarre story, isn’t it? I will admit that I am not a big fan of it myself. We read a story like this aloud together, and afterwards we proclaim “The word of God for the people of God,” which is followed by the collective reply “thanks be to God.” And upon saying it, our eyes roll around in our heads a bit. Thanks be to God for this? It isn’t an easy story to ponder. Nor is it one that can be tied up with a neat little soundbite.

This is one of those stories that — if it had been redacted from scripture and then suddenly discovered in a jar in a cave today — I wouldn’t feel cheated. It could disappear now and I could understand why. Child sacrifice? Really? It is like the great Bob Dylan song “Highway 61 Revisited.” God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Abe says man you must be putting me on.

I often want to shout into the page “Isaac, run! Your dad had gone crazy in his old age!”

I can understand why we don’t read it very often. I’ve never preached from it myself because of my bias. When I’ve heard it preached, it is often simplified it into some sort of universal ethic … that like Job’s, Abraham’s story tells us that we’re all going to have times when God challenges us and we can either answer them with strength and courage, or fall into a pit of despair. It is all a big parable. A moral metaphor … like a macabre mother goose.

We don’t really think about Isaac as being a real child tied to rock looking into his father’s eyes and wondering. We don’t really think about what Abraham’s eyes said as they gazed upon his son. I don’t want to know, frankly. I don’t want to know if he was filled with violent indignation, ready to commit this act for his God. I don’t want to know if the tears dripped from his eyes onto Isaac’s forehead before the ram cries out in pain after being stuck in the thicket. We just remember the mantra that if we trust, God will provide. We turn the page and move on. (more…)

Sunday, February 26th

Genesis 16:7-15

7 The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. ⁸And he said, ‘Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?’ She said, ‘I am running away from my mistress Sarai.’ ⁹The angel of the Lord said to her, ‘Return to your mistress, and submit to her.’ ¹⁰The angel of the Lord also said to her, ‘I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.’ ¹¹And the angel of the Lord said to her,
‘Now you have conceived and shall bear a son;
you shall call him Ishmael,^*
for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.
¹² He shall be a wild ass of a man,
with his hand against everyone,
and everyone’s hand against him;
and he shall live at odds with all his kin.’
¹³So she named the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are El-roi’;^* for she said, ‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?’^{* 14}Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi;^* it lies between Kadesh and Bered.

15 Hagar bore Abram a son; and Abram named his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael.

Reflection:

Genesis 16:7-15, A Reflection, of sorts
When Polly asked me to write a reflection on Genesis 16:7-15, my first reactions was “Hmmm? I don’t know that one.” Then I read the verses, and I thought “Wow, I have no idea how to reflect on this. What does it even mean?”
So, I did a little research and found out that what these verses are discussing mainly centers around both obedience and sticking it out when things get tough. O.K. Those are two things I can talk about.

Obedience might be the tougher of the two. When we are being obedient to God, often times, we are going against what is generally acceptable to society. What God

wants us to do, we will usually want to do and know that it is the right thing to do , but it is at times much easier to ignore God’s commands and follow along with the pull of society.
Which leads perfectly two the second point: sticking it out when things get tough. I have run two marathons. I like to think of myself as an endurance athlete. I know a thing or two about sticking it out when things get tough. But, I often times find it easier to run a lot of miles than it is to do something that goes against the norm of society. And once things get hard, I find it easier to give up than to see it through to the end.
The articles that I found online to discuss these verses dealt mainly with marriage and divorce. How long could you be obedient, both to your spouse and to God, and how long would you stick it out before giving up on love and marriage. Well, as a single man, I feel I might not be an expert in that category. But, I do know a thing or two about sticking it out. I feel that where this verse is calling me is my “Lenten sacrifices.”
If you don’t like discussing your religion or faith, it will probably be hard to give something up for Lent. Especially alcohol. Last year was the first year I gave up alcohol for Lent. Man, people ask a LOT of questions. Sometimes, I found it easier to brush the questions away than to stand up and represent my faith. When God tells Hagar to go back, I can sympathize with what must be her internal struggle. “All these people will know,” she might have been thinking. For me, that leads to “what will they think?”
My goal this lent is to be obedient to my sacrifices and to God, and to stick it out for 40 days. More so, though, to do this because I want to be pleasing to God, knowing that when I make my sacrifices, they are nothing like the ultimate sacrifice that Jesus made.

By Adam Bogucki

Saturday, February 25^th

Friday , Feb 24^th

Sunday, February 19, 2012
Holy Covenant UMC
Rev. Matthew Johnson, preaching

Mark 9:2-10

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“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” It is an iconic phrase … the one the great and powerful Wizard of Oz says of himself when Toto pulls back the veil which had been hiding him.

As you can probably vividly remember, he had stood behind it, controlling knobs, releasing flash pots, increasing echo and volume of his voice, all of which made him appear as an ominous and frightful floating head. But the man behind the curtain was not frightful. He was small and ordinary … a fact which he did not want others to know about him. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

In 2003, while I was deciding (begrudgingly) to put away my journalistic ambitions and answer a call to ministry, the public’s trust in the information that came from the news media was crumbling. That became quite evident to me when an old college-newspaper colleague of mine forwarded me a web link to a New York Times article. Included with the link was a message from him, that said something like “How come the best people never get the best jobs?”

Clicking the link from blue to purple, my web browser brought me the sad story of the now infamous Jayson Blair. It began like this:

A staff reporter for The New York Times committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months, an investigation by Times journalists has found.

Mr. Blair, 27, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.¹

I wasn’t surprised, honestly. Having many friends who had bylines or checked copy at major newspapers; and having been embroiled in battles with publishers and ownership myself, I can see how it happened. There was always a pressure to be more than you could … to do more than you could … to be in more places than you could. (more…)

“Why should we praise them for something they SHOULD be doing?” I said to the other members of my college newspaper’s editorial board. It was the afternoon, we were creeping toward the deadline for the opinions page, and there wasn’t any consensus on what the “unsigned” editorial should be about. Since they were supposed to be representative of the newspaper’s leadership, we had to agree on the content. My response was prompted by a suggestion that we thank the student government for running a good debate (or something like that). I didn’t think we should be rewarding an expected behavior. When I look back on it now, remembering the hostility in my voice driven by thinly-veiled entitlement, I see myself as a pretty big jerk.

This struck me last year around the beginning of Lent as rhetoric regarding “expectations” of teachers and public workers reached a frenzy. I heard my college-age self in all of it, and I was mortified.

That’s when I decided my Lenten discipline would be working to change my mindset from one of assumption to that of thanks. Those who typically received more criticism than praise became the center of my attention. I thanked garbage collectors, bus drivers and postal workers. I validated used-car salespeople, telemarketers, lawyers and underachieving teenagers. I wrote notes of encouragement to loathed politicians, scandalous religious leaders and (many) mistake-prone friends and colleagues. It was transformative for me. I cared less about superficial things. I had more respect for the people who make the world go ’round without me having to pay much attention or worry.

And it became something that lived much longer than 46 days. While I am narrowing down what my discipline will be for this Lent, I can promise it will be something that I hope can last much longer than these days leading up to this Easter. I hope it will last in me until the resurrection; not Jesus’ alone, but all of ours. That may be a while, and that’s OK. I still have a lot of people to thank.

What is your discipline going to be this year? My prayer is it will be more transformative in October 2020 than it ever was in March 2012.

Peace,

Pastor Matthew

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Scripture: 1 John 1:3-10

By Lisa Rothman

³we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. ⁴We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

5 This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. ⁶If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true;⁷but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. ⁸If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. ¹⁰If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

Reflection:

“God is Light and in him there is no darkness at all 1 John 1:5”

For me this passage from 1 John 1:3-10 makes me imagine someone in a sunny field but they have their eyes closed tightly. While they are surrounded by light they are still in darkness. It can be easy to close our eyes and then be afraid to open them again. I think we sometimes are afraid because light is not always kind. That is why we have sayings like “Cold light of day”. But God’s light is a warm, cozy, comforting and love filled light.

This Lent I am trying to keep remembering God’s light/ love. In addition to attending church, and doing some daily prayer practice, I will also fill up on God’s love. While it is completely symbolic I am going to pick a cup and have a cup of water (and read a quote or scripture about how God’s love will never run out) every morning as well as whenever I start getting stressed about school, or work, or life. My hope is this will allow me to keep remembering that no matter how many times I have to dip into God’s love it will not run out. I sometimes worry when I have to “fill up” too much because part of me is afraid I will use it up and either it won’t be there for others who need it or when I need it in the future it will be gone.

Prayer: Dear God, remind me that your love and light will always be. When the sun in the sky burns itself out you will still be there. You are a cup overflowing. No matter how many times we are broken and make mistakes you will always be there with a big hug.

Give someone a Hug today. It does not matter who: a partner, a family member, a friend, a co-worker, or a complete stranger.