Text: Mark 2:2-12

Speaker: Sarah Werner

This morning I want to talk to you about the spiritual practice of friendship. Our hyper-individualized world often fails to embrace the benefits of various types of community, including friendship.

Thankfully literature is full of powerful friendships. A few good friends can make up for quite a lot of fear and danger. I think this is why The Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite book series of all time. It is essentially a story about the incredible power of friendship in the most perilous of circumstances, how these four friends save each other over and over, and how they save the world in the process. We should all wish to have friends like Merry, Pippin, Frodo, and Sam.

And so it is with our text for this morning, four people who literally tore apart a roof for their friend. Before we begin, though, I have to share that I have a fraught relationship with most of the healing miracle stories in the Gospels as a disabled person. I do not believe that God is going to cure me of being disabled. Some days I am fine with this, because my physical embodiment, including disability, has shaped my life in distinctive and amazing ways. I wouldn’t be the same person without it. Other days I would dearly love to leave behind the pain and the unpredictability and the frustration of inhabiting a disabled body. Pride and grief can comingle.

Another reason miracle stories are fraught is how Christians have weaponized them against people with disabilities. We receive unsolicited offers of prayers for healing from people who know nothing about us and our lives. When said healing does not occur, we are blamed for our disability because of our lack of faith. Or, despite Jesus’ teachings to the…

Text: Genesis 18:1-18; John 13:5

Speaker: Joel Miller

If you watched The Odyssey, you likely noticed multiple references to something called Zeus’s Law.  Hopefully you noticed this because it was a big part of the movie.  Zeus’s Law is a simple idea.  You should always be hospitable to strangers because they could be a god in disguise.  If they need food or clothing or shelter, you give it, even before knowing who they are.  In turn, the guest is to be respectful and not overstay their welcome.  Break Zeus’s Law, and you risk angering the gods, which is a very bad idea.    

If you’ve read The Odyssey….my first time, this summer, a mere 13 hour audiobook, very doable…you would catch the same theme, although not quite as front and center.  The story culminates in Odysseus finally returning home to Ithaca, but disguised as a beggar.  A few of his kinsmen, not knowing who he is, welcome him.  The leading men who, in his absence, have been vying for his throne, and vying for his wife, Penelope, treat him poorly.  Odysseus eventually reveals his identity and gets his vengeance in a very non-Mennonite, non-nonviolent way.  And if that’s a spoiler, my apologies, but you did have like, almost 3000 years to read it.

Where Christopher Nolan’s film differs from Homer’s epic poem, among other ways, is that he turns Zeus’s Law back onto Odysseus.  Rather than leaving us with the triumphant hero who reclaims his throne, thus restoring justice and order, Odysseus is racked with guilt throughout the film.  Because he himself had not just broken, but shattered Zeus’s Law.  As a military commander he had devised a brilliant trick to get his army through the impenetrable walls of Troy.  He had his men build a massive, hollow, wooden horse.  This was left outside…

Text: Matthew 14:13-21

Speaker: Joel Miller

Lectio Divina is a fancy name for a simple practice.  It’s Latin, so that automatically makes it sound important.  Lectio translates as “reading.”  And Divina is what it sounds like, “Divine.”  Lectio Divina, Divine Reading.  It may be one of the few cases where the English sounds even more important than the Latin. 

But it’s a simple practice.  We’ve already experienced a form of it today with the children.  It is the first time I’ve seen Lectio Divina Bingo.  We’re going to try the non-Bingo version as a larger group.  First, an introduction.

As a spiritual practice, this is a certain way of relating with a text.  So you need a text.  It works best when the passage is not too short, not too long, maybe 3-10 verses.  Stories from the gospels work especially well, including parables.  But it could also be from Paul’s letters, a Psalm, something from the prophets.  For today, we’ve selected a familiar story: The Feeding of the 5000. 

A challenge of lectio for us intellectually curious folks is that we have to turn off our analytic mind.  Don’t worry, you can turn it back on afterwards.  With this story, we’re not asking how those five loaves and two fish became enough to feed a multitude, with even more left over.  We’re not looking into the Greek.  We’re not comparing how Matthew’s version differs from the other gospels.  We’re not even going to do an in depth cultural critique of the patriarchy that caused only the men to be counted as the 5000.  Although noticing who doesn’t get counted may be a point of reflection.

What lectio divina does, is that it gently flips the script from us reading and analyzing the text, to the text reading us.  What does the text call forth from us,…

Texts: Psalm 103:1-5, 13-18; Mark 10:17-26

Speaker: Chris Walker

I want to talk about choosing less as a spiritual practice. 

I wanted to start with a personal story, and a poem by Wendell Berry. But there’s not  enough time, and I respect the limits of your attention. So no story, no poem, I’m going to  plow right in.  

All I’ll say is that for decades I had a sense that the life I was living was not anywhere  close to the life I was called to live, and I felt like I was trapped. Over time, I came to  understand that a couple of things were contributing to the disconnect in my life: 

1. Losing sight of who I am—the person I’m called to be in the world and for the  world; and 

2. The paralysis caused by too many demands on my time and attention.  

Does that resonate at all? I’m guessing the second part might—too many demands on our  time and attention?  

The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csziksentmihalyi once wrote that the  mental distress peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can  actually accomplish, and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.  

And 150 years before, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men live lives of  quiet desperation.” In the 1840s, Thoreau was paying attention to what was going on around his home in Concord, Massachusetts. He wrote about his neighbors for whom farms, houses, chores, barns, flocks, oWice, just seemed like endless forms of penance. 

“How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its  load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its  stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, pasture, mowing, and  wood-lot. . . . Better if they had been born…

Texts: Genesis 1:31-2:3; Isaiah 2:1-4; Mark 1:14-15; 2 Corinthians 5:16-18

Speaker: Joel Miller

Three weeks ago, I went white water rafting with our youngest daughter, Ila, on the New River in West Virginia.  It was Ila’s first time, my third.  Each time included a long bus ride from the check-in area to the put-in spot on the river.  Each time the main guide gave instructions the whole ride, yelling over the noise of the loud retired school bus, with a hoarse throat, because they do this every day.  On the two previous, higher risk, trips – without Ila – this largely involved telling us all things that could go wrong.  Despite this, each time, I was struck by one of the key practices of rafting safety.  It’s called “point positive.”

In summary, there are plenty of obstacles on the river – rocks, branches, the protruding remains of a train car that careened off the nearby tracks decades ago, etc.  There are plenty of routes you shouldn’t take and, depending on the level of difficulty, some routes that present real danger.  When approaching such a challenge, the guide will always point positive.  That is, they will point in the direction you should go rather than the ones you should avoid. 

Just as important, if your boat does get hung up on a rock, a guide will point in the direction you should lean to allow the water current to push you safely free.  And if you do end up in the water, a guide will point in the direction you should swim toward.  They will not point toward an undercurrent and yell, Don’t go there.   

They will always, they repeat, loudly, on that loud bus, point positive.

Along with being consistent and clear, this addresses a fundamental feature of human psychology.  We tend to go in…