Hopewit

It takes time, time and more time . . . . . . and many cups of Turkish coffee.  But since you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness and in the love we have kindled in you—see that you also excel in this grace of giving. (II Corinthians 8:7) To excel in the grace of giving. II Corinthians 8 is an appeal to the generosity that ought to result from the blessings of “faith . . . knowledge . . . love” and a zeal kindled by the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Corinthian Church included persons with means, persons with good educations, a people who had been extraordinarily blessed. But privilege doesn’t automatically result in generosity; Paul’s admonitions in this chapter imply that there’s a glaring omission in the Corinthian community: they have members who have and members who don’t have , and equity ought to characterize the fellowship. Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard press...

Someday we'll all grow and buy our food in dignity and sufficiency Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:The old has gone, the new is here! 18. All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation : 19. that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation . (2 Corinthians 5:17-19). “And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” I led an adult study yesterday morning on the word reconciliation. The theme is ubiquitous in Paul who would, no doubt, concur with Merriam-Webster’s definition: "Reconciliation is the act of getting two things to be compatible with one another." It’s about getting from incompatible to compatible, from broken to whole, from messy to orderly, from conflict to peace. It’s being able to live together amicably “in the same house” once again. We’v...

Metropolitan Cathedral, Panama City I remember hearing long ago that a human was worth $11.50. The astoundingly audacious pronouncement rested on the assumption that some marketable chemicals could be extracted from a cadaver.  A horse, one guesses, would be worth much more. . Dismissing that absurd evaluation, we could consider how much we individually are paid for our skills and labour. By that measure, a surgeon is worth about ten times as much as a McDonald’s employee. Strident anti-abortionists—I’m guessing—would argue that a living human is of immeasurable worth, and that a fetus is a human being.  The indiscriminate bombing of Eastern Aleppo this week by Russian and Syrian militaries demonstrated again that to some persons, various of our fellow humans are considered immeasurably valuable while others are discarded as less than worthless. In a capitalist economy, people are inevitably layered into levels of worth by at least so...