Hopewit

Photo Credit: Pauline Roth Photo Credit: George Epp Meditation for Eigenheim’s 125 th Celebration: Saturday, August 19, 2017 George Epp, chair Service, Mission and Outreach Committee E igenheim Mennonite Church is the story of a community; a community steeped in the gospel of Jesus Christ, seeking to live out faith in harmony and to spread the good news in service to their neighbours and the world. Stumbling sometimes, disagreeing on issues sometimes, misunderstanding each other at times, but always conscious of the core and centre of community and faith: I Corinthians 3:11. “For other foundation can no one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” The story is not finished; we write new chapters as we go.     The authors of the opening chapter came from a variety of backgrounds: There were the 1892 Chortitza Mennonites from Russia (Epps, Friesens, Letkemanns, Janzens, Duecks and others), the Prussian contingent (Tiefengrund Regiers, Friesen...

  Metis infantryman in the trenches of Batoche - Diarama at Batoche The fortified city stands desolate, an abandoned settlement, forsaken like the wilderness;     there the calves graze,     there they lie down;     they strip its branches bare. When its twigs are dry, they are broken off     and women come and make fires with them. For this is a people without understanding;     so their Maker has no compassion on them,     and their Creator shows them no favor. (Isaiah 27: 10-11, NIV) The book of Isaiah has provided essential material for the Christian faith, including for the scribes and scholars who put the New Testament to print. As is so often the case when scriptures are understood as ancient oracles rather than as parables, Isaiah has been read as predictive of Christ’s coming, even of end times. My tendency is to see Isaiah as as story that illuminates the human condition, gives reason for hope i...

  Batoche Rise up, Lord, confront them, bring them down;         with your sword rescue me from the wicked. By your hand save me from such people, Lord,         from those of this world whose reward is in this life. May what you have stored up for the wicked fill their bellies;         may their children gorge themselves on it,         and may there be leftovers for their little ones.  (Psalm 16: 13&14, NIV) Charlottesville, Barcelona, Turku: news this past week was dominated by violence in these three places to the point where you needed only to say, “Charlottesville incident,” and people knew what you were talking about. The expression, Alt-right was still new to our vocabulary when we had to wrap our heads around Antifa , which Donald Trump mistakenly called the Alt-left , thereby giving the pundits yet another story-line. And then the opinion editorials ( op-eds ) started ...

There's no rose like a wild rose “How come we never talk about sin anymore?” she asked. We were a liberal congregation off the beaten path in Northern Manitoba, but our roots were elsewhere. For her, possibly, in a southern Manitoba congregation steeped for generations in sin theology: we are all bad, all the time, and our struggles are twofold, 1) to work hard to stifle our tendency to choose bad, and 2), to accept that our badness is so irredeemably bad that God’s son had to be killed as a sin offering, thereby purchasing our forgiveness. Bad, bad, bad. Sin, sin, sin 24/7. Although fraught with sinister connotations, sin is, after all, just a word. It’s phonetically similar to six and bin, to sit and tin . But because its use over time has encouraged us to see the world through the paradigm of two columns labeled “sin” and “not sin” and to place thoughts and act into one or the other column, the effect has become both notoriously stifling and destructi...

Longing for More - St. Johns Harbour We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder Soldiers of the Cross. Every rung goes higher higher Every rung goes higher higher Every rung goes higher higher Soldiers of the Cross Sinner do you love my Jesus Sinner do you love my Jesus Sinner do you love my Jesus Soldiers of the Cross (Add verses as they occur to you.) We used to sing this chorus although with no idea what Jacob’s Ladder actually referred to, where this ditty came from or what loving Jesus could possibly have to do with ladder climbing. In short—I read now—it’s a slave spiritual likely far more significant for its “singability,” its “lilt” than for its message, which was probably related to hardship and the hope for a better life in Christ, symbolized by climbing out of this earthly abyss toward heaven. “Image appropriation,” I’d say. A nice choral performance of it is at https://www.yo...