Hopewit

  Calla Lily Acts 13:15, NIV.  " After the reading of the Law and the Prophets, the synagogue leaders invited them, 'Brothers, if one of you has a sermon for the people, please speak.'" As we meet on Sunday mornings for worship, we know there will be hymns, prayers, scriptures, announcements, sharing and most certainly, a sermon , “a talk on a religious or moral subject, especially one given during a church service and based on a passage from the Bible (Microsoft online dictionary).” The dictionary lists synonyms: homily, address, talk, discourse, oration, lesson, preaching, teaching, peroration. I like the last one.   What place does the peroration hold in your thinking about worship? Is it more like a personal opinion expertly or not-so-impressively delivered? Or is it the inspired voice of prophecy, like Zechariah trying desperately to guide the children of Israel onto better pathways? Something between maybe?          ...

  Eigenheim Mennonite, ca. 1950 The article on which our Adult Sunday School focused, and which was first printed in the Canadian Mennonite, was logically questionable. It posed the argument that our “traditional” churches put up barriers to entry by members of other cultures, and that that explains the lack of cultural diversity in our pews. That might be a factor in some cases, but the explanation for a lack of cross-cultural presence in Mennonite churches is way more complicated than that. People who visit our churches—whether they’re culturally different or not—come again if their experience was satisfying; they don’t if it wasn’t. That choice likely depends more on their own expectations than it does on the welcome they receive. The churches with which I’m familiar go out of their way to greet and engage with strangers, but to even suggest that altering the style and content of worship so that others have their expectations met—and so they will return—would simply be at cos...

  Calla Lily Love “ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30) Whenever I come across this imperative in the gospels, my thoughts stray to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43, How do I Love Thee? It begins, “How do I love thee? Let me count (list) the ways,” and then in the standard fourteen lines to which sonnets are restricted, her poem itemizes ten dimensions that characterize the speakers love for, not God, but a dear person. (I’ve attached her poem at the end of this meditation.) Question for me is, “When it comes to loving God with all my heart , soul , mind and strength , do I know what I actually mean? Could I list the ways? Does love really have two meanings, one that speaks of feeling and another focussed on doing. Is one aspect of love illustrated by “when I hear the knock on the door, I hope against hope that it will be you?” and another, “when I see anyone hungry, ...