Hopewit

My favourite watercolour artist and neighbour, Brian Hicks It seems tragic to me that we have now reached the point where the defining factor in a person's Mennonite identity is his/her opinion on whether or not the church should honour gay persons' desires to solemnize their commitment to each other in their church. In the USA, the large Lancaster Conference is working on plans to separate from MC USA; except for the gay marriage issue, this wouldn't be happening. I'm reminded of Dr. Seuss' The Sneetches where a physical attribute is allowed to divide, where a certain feature—or lack of it—escalates to become blatant and unnecessary discrimination blocking out the central truth—which is discovered at the end: WE ARE ALL SNEETCHES.  It's a children's book, not the Bible, but the core of Dr. Seuss' parable might be something we want to revisit: the unwarranted escalation of one apparently important difference has the power to obscure ...

(From Edmonton) John 7 strikes me as political as the gospel gets, almost as if it's a chronicle of the ambivalence in the Jewish Community of the time with regard to the identity and role of the awaited Davidic Messiah. Rumours abound about this Jesus who claims that identity; the people wait for leadership to decide, they in turn are torn between recognizing his deeds and teachings as God-inspired or killing him as an impostor. I'm not sure what one should make of the brothers of Jesus urging him to go up to Judea for the Festival of Tabernacles, his refusal to do so . . . And then going anyway. Once there, of course, he's recognized as the one who's raised a following potentially capable of challenging the status quo. So the debate is on: how could a Galilean, of all people claim to be the fulfillment of the Messianic hope? Described in it's most raw firm, I am a spiritual descendant of the Gentile converts post-resurrection, not of the Jewish followers of J...

(Written on my Blackberry; no picture today) John six begins with the feeding of the five thousand and "walking on water" signs and more or less duplicates the stories in the other gospels. I won't repeat the comments  I made during my Matthew reading about these events. I just participated in an inter-church communion service last night and so the metaphoric "eat my flesh, drink my blood" pronouncement is still fresh in my mind. In John's record, so much is made of the image and the fact that hearers were extremely disturbed by it that one wonders why Jesus didn’t choose a more palatable metaphor. As I understand it, it's a simple declaration that following Jesus requires that his word, his teaching, his sonship must be absorbed in their totality; this is not a hobby or something that one does on weekends. You don't snack on Jesus; he must be your main course, your total spiritual sustenance. That has to be the message; not much is as repugnant...

 Eigenheim Church - Photo by Maryvel Friesen - thanks, Maryvel John 5: Jesus vs. the "Jewish leaders." Now here's a story that should bring a chuckle. Near the pool of Bethesda lies a paralytic on a mat, hoping someone will help him into the healing waters of the pool. Jesus walks by, sees him and heals his paralysis. The man gets up and walks away. He's spotted by some elders/rabbis/pharisees — John doesn't make their identity clear — who charge the man with breaking Sabbath law . . . by carrying his mat. The oddities of other people's beliefs was in the news lately when Stephen Harper defended the refusal by a citizenship court to allow a woman wearing a Niqab to take the oath. Some dozen years ago, we were all bent out of shape here in Canada because a man of the Sikh religion wanted to wear a turban AND be a Mountie. I imagine there are people who find the Christian choice of a cross as its symbol somewhat odd, or the importance they pl...

The imagery is of a well, and water, and thirst. That the woman Jesus meets at Jacob's well while the disciples are shopping for food is Samaritan probably had more impact on early readers than it does on us. Central to the story is Jesus' use of the quenching power of water in a dry land to introduce the woman to a life that is more than the daily drawing of physical-life giving water, that promises fulfillment for the spirit, a fulfillment for which she thirsts. It's a thirst we all experience, a wish to be more like eagles that soar than like worms that drag themselves along the ground, grinding out their daily lives. Jesus offers the Samaritan woman only the news that the Messiah who will bring with him the spirit-raising water is here, sitting on the side of the very well where the ancestral hope for his coming was given birth. There is no “born again” transaction here; John's story is for the edification of the early church, a continuation of his def...

John 3 provides a concise, if enigmatic, summary of what has come to be the core of evangelical theology . Mankind is flesh, food, earthy. He is, by all accounts, an animal that is born, feeds reproduces, ages and dies. According to John, though, there is a possibility for more, and that more is hard to embrace because, like the wind, it comes and goes invisibly from and to wherever it will. It is therefore different from the material world that we sense on a daily basis and so it must be apprehended differently. The spirit comes to the one who believes, the one who is, as it were, born over again into a spiritual realm where all is new and different. Nicodemus apparently comes prepared to be inspired to something more than he has so far experienced as a mortal being; he recognizes in Jesus a teacher who possesses something more than life has offered him so far. He comes at night because the niceties of his formal life as a person of importance in the ruling class would...

John 2 is a short chapter – 5 minutes of reading tops. It relates only two incidents: the wedding at Cana where Jesus is purported to have turned water into wine and the cleansing of the temple, the latter appearing surprisingly at what would appear to be the beginning of his ministry; the other gospels place it near the end. I have occasionally quipped that if Jesus had been born into the Mennonite congregation of my youth, he would likely have arrived at such a wedding early and turned the wine there into water. Wine was objecta non grata at Eigenheim weddings . . . and still is. We could debate the significance of this miracle , and one is tempted to do so. John makes the points that his mother has confidence in his ability to help the host out of an embarrassing situation, that the jars Jesus had filled in order to produce the new wine were jars normally used for ritual cleansing, that the water-into-wine event “was the first of the signs through which he revea...