Hopewit

"If I had a Million Dollars," I wouldn't be sittin' under this tree, waitin' for a bus. Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico, March 2019 The wealth of the rich is their fortified city, but poverty is the ruin of the poor. (Proverbs 10:15) How poor do you have to be to be poor ? How rich do you have to be to be called wealthy ? Type the words poor and poverty into the search engine on a Bible website like Bible Gateway and you’ll leave with the impression that the wealth/poverty tension is not only present from Genesis to Revelation, but that it’s one of its central themes. Granted, we have all kinds of conventional wisdom about the obvious, which is that there have always been rich people who are able to luxuriate in the freedom excessive means provide, and there have always been a vast majority preoccupied with scraping together the bare necessities of survival. “ Money can’t buy happiness.” Who said that, and if it’s true, why do the bulk...

1903 - 1912 Rosthern's first Mennonite sanctuary; 1913 - 2014 Rosthern New Church Society, 2016- present. Chapel preserved by Mennonite Interpretive Centre on the Rosthern Junior College campus. © Thanks! Really! Thanksgiving Sunday, October 13 th , 2019 Aberdeen Mennonite Church If you’re like me, you probably have a set of associations relating to Thanksgiving Day. Turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie come to mind easily. Autumn leaves, the picture of bins brimming with wheat, crisp cold of October mornings, and displays of grain sheaves, garden produce and fruit in an amazing still-life at the front of church. And the hymns, “We plow the fields and scatter, the good seed on the land, but it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand.” And maybe some of us think first of “Come, ye thankful people come, raise the song of harvest home. All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.” The association of harvest and Thanksgiving is probably as old as t...

Chilton Beach, PEI after Dorian What do you think of when you hear either if these two phrases: Free Speech, Political Correctness? I just finished listening to a YouTube interview: Rex Murphy interviewing Jordan B. Peterson on YouTube .  You may be aware of the notoriety surrounding Peterson, some—at least—relating to a dispute over what constitutes free speech on university campuses.  Mainly, it’s been Antifa and progressive-leaning students blockading speakers holding views considered to be anti-immigration, anti “political correctness”, or generally—and too simply put, I admit—those advocating extreme right-wing positions politically.  I’ve tuned in to other appearances by Peterson on YouTube, and am currently reading his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos , a book with wide circulation, enough at least to make the Canadian Clinical Psychologist a millionaire--and something of a celebrity. Anyone who watched CBC a number of years back w...

"The Church," Jocotepec, Jalisco, Mexico, 2019 “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this [that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God] was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades [place of the dead] will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:17-19, NIV) The book launch for Isaac Janssen, MDiv (October 1 st at Common Word in Winnipeg) precipitated a lot of discussion late into the evening on the future of “the church.” A friend talked about experiences of visiting churches in Winnipeg and compared them as regards music quality, sermon delivery, attendance, liveliness and so on, and since we’re faced with traditional, “old-line churches” declining in numbers and non-denominationa...

One of Us? With whom, then, will you compare God? To what image will you liken him? (Isaiah 40:18, NIV) “ If God had a name, what would it be? And would you call it to His face? If you were faced with Him in all His glory What would you ask if you had just one question?” It’s been 24 years since Joan Osborne recorded Ed Bazilian’s song, One of Us. I’ve got it on a CD and played it in the car as we drove through northern New Brunswick. The haunting chorus (“What if God was one of us / Just a slob like one of us / Just a stranger on the bus tryin’ to make his way home”) stays with you; a fantastic backup band helps with that. Isaiah goes on to answer his own question beginning with what God is not: not a man-made replica of an imagined god by a craftsman in gold or wood. What God is, though, is a creative force in the sky, so far above that the people of the earth appear to him as grasshoppers. Not a “person” who walks to and fro upon the earth either . From his l...

There's got to be a story here. “ Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’” (Genesis 1:26, NIV) This is part II of “mankind in the image of God.” Earlier, I pondered the imagery in terms of the physical—the human body, cuerpo humano . Today, I’d like to consider the implications personality-wise. Is the writer saying that God’s personality and our personalities are alike? Is a similar range of emotion and thought present in God as in us? Genesis 1:26 contains a “so that,” a reason for the creator to have made us this way; how else would we have the ability, skill and intelligence to accept sovereignty over the earth? Most of us, most of the time would likely question God’s judgment in thinking that we are up to the job, but such a conclusion can only be reached, I thi...

I take you back today to the wisdom of Solomon —but imagining that he’s writing his proverbs in the time of climate change. The passage in my Bible is called “Wisdom’s Rebuke,” and I’ve taken the liberty of retelling the passage as if Wisdom is the science on climate change—plus giving a nod to Micah’s admonition to please God through the practice of justice, mercy and humility.  So what follows is a paraphrase of Proverbs 1: 20-33. You can read the NIV Bible’s version of the passage by clicking here. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+1&version=NIV Wisdom’s Rebuke On radio, television, newspapers, books, the internet and on the street, those who have learned and understand the potential consequences of climate change warn people repeatedly, emphatically. They declare in detail what floods and storms, fires and drought will do to us all, but the question they begin to shout most loudly is this: “How long will you who just don’t get it clin...