Hopewit

The Lord said to Moses, “Soon you will lie down with your ancestors. Then this people will begin to prostitute themselves to the foreign gods in their midst, the gods of the land into which they are going; they will forsake me, breaking my covenant that I have made with them. My anger will be kindled against them in that day. I will forsake them and hide my face from them; they will become easy prey, and many terrible troubles will come upon them. In that day they will say, ‘Have not these troubles come upon us because our God is not in our midst?’ On that day I will surely hide my face on account of all the evil they have done by turning to other gods. Deuteronomy 31:16-18 (NRSV) We are firmly embraced in the arms of a world crisis , and many a Christian pundit will try to convince us that “. . . these troubles [have] come upon us because our God is not in our midst.” True, I firmly believe with others that many of our problems would vanish if we all carried a God-consciousne...

“But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” - Amos 5:24 Our current Adult Bible Study has taken us to the minor prophets: Amos, Habakkuk, Micah, Malachi. It’s territory we don’t traverse a lot. In summary: Amos deals with a peaceful time in the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel and warns—particularly the leadership—that their abandoning of the justice and righteousness that God demands of his children is going to have dire consequences. It’s easy, after reading Amos to conclude that the essentials of justice practiced in the everyday are so important that the very survival of the nation and culture are dependent upon it. Beverley McLaughlin traces her search  for the meaning of justice  in her biography, Truth be Told. McLaughlin was chief justice of the Supreme Court in Canada for 17 years. She concluded early on in her law career that a standard of economic fairness was fundamental to justice, a conclusion not...

Butter Beans, by Frank Stanley Herring Jean Vanier is known to most of us for his work in establishing L’Arche, a world wide community of support institutions for the developmentally challenged. Some of us know people who worked or are working in one of these charitable endeavours and the news of L’Arche’s good work has become legendary in our time. If you click HERE , you’ll see Wikipedia’s story of the man and his work  . . . including a Globe and Mail headline that says he may soon be posthumously charged with the abuse of at least six women.      Among the comments appended to a fb post on this development is only one male voice alongside numerous female voices, and one comment declares that the lack of men’s responses is meaningful. That may be true, possibly because women far outnumber male users of fb, and/or plus a possibility that men are ashamed to be of the same gender as the perpetrator, or that they just don’t really care that women are being ab...

A good place to meditate, or just walk the hills. “ When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the LORD said, ‘My spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.’ The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.” (Genesis 6:1-4, NIV) Type the word nephilim into Google search and watch as preachers and theologians turn themselves inside-out in attempts to exegete Genesis 6:1-4. Nephilim are either the product of the coupling of the “sons of God” with human women, or they’re not. The “sons of God” are either angels who abandoned their place in heaven and are copulating with women, or they were the heroes of ...

Boquete Flower Festival, Panama A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.   (Galatians 6: 7 & 8, NIV) If you’re like me, Paul’s ubiquitous reference to Christian life as a war between flesh and spirit can be a puzzler. Flesh , to me, has always had connotations of meat; like a raw tenderloin of pork or a carcass of beef hanging in a butcher’s cooler. Or in the human body, flesh wound as opposed to a broken bone. Muscle, in other words, comes to mind.  The Greek word Paul was using, s àrks, can denote flesh but also connotes the person before Christian regeneration. The person as physically born. In effect, then, Paul would be saying in verse 7, “If you persist in thinking and living like you did before you heard and accepted the good news, you are sowing daily the seeds of your own disappointment.”  Parsing spiri...

Jill Mitchell Art, https://www.facebook.com/pg/jillmitchelloriginalart/posts/ This is what the Sovereign Lord , the Holy One of Israel, says: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it. (Isaiah 30:15, NIV) It's nearly 9:00 o'clock on a winter Wednesday morning . I've just read Father Richard Rohr's column on “Inner Silence,” the contemplative life that makes space for renewal and maintenance of the spirit. “Inner Silence,” I conclude, is the opposite—roughly—of thinking. Thinking/doing is mind-busyness while resting in inner silence is a gift to the mind as sleep is a gift to the body. (Rohr would probably recoil at this analogy.) I'm obviously not in a contemplative state right now, at least not of the kind Rohr describes. I couldn't be writing these words if I was because this task takes thinking. And obviously, Rohr was not in that state either when he typed out his des...

Catedral de la Asunción de María Santísima -Guadalajara, Mexico Eigenheim Mennonite Church, Rosthern I'm currently leading an adult study group in a series of four lessons from I Kings concerning the building of Solomon's Temple. We're being reminded about the symbolism that's present in structures Jews and Christians have built over the centuries. Only some archaeological bits of Solomon's temple remian in existence, and no cathedral construction comparable to St. Peter's in Rome, St. Paul's in London or St. Isaac's in St. Petersburg is currently being contemplated, at least not to my knowledge. (An exception might be the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which remains unfinished although begun in 1882.) How we construct worship sites says a great deal about the nature of our beliefs regarding whatever higher being we imagine. In the case of the temple of Solomon and the subsequent temple destroyed by the Romans, location was apparently ...