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, ...

  Indonesia has revised its criminal code so that sex outside of marriage will be prosecutable and subject to one year of imprisonment. Same sex marriages do not exist. Do the math. In Iran, protests continue since the death while under arrest of a woman who didn’t wear her head covering properly. CBC’s The Fifth Estate recently interviewed an Iranian-born, anti-regime activist who said that she first became aware of her imprisonment to convention as a girl when she saw how her brother was free to swim in the river and she wasn’t. We can view humanity and our place in it through Ten Commandments eyes, or through the lens of The Sermon on the Mount, through Sharia Law or through the benefits of democracy, or however you understand what Jesus said in Matthew 5 about selfless love fulfilling, and exceeding by far, the moral requirements of compulsive obedience to law. 43  “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  44...

  Poinsetta The death and destruction spawned by World War Two   doesn’t need to be reiterated for those of us alive during that unbelievable debacle and its aftermath. For “baby boomers” and others born after the blood had all seeped into the earth and the rubble had been cleared, a need for education about the facts of the war, the psychology and sociology making it possible can’t be overstressed. Two relevant allegories coming out of that war could be helpful, but only if reading skills are up to appreciating deep truths illuminated by story, like Jesus’ parables, for instance. The first— Animal Farm , by George Orwell—has been taught in schools as an exposure of the folly of Communism. Published in 1945, it’s “story” may indeed have been inspired by the descent into brutality of the Communist Revolution in Russia, but it much more importantly exposes the basic human tendency to sink into self-serving, into embracing doctrinaire ideologies that serve individuals over coll...

  (Note: There’s a painting following this text. Please give it a look before going on.) Were Jesus to be listening in on the current conversation in Western politics, and if he were to be asked what he made of it all, given that many who count themselves as his followers are loudly involved, what would his reply be? I, of course, can’t claim to know. I expect he would have replied with a parable like “The Good Samaritan,” or “The Prodigal Son,” and like the scribes, the pharisees and the teachers of the law (and his disciples, frequently) in his time, each would interpret what they’d heard as support for what they’d already embraced as truth. Maybe he’d shrug and say, “It appears subtlety won’t work … again, so here’s a thought: whatever you do or say, I judge on its conforming--or not--to one very simple standard, and that is that your words and actions respond to your love of God and that which he’s created for your benefit, and that it wishes for your neighbour every...

  I occasionally listen to Bill Maher monologues on one of the American Network’s late-night shows (also on YouTube). He’s one of those anti-woke, “stop being so sensitive” public figures who in a recent episode invoked that old “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” shibboleth plus the “get over it already; they’re just words” sentiment. The attitude seems to be an accompaniment to a larger “free speech” theme where taking exception to what people are saying or writing is interpreted as an attempt to force them to shut up, to rob them of the right to say what they’re thinking. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an American house representative—who’s gained notoriety for her outspoken, arbitrary pronouncements on just about everything—publicly decried the judgment against Alex Jones for lying repeatedly that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax: “He was just speaking words,” she said. I think thoughts and write words. More than that, I publish them occa...