Jesus and Me ... and the Cats

Acts 2:43-47 Thee. Thou. Thine. These are pronouns that have long been out of fashion in our language.  These days they're found in the King James Bible and in some of our hymns.   Thee, thou and thine were used instead of you and your when addressing someone with whom you had a deeply personal emotional or spiritual connection with,  like a family member, a close friend, a loved one, and of course, God and Christ.  For example, an angry driver might roll down his window and yell, "Why don't you learn how to drive, you jerk," but he would say to his beloved wife, "I love thee. " So, when we look for key words like common, community, commune and communion in understanding Holy Communion, think of them in the context of an intimate emotional and spiritual connection. My husband often marvels at how we ever became a couple.  We don't have a lot of common interests, but we do share many of the same values about life, marriage, and social jus...

James 9:1-41 I don't wear these glasses because I'm trying to make a fashion statement.  My vision is very poor.  The glasses help my physical eyesight, but they don't help with the things that obscure my spiritual sight, like being judgmental.  The only thing that clears it up is choosing to see with the eyes of grace. "As Jesus walked along, he saw a man who was blind from birth.  Jesus' disciples asked, 'Rabbi, who sinned so that he was born blind, this man or his parents?"  (John 9:1, CEB) It was believed then and to some extent today, that anyone who was disabled or sick, anyone who suffered tragedy or lived in poverty, was a sinner.  They did something bad to deserve what happened to them.   "Neither."  Jesus said.  Jesus lead his disciples beyond the cultural bias to seeing this encounter as an opportunity to bring God's unconditional love to their encounter with the blind man.   Rather than allowing them to be...

Luke 22:14-20 It's called the "Lord's Supper"  because it was not only a sacrament instituted by Jesus, but it is also a story about the night that Christ gave himself up for ourselves.  Like any good story, it has a background story that brings understanding to it.  A good story also becomes alive to us in our own context.  Lastly, a good story becomes part of our story and impacts our future perceptions and decisions.  In other words, it has a past, a present and a future. It just about broke my heart.  I asked group of Christians what was most meaningful for them about Holy Communion.  One man replied, "It's only meaningful to me during Lent." What he had done was anchor the story of the sacrament to one point in time.  It had become an act of memorial, remembering it as an event of the past, limiting its significance and importance to us as Christians.  As we unpack the Lord's Supper, we'll understand why we should never...

Romans 4:1-17 I Corinthians 12:23-26 Are you into genealogy?  Have you ever had your DNA analyzed so you know what your ethnic origins come from.  It's fund to discover that.   Understanding our spiritual DNA and where we're coming from may help us appreciate our traditions, like the sacrament of Holy Communion. Usually we define DNA as what passes on physical traits, determining how how our bodies work and look.  Yet, we are more than just biological machines.  Our families and the communities we grew up in passed along values and traditions that also shape who we are. In Romans 4:1-17 and I Corinthians 12;23-26, we find that our spiritual DNA as Christians and as United Methodists is made up of our faith, our belief in God and the traditions that help teach us about Jesus and God's grace and pass the faith from generation to generation.  One of those traditions is Holy Communion. WHAT WE BELIEVE AS UNITED METHODISTS Holy Communion i...

Matthew 7:7-11 Lent is a time of preparation.  Originally, it was a time when new Christians prepared for baptism and reception into the community of the church on Easter Sunday.  Today, Lent is a time for reflection and the practice of spiritual disciplines as we prepare for the celebration of Christ's resurrection and his promise of eternal life.  This year, we're going to grow in our knowledge and understanding of the Lord's Supper both through the proclamation of the Word and the engagement with God's grace through this sacrament each week during Lent. In today's message, look for three important words, all of them action words: come, receive, expect. In the movie, "The Polar Express," the young hero of the story doesn't believe in Santa Claus.  His research and experience have proven to him that he's correct.   Believing as he does, he doesn't expect a magical Christmas train haunted by the ghost of a hobo to pick him up and...