Today was like a homecoming with Mike and Marilyn Newman back from Key West and Helmut and Susan Linne von Berg back from Florida and a cruise. Ruth also paid a visit from Maryland and enlivened our Adult Christian Ed (which had 11).
We had 38 in attendance on a cloudy/foggy day with mild temperatures. The weather
brought the moss back to the grave yard and a hush amidst the spring setting. Robert Frost once wrote "The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on." And it did move on here in the early afternoon.
We also celebrated Johnny Davis birthday happening next Saturday.
This week was a continuation of previous Lent sermons of understanding God’s covenant with us (Earlier weeks had considered covenants with Noah, Abraham and the Israelites). The latter is explored more this week. The service revolved around the Numbers Old Testament reading and the Gospel. (The readings are here as well as the bulletin.) In Numbers, the Israelits have complained against God and against Moses. The sermon summarizes the story.
"God sends poisonous snakes among the people, and many of them die from the wounds the serpents inflict on them. So the people go to Moses and confess that they have sinned and they ask Moses to pray that God will take away the poisonous snakes. But God, in his mercy, does not take away the poisonous snakes."
"Instead, God tells Moses to make a poisonous serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live…God didn’t remove the poisonous serpents, but God, in God’s mercy, provided the Israelites with a way to find healing and new life in the midst of death."
The sermon provides a story of one lady Mary Johnson who over time, more than 10 years, had to give up her anger against the murderer of her young son. She had found healing by meeting the murderer and later founding an organization to help reconcile people. Finally the poisonous serpent had left her heart after they reconciled.
The passage from John in the lectionary is the core statement of all Christians’ belief in God. Earlier in the passage Jesus gives us a wonderful image of lifting our eyes up to him and past him to God the Father in heaven, just as the Israelites lifted their eyes to the bronze snake and then looked beyond it to God.
"And God lifted up Jesus, his only son, on a cross. God absorbed all of that poison and hatred that belong to us, and took it into himself. And through the crucifixion, God transforms all our evil and darkness into the loving and light filled mercy that flows eternally from the cross. Through the cross, God forgives us for being the merciless people that we are. God longs for us to do no less for one another."
"Looking at the cross reminds us that when we seek God in our pain, God transforms us and lifts us up and makes us alive together in Christ, filled with mercy and love for one another through God’s grace filled mercy."
The core beliefs help "make us alive and together in Christ:"
1. What will everyone who has faith in Jesus receive?
[Everyone who has faith in Jesus will receive eternal life.]
2. Did God send his Son into the world to condemn the world?
[No, God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but to save the world.]
3. Why do people who do bad things hate the light?
[People who do bad things hate the light because people can see what they have done.]
4. Where do goodness and truth come from?
[Goodness and truth come from God.]
The first day of spring is this week and nature’s beauty show continued to be present at St. Peter’s this Sunday. Blooms from last week had ended – blossoms on the ground but then the pear tree was now in bloom. Nature’s processes continue. Yes, all of this does lift us up:
