Sunday, Jan. 14, 2018 (full size gallery)
A cold Sunday with ice strips covering the river. We had 34 at 11am.
Today was the Congregational Meeting. The election of new Vestry members is the main business. Johnny Davis and Eunice Key replace Becky Fisher and Elizabeth Heimbach. The reports reviewing 2017 are here.
During the Sunday service the following spoke in reference to the 2017 reports – Becky Fisher, Helmut linne von Berg, Rob Dobson, Eunice Key, Ben Hicks, Catherine Hicks. Videos are here.
We also celebrated Cookie’s 75th birthday and birthdays of Susan Tilt and Marilyn Newman as well as the Tilt’s wedding anniversary (53 years) and Cookie and Johnny Davis (33 years). Wow!
The tie between the meeting and the scriptures is the concept of discipleship which is how we live the faith. We are called to a living faith, a way of life that embodies our relationship with God in all that we do. We do not do good works to get into heaven, nor do we simply pray a prayer of salvation to get into heaven. Rather, it is about a transformation that takes place, and that transformation is manifested in us when we see Christ in the needs of others–in the naked, the sick, the imprisoned, the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized. , Jesus declares that there is a judgment, and the judgment is based on how we live out our faith. We separate ourselves based on our actions.
The sermon took up discipleship with the words "Come and See" in the Gospel. It used the images of Baba Yaga on the bulletin cover. Baba Yaga from Russian folk tales flies around in a mortar, wields a pestle, and dwells deep in the forest in a hut usually described as standing on chicken legs.
Here it is discipleship as a community of Christ.
"We, as the Church, must have legs and be willing to use them to do what Jesus asks of people right up front in the gospels, to follow him. God is always calling us to move out into the world as the body of Christ.
"And when we say to others, “Come and see!” we aren’t talking just about our building, or our congregation at worship, or our food distribution.
"We’re asking people to come and see what happens in a household of God when it remembers that it has legs, and follows Jesus out into the world to do the work of Jesus, hoping to be a part of God’s work of making Jesus visible and alive and active in the world. "
Today’s readings extend the call to discipleship. In 1 Samuel, the voice of the Lord awakens a sleeping Samuel, who responds with attentive obedience. Paul outlines how those called by God are to honor their physical bodies. Jesus calls his first disciples Philip and Nathanael with the simple invitation, Follow me (v. 43).
First Samuel focuses on the man who ushered Israel through the political transition from judges to kings. Samuel united in himself many of the roles of the tribal confederacy period of Israel’s history. He was a Nazirite dedicated to the Lord, a judge, a prophet, a priest and the reluctant leader of the movement to place a king over Israel.
Today’s reading recounts the call of Samuel in the temple at Shiloh. Shiloh was at that time the resting place for the ark, the throne for the divine presence on earth. The setting in the temple and the time, probably just before dawn since the lamp was to burn all night, are traditional for divine revelation.
The Epistle considers the special role of baptism. Paul calls the Corinthians to remember their spiritual status effected through baptism. They have been freed from guilt, united with the people of God and placed into right relationship with God. Now their lives are to exemplify the moral effects of conversion.
Paul points out that Christian freedom is not only deliverance from the law, it is freedom for the service of God. Christian freedom is qualified by communal and personal duty, by consideration of the nearness of the end, and by relationship to Jesus and to the Spirit.
Paul knows that salvation embraces the whole person. Physically, the body incorporates the human personality and so is the instrument of relationship with God and with one another. Spiritually, the body is a temple that contains the Holy Spirit and so is sacred and must not be profaned by sinful behavior.
After John’s prologue (1:1-18), his gospel presents Jesus’ significance by not recounting the baptism. Instead, it accords him a sequence of titles in 1:29-51 that summarize the gradual understanding of Jesus’ identity by his followers.
Nathanael’s skepticism about Nazareth may rest on its obscurity, for it is never mentioned in the Old Testament, in contemporary historical accounts or in early rabbinical writing. Or he may distrust the whole region of Galilee, whose inhabitants were regarded by strict Jews as ethnically mixed and religiously impure.
The “greater things,” which Jesus promises that Nathanael will see, begin with the first sign in Cana (2:11) and culminate in Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. Jesus is presented as the point of contact between heaven and earth, as the locus of divine glory. The sequence of titles in this chapter sets forth a process of understanding that the disciples did not complete until after the resurrection.