Matthew 8:1-4,16-17 A lot of the time you can keep your health issues to yourself. You don’t have to announce them to the world if you don’t want to. You can have as much privacy as you like. But it’s different with infectious diseases. And in a time of pandemic, it’s very different. People are hyper-alert to any signs of illness in themselves or the people around them. I know. Whenever I sneeze into my mask, I can feel people giving me the side eye and inching away. It was like this, but worse, in the ancient world with leprosy. Anyone who had leprosy was shunned. Leprosy was serious business. It meant potentially disfigurement, rotting skin, and loss of limbs; something highly contagious and incurable. People believed that merely touching a leper could cause you to become infected. And so the lepers in Biblical times were banned from community life. […]
Continue readingMonth: February 2021
One Piece at a Time
Isaiah 40:21-31 ; Mark 1:29-39 There are many stories of creation, coming from a variety of different cultural and religious traditions. We know best the two creation stories in Genesis. And we know them in a different way than we might know others, outside our religious tradition. But they are stories, like the others. And the reason we need such stories is simply because a story can contain greater, deeper truth sometimes than a whole pile of factual statements. There’s the old saying, a picture paints a thousand words. I think of stories as word pictures. They use words imaginatively to paint pictures that help us understand who we are and where we came from, and why we are here. The two stories in Genesis about how the world came into being, the story in chapter one, about the seven days of creation, and the story in chapter 2, about Adam […]
Continue readingEveryday Freedom
1 Corinthians 8:1-13 Back when I was just beginning to explore my call to ministry, I was a member of a church in Pennsylvania. I had just made my decision to attend seminary and pursue a Master of Divinity degree. I was at a presbytery meeting one day standing around with a few pastors who were offering me their personal advice about seminary. One of these men said, “You’ll be fine as long as you keep your eyes and ears shut.” That struck me as counterproductive, but I got his meaning. His idea was the knowledge they want to give you in seminary will not help your faith, but hurt it. For him, such knowledge is a threat to the gospel. It’s possible that there were some seminary professors who looked down on him, back when he was in school. Maybe he pushed back on some of their new ideas […]
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