Luke 6:20-31 This week our book discussion group gathered together to talk about the most recent book we have read: Ordinary Grace. A man named Frank looks back on one particular summer in his childhood. 1961 in a small town in Minnesota. He was 13 years old, his brother Jake was 9. And in that summer, they confronted death for the first time. It wasn’t as though they knew nothing of death, actually. Their father was a minister, and they had been to plenty of viewings and funerals in their childhood already. But this summer was different. There were four deaths for these young boys: lives taken by tragic accident, by violence, by unknown causes. Four deaths they met at close proximity. All four, lives taken too soon. And throughout the story there is the question of faith – and grace. How does faith carry us through times of loss? How […]
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To Be Blessed
Jeremiah 17:5-10; Luke 6:17-26 Rachel Naomi Remen is a doctor – she was, perhaps, genetically disposed to be a doctor. She comes from a family tree full of doctors and nurses. But in addition to all the medical persons in her orbit there was, she says, one mystic – her grandfather the rabbi. Her grandfather taught her about blessing. For her fourth birthday, her grandfather gave her a story. He said, Rachel, this is the story of the birthday of the world. In the beginning there was only holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. Then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. But then there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the wholeness in the […]
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