Amos 5:16-24 John 17:20-26 In ancient Israel the center of religion was the temple in Jerusalem. Before that it was the tabernacle that they constructed during their time in the wilderness. There was, for hundreds of years, a single place the people went to worship the Lord. And the central act of religion was sacrifice. Not prayer, not reading from scripture or singing hymns, but sacrifice. The book of Leviticus provides in detail all the written laws about how and why to make sacrifices to God. They were called offerings, and there were several kinds. There was a guilt offering, a sin offering, an offering of well-being, a thank offering. The offering might be the grain from your fields, but more often an animal was required – a bull, a sheep, a goat. And if you could not afford one of these larger animals, you could bring two turtle doves. […]
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Who We Are
Mark 1:4-11 I always love this Sunday. The baptism of the Lord. It always comes the Sunday following Epiphany. It’s the one day of the year that we intentionally remember that Jesus was baptized by John, and that we are also called to be baptized into his family. For me, it’s always a treasured opportunity to talk with you about why we baptize, what it means to us. It’s easy to forget about baptism, really. Every new Christian is meant to be baptized, but we do it so infrequently that we seldom think of it. We all get baptized, but only once. And if you were baptized as an infant, as most of us were, you don’t even have any memory of it. Some people don’t even know for sure if they were baptized. Which is interesting to me. It says to me that baptism is sometimes a rather meaningless […]
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