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 […]
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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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