Pastor's Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 12:28-36 bible study (August 5, 2024)

August 5, 2024:  Monday Bible Study on the Gospel of Mark 12:28-36

Buenos Dias - Good Day to you this morning. May the LORD of all Creation enfold you with His Love and grant you strong growing faith in His Son our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We all need to be praying for calm and conversation between Middle Eastern nations. Our world, and the world of revenge that is currently playing out in the Middle East is proof of our readings for today in Mark.

In our reading for today we find a Scribe who comes to Jesus asking Him, what is the first commandment of all the commandments? We should all know Christ's answer to this query. But over the centuries there had been a list of writers, prophets, and leaders like David who had addressed the laws by which a person of faith must live. It was taught by rabbis and religious leaders that Moses had received 613 precepts on Mt Sinai, 355 laws according to the days of the year, and 248 for the generations of man. But David comes along and states in Psalm 15 that there were only 11. We can all read these in the Psalm. Isaiah came along and reduced them to 6. See Isaiah 33:15. Micah wrote in 6:8 that there were only three. Let's see what Micah had to say.  For this prophet they were 1) to do the Lord's Justice. 2) to love mercy. 3) to walk humbly before God. And, later in Isaiah 66:1 there were only two. 1) To restrain from judging others. 2)  To do God's justice. Finally, the prophet Habakkuk whittles it down to one! "The just shall live by faith."

Jesus takes Old Testament Scripture and refines it. Deuteronomy 6:4 "Hear O Israel, the LORD your God is one LORD."  This phrase is named the Shema. It is meant to direct the faithful. It is an imperative to hear. We have imperatives in our own language. When the children are being rowdy and not hearing any direction from the adults we may loudly say "Listen!"  Even our street sign with the words STOP on it are an imperative. The Shema is the foundation for monotheism that was certainly at the heart of the faithful of the Hebrews (Jews) and the current Jewish faithful. But there is more. In Leviticus 19:18 we see "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  Jesus puts these two passages together to come to the Great Commandment and its second, satisfying the Scribe who had asked the question. In fact, Jesus found this Scribe to a person of great faith and having the fullness of all that the Bible reveals about what is really most important for all people who have faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the place where you and I can never go wrong if we allow the Spirit's guidance in our faith! But it is also the place in our lives of faith where we so often fall miserably short. The simplicity of "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and the second to it is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Its strikingly simple, but for you and me, extraordinarily difficult in our faith journey. We encounter the need for this Great Commandment every day, from minute to minute, and hour to hour. From the man or woman on the street median, to the person sitting next to us in worship, to others who we will never see, but for whom our faith calls for our lovingkindness, and the most difficult, to offer our love to those we loathe in this life.  I want you to know that I am saying that right along with you I certainly have miles to grow in my own life as I shepherd Christ's flock and pray for His guidance and courage to be all that these two commandments ask of me. We all need to know that worship is not just a Sunday morning thing that we do, it is instead what we do with every minute that is also our worship. So, is our worship right with God? Are we God's justice for others? Do we love God fully all of the time? What is really the god that we love the most in our lives? These questions and more are good for us to ask ourselves every day. For Jesus, the answer to every one of these questions is answered in the Great Commandment and its second.

God bless you all, and may your worship be constant and your prayers to the Father endless.

In Christ's love, Pastor Kim

Pastor's Ponderings: Old Testament bible study on Nehemiah 9:20-37 (August 1, 2024)

August 1, 2024:  Thursday Bible Study on the Old Testament book of Nehemiah 9:20-37

May God bless you and keep you throughout this day.

I am happy to be back with you again this morning. We are getting our two 18-year-old boys ready to start at Pima this fall. Yesterday was the day to go get each of them a really good computer.  Yikes! Even on sale they were still expensive. I know that each one of us is concerned about our personal economy, and my family is no exception. Our summer weekly offerings at church have not been meeting the budget. Our community in Christ has rarely been able to claim lots of reserves, so that means that just like so many of us at home, the church is living from offering to offering, so when we have a low offering week, it gets pretty tough to handle the necessary expenses.  I want you to know that I am thankful for your difficult decisions about your giving. Sometimes we have no choice but to lower offerings, but sometimes we forget that when that time is over, we need to move our offerings back to where they were, and if you are fortunate enough to be able to increase your offering... that is wonderful. Though my family's personal income has greatly reduced this year, we are working to give a tithe of our current income.  Over the years we have been able to give 19 to 20 percent of our total income, but like you, our expenses have also increased, so in response to this need in our church, we have committed to giving more. I can tell you it won't be easy, but we are so thankful for all that the LORD has done for us, and American is His Church, so we will do it.  Please don't think that if you can't increase your giving that anyone will think less of you, your giving is always between you and God, and God rejoices in the sacrifices you offer through your giving.  This is such a great transition into our Nehemiah reading for today.

In Nehemiah's prayer today, we find yet another iteration of the story which the people carried in their hearts and minds about their exile, and their later return to Jerusalem. Nehemiah's prayer reveals how the people, and he himself, see the place of the Judahites in their post exile world. The text tells us that the people now see themselves as serfs, people who must pay tribute to the King of Persia based on what they produced on the land which had formerly been their independent and promised land. They had enjoyed God's abundant blessings, but in enjoying the benefits of the land of Israel, they had failed to remain in the Covenant relationship that God had established for them, and now the consequences of their faithlessness are still present even though they had returned to the promised land. It was now under the control of the Persians and would be also in generations to come under the reign of the Greeks, and then the Romans, and today is in a constant struggle to maintain their independence battling against their own relatives. (Jews and Arabs are half-siblings through Abraham.)  Ishmael and Isaac were both children of Abraham, and both had promises from the LORD to richly provide for them. I guess their battle is over who is going to get what from the estate of the Father in Heaven when all is said and done.  This text indicates that God is responsible for putting this series of overlords in place with continuing power to subjugate the Judahites because they fell away from His Covenant.

As we all know, there are consequences for our actions, including the ones which offend God. We must remember that God is always involved in our lives, constantly involved, so that we might join the Judahites in being able to say, "This is the way that You have treated us, and we cannot complain!"  The good news is that even in the midst of the consequences we suffer, the LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob always remains faithful toward us, and through Christ has moved to restore us to righteousness before His judgement. We are saved! And, when we are in trouble it never hurts to appeal to God for His assistance. God is loving, gracious, compassionate, and committed to us throughout our lives. When we are in trouble with consequences of our own doing, it still never hurts to seek God's forgiveness and help. Remember, He Loves us all of the time, not just when we are being obedient to His 10 rules for living right with Him, and with every person, because we are His much-loved creation. But like the Judahites, sometimes God chooses to let us stew in our self-created mess for a while.

Thank you for spending this time with me this morning.

In Christ's love, Pastor Kim

Pastor's Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 12:18-27 bible study (July 30, 2024)

July 30, 2024:  Tuesday Bible Study on the Gospel of Mark 12:18-27

May the LORD'S gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation fill you with hope today and always.

Please continue to offer prayers for those who are ill. But this past Sunday we received wonderful news from Camille at worship. Her blood work shows no sign of cancer. Her care regimen over the past several years has truly done its work and destroyed the cancer that she has struggled against. Thank you, LORD! This next week we have our Gospel music Sunday worship followed by our Hawaiian themed carry-in meal. Thanks in advance for your creativity and preparations. I hope to see you this Sunday for worship and good food.

This morning, we continue with chapter 12 in the Gospel of Mark. For the first time in this Gospel, we are encountered with the other, less often written about, religious leaders. They are the Sadducees. It really is interesting, because in so many ways we usually think of the leaders of the temple in terms of their conservatism. The Pharisees, and priests were indeed conservative, but the Pharisees used both the law and the prophets as their guides for the body of Jewish Law which they saw as the guiding principles for all of those rules for every aspect of a faithful Jew's living. However, the Sadducees were even more conservative, not believing in any life after death, or angels, or spirits, and certainly giving credence to only the first five books of the Bible, what is normally called the Torah. Please note that the Pharisees came to believe in a resurrection based on their own study of Scripture and discernment while they were held in exile in Persia. It is interesting that people with such diverse thinking and theological ideation could exist side by side, but evidently, both groups of religious leaders found Jesus to be a serious threat to their ways of thinking and learning and living.  To be honest, Jesus was a threat to their wealth and authority, regardless of who it was. So, Jesus steps right up to confront them with what you and I know to be the Truth. The Sadducees wanted to impose the world of physical relationships on the Resurrection. Jesus makes it clear that neither heaven nor God are bound by the Jewish Torah in heaven. His inference is that we will all know one another, but not in the ways that we know one another in this world. In this world we have always wanted to make heaven an extension of all of the good things that we believe measure something important, like streets paved in gold, but Christ knew, and we have learned from Him, that Heaven is being in the presence of the Holy Trinity, the One True God, and that it will all be so much more than we could ever have hoped for, or dreamed of.  It is my belief from the Orthodox Christian community that the hosts of heaven are busily present at every reading of the Word, and at every celebration of Communion. For me that means that every time I receive the Sacrament of the Altar, my parents, and grandparents, and everyone I have known are there celebrating along with all of the heavenly hosts. Those who now know for eternity that the joy of the Resurrection is real and true. Jesus also brings to us, a saying that is a little more difficult to understand. God is not the God of the dead! What Jesus is saying is that once a person has received from God His gifts of forgiveness, life, and Salvation, that person will never die. The grave becomes the gate to eternal life with the LORD. All of this is why we celebrate life when our loved ones depart from this physical world to God's Heavenly gift. In Christ we are alive in this world, and will be alive in the next, our heavenly home.

With love in Christ, Pastor Kim