Pastor's Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 6:45-52 bible study (January 30, 2024)

January 30, 2024

Tuesday morning Bible Study on the Gospel of Mark 6:45-52

Good morning on this beautiful warm January morning.  I pray that God's revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ in the season after the Epiphany of our Lord is bringing to you a sense of awe and wonder at the power and love of God for your very life.  Today I have a greeting for you from Pastor Ron and Becky who have been busy with their families in MN, and especially busy with the repairs to their home after a flooding event.  They are really hoping to be back in early February.  They send their love.  This week at church we will have our Gospel Music Group leading worship, and after, a carry-in meal.  I hope that you will be able to be with us for what has become a really wonderful worship event. 

Meet us online for our virtual bible study

Today we move on to the next passage in chapter 6 of the Gospel of Mark.  Like the passage about the feeding of the 5000+++, the next story is very familiar.  In verses 35-52 we have the story of the disciples on Galilee in a boat at night, having been sent to cross Galilee by Christ.  What we have probably focused on in this passage is the storm, and Christ's subsequent walking on the water.  For the Scandinavian Lutherans, I grew up in a Swedish Lutheran congregation, this passage was often key.  After all, these people were often sea faring, so the story of Christ saving of the disciples was, and probably still is, very important in these communities.  Though Mark does not speak of Peter walking to Christ, it is the same source which provides that story, and all of the Gospels, but Luke, hold this passage in common with a few twists and differences.  Matthew 14:22-33 and John 6:16-21 are the Gospels who share this story.  Growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan, I should not have been surprised by the bigger than life painting to the right of the altar of Peter falling through the water and reaching out to Christ for His saving hand.  When I go to my home congregation today, the art has been painted over with brilliant colors shaping the half dome of the altar, but it will always be vivid in my mind.   So, we have the storm and Christ's coming on the surface of the stormy waters to save the disciples, but what is written "between" the lines here is really important too. 

We need to know that after such a large and surprising miracle, Jesus was faced with several on-going issues in His life.

1. The break that He had intended to take with His Disciples never happened.  More than 5000 people followed him, needed feeding, healing, and being taught God's Truth, but this ended up becoming far more than just that miracle.  I hope that Christ's sending away the disciples was an act of sparing them from the crowd's exuberance, for Christ had probably grown, grown to the point where He was worried that the people would move to make Him their King.  Remember that this area was best known for its political and religious zealots in all of Israel.  Jesus may well have not wanted His followers to be influenced by this radical thinking.  It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of such a push to crown Christ King.  We don't know how Jesus dismissed the crowds, and we have no record of the witnesses, who would become later authors of the Gospels, of what Jesus said to get them to leave.  Jesus had already been through those 40 days in the wilderness and its temptations for Him.  Perhaps this move to crown Him king was tempting.  After all, we do see Jesus needing to isolate and pray over all of this before He sees the distress of the disciples on Galilee.

2. There was the issue of His responsibility for the disciples.  When He saw the disciples in trouble, he moved immediately to help His friends, just like He moved to feed that hungry mass of people.  Wherever Jesus saw people in need of help, He moved to bring that help to their lives.  That's you and me too.  In our sin we are constantly in need of Christ's help if we are to have hope that we can be right with God.  Christ comes to us through His gift of himself in the bread, (This Is My Body) and the wine, (This Is My Blood).  Our hope comes from His constant Spirit intervention in our lives.  We need His help, and He comes to bring it to us!  We know that the Sea of Galilee event happens late at night because the 4th watch is the last of the night's divisions.  6PM to 6AM.  The fourth watch would be 3AM - 6PM.  It would seem that the disciples had been trying to get across Galilee for quite some time, fighting against the wind to do so.  I know, you might be saying, well aren't they fishermen who are always in boats?  The problem for them was their fishing was always within a few blocks of the shore, and now they are on the body of Galilee, perhaps miles from any shore.  They are in trouble.  Galilee is a fairly shallow body of water; its waves are devastatingly deep and close to each other just like the ones on Lake Michigan.

3.  Another difficulty which Jesus faced every day was the hostility of the orthodox religious community that was always after Him, no matter where He went.  This miracle of the feeding may well have created for them a greater feeling of moving more quickly to stop Jesus.   He was a threat to their lives, its power and wealth and manipulation of the people who were so desperate for God's help!  In addition to the orthodox, there was Herod Antipas, the current Jewish king who was frightened and suspicious of this threatening teacher of God's Truth, who Herod could only see as an enemy. 

Jesus carried all of these things on His heart, and we must not forget that He already knew how this would all end.  Even with all of this before Him, Jesus moved forward with confidence.  For you and me, there is clue here about how we should handle all of the unknown trouble which may come our way.  Jesus conquered the storms of this life, and so can we when we face all the coming troubles and storms with Christ in, with, and around us every moment of every day.   Next Monday we move on to yet another crowd, in need of so much healing and hope.  

In Christ's love, Pastor Kim

Pastor's Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 6:30-34 & 6:35-44 bible study (January 29, 2024)

January 29, 2024

Monday morning Bible Study on the Gospel of Mark 6:30-34 & 6:35-44

Good morning to my dear friends in Jesus Christ.  May His presence in your life today make a positive difference for you and everyone who you meet.

Yesterday, we held our annual meeting of the congregation to conduct business, choose a Gospel Ministry Budget, and elect our Church Council.  Installation of Church Council members will be next Sunday on Gospel Music Sunday.  Please remember that there is no Sunday School Hour due to rehearsal for the singers, and that after service we will celebrate our first Sunday carry-in dinner to the theme of your favorite food to serve to your valentine.  I am looking forward to seeing what you all will be bringing.  I think that I will put together some really good brownies.  O yes, Thanks to everyone who brought brunch type food for the congregational meeting yesterday too.  It was a wonderful buffet.

Please continue to keep Kandice and Lisa Kartchner in your prayers as Kandice now seeks to find a different approach to the treatment of her cancer.   Also pray for my daughter-in-law's father Jeff, who has been diagnosed with an aggressive and hard to treat cancer.

The Feeding of the 5,000 ~ Mark 6:35-44

Today we will look at two passages from Mark 6.  The first is about the return of the disciples from their journeys to carry the Gospel and the Healing of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit out to a larger community of people.  Mark keeps it brief, but we know from his writing that the outreach really was successful.  They return worn thin from all that they were doing, and we discover in a few later lines why that is.  Jesus attempts to take them to a quiet place for a break and some rest.  You and I would probably see this as a time of de-briefing.  But people are so desperate to have access to Christ, that His movements are being watched by the large numbers of people who want to hear His teaching and experience His healing miracles firsthand.  After all, today we would be after a person who was able to cure our aches and pains, and illnesses in the same miraculous way.  In fact, we chase after many of those "miracle" cures, hoping that they are true.  People do not change very much when it comes to their desire for that more abundant health.  And it would seem that people were really quite tired of hearing the judgement and endless rules for that appropriate life before God, while Jesus came bringing the promise of fulfillment of the Decalogue, and with it, the powerful Holy Grace of God which He shared abundantly with anyone who came to him.  The mobs of people who came to Christ for help were never disappointed.  Jesus, as we see here, was, and is, always ready to be available with compassion for all of us, no matter who we are.  All too often, the Church, has historically set about limiting who is acceptable to be a part of the community of believers, but we never see that from Christ!  All of the outcasts of his time were welcome at His Feast of Life every day.  As we move on today to the next passage in Mark 6, we discover that the size of this crowd that went to meet Jesus on the shore of Galilee was massive, 5000 men, and then women and children too.  We can guess that the number for this group must have been close to 10,000 altogether.  They came for the very same reason that we also come to church.  They sought guidance from God.  The One True One who people had been taught was a mean wrath-filled God, ready to never offer His loving kindness, but instead to reign down death and destruction on His created children.  If that is the message of the worship community which you attend, then they are nowhere close to preaching and teaching the true Christ and His Abounding Grace for all people.  Christ's teaching is clear.  Love God above all else and love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Jesus came to teach the how of what seems so simple yet is so difficult for anyone to master.  NO One has done it yet!  That's why we must include faith in the Savior of all of creation.  Only through His merit can we be right with the Father.

And just when we might think that Jesus will respond like we would, He turns to welcome them offering His Compassion and Love for each and every life that comes to Him.  That welcome is one of the hardest things that we have to do, when we are busy deciding whether or not someone deserves the love we have to give in Christ's Name.  We continue to need Jesus' guidance in our lives today too.  It is just one of the reasons why it is so important for us to be in church and part of the faith community.  Not one of us has arrived yet as the one who perfectly conveys the Love of the Lord for the lives of all people.

We are familiar with what happens to all of these people after they have followed Christ and His Disciples along the shore of Galilee.  With so many people present to receive Christ's personal attention, the day of Jesus' caring ministry grows late into the afternoon, and few, if any, of these people were really prepared to be as long as this day has gone.  They were away from their homes, and access to food, But the disciples had prepared enough for themselves according to Mark.  In another Gospel the food is with a child in the crowd.  Jesus tells the disciples that they are to take care of feeding all of the gathered people with the small amount of bread and the salted fish that they have with them.  They indicate that it would take the income of six months to have enough money to buy the bread and fish that would be required to feed the gathered community.  Jesus tells the disciples to get the people to sit down on the patches of green grass in groups of 50 and 100.  The word to describe this is the same word used for how a garden is organized in neat rows.  The fact that there was green grass is an indication that it was likely that this miracle occurred in the spring, perhaps in April.  Christ blesses this small amount of food, and it becomes the presence of a meal for everyone who is gathered.  In the Name of Christ, what may seem humanly small and insignificant truly becomes much for the work of the Gospel.  We see it time and again in the church.  Christ provides for the faithful and their work on His behalf, and it is not usually out of abundance, but out of what would seem to be less than necessary.  Over my 33 years as your pastor, I have seen many times when it seemed like there would not be enough resources to continue, but low and behold what is needed will be made available.  I vividly remember at seminary (residential 4-year-long theological graduate school) we would be down to no milk, mixing carnation dry powdered milk, and the bread was running low, and we knew that we would be out of food in a couple of days.  And then, miracle of miracles, a gift would appear from an unexpected source.  Just enough to buy groceries for a while longer.  When we went to graduate school with our Jeremiah age 3, and our Rachel as less than 1, we committed to giving a tithe of all our work money and any other resources for the work of the church.  Our offerings went to Reformation Lutheran in Pullman on Chicago's far east side, and to 1st Lutheran in Harvey, Ill, our teaching parishes, and then later to our internship site, St. John's Des Moines, IA, and when we returned to school to finish one semester of classes for me, we had no money to pay owed rent, and I was not going to be allowed to finish or be ordained.  God had a different plan in mind for us, and the faith of a SE Michigan church who said that they would pay our final bills at seminary!  This was Christ's miracle of generosity for our very lives and for my ordination to serve the Gospel under call to our first call setting.  The rest you know.  Though raising a family of 8 children, 3 who are our biological children, and adopting 5 children who were considered unadoptable, I can tell you of time after time when Christ intervened with His Grace.  We have received grace upon grace through all of the children.  I think that our blessing has been the greater of theirs and ours.  And I won't even get into the 8 grandchildren, and the others who are just like our own children who we so dearly love.  The power of Christ's Love for each of us is more amazing than we can ever fully know.  The final note about this passage is that there is enough left in abundance for the disciples, 12 baskets.  This has always been our experience with grace and the provision of Christ, and I hope that you know this in your life as well.

Thank you for allowing me to guide you through this portion of Mark.

In Christ's Love and Grace, Pastor Kim

Pastor's Ponderings: Old Testament bible study on Ezra 7:1-10 (January 24, 2024)

January 24, 2024

Thursday morning Bible Study on the Old Testament book of Ezra 7:1-10

Blessings for you this morning in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Just a note for us all about the name change for LIRS (Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service) This Church-wide board is how Alice and her family were welcomed to Tucson, and it is how we became connected to her need for support as she worked to make a place for her family for housing, education, employment, and much more.  We were truly blessed to have the resources from our Red House sale to invest in the Behling-Kress House (White House) at the north side of our parking lot.  And then came Alice and her family to become a part of our Christian Fellowship.  LIRS will now take on a new name but will continue their fine work.  They are now to be known as Global Refuge.  We are in an unprecedented time of population movement on this planet.  People are moving because of crime, famine, economic relief, safety, war, environmental change and global warming.  Just like our families, immigration became a necessity for many of the same reasons.  Global Refuge will help us as a Church address the complexities and realities of this mass movement of millions of people, in addition to moving families from danger to the support of congregations around the United States.  If the Holy Standards of God for Jerusalem still stand for us today, caring for the resident alien in our midst is one of God's great measuring rods for our relationship with Him, just as it was, and is, for Israel.  How do you think we are doing?  Just a question to ponder as we deal with a growing sense of nationalism and isolationism in our country.  Our entire Lutheran History is filled with isolationism.  Every group had to have its own congregation.  Swedes, the Norse, Danes, Finns, Germans, all lived in homogeneous communities and churches.  It took too many years to discover the rich blessings of mixing these heritages, and to allow for that mixing diversity that makes up our congregations today.

The Old Testament book of Ezra

I guess as we talk about Global Refuge, we can certainly connect it to the exiles in Persia moving back to a land which others had taken over for more than forty years.  The Judahites came to restore Jerusalem, the land, and the Holy Temple and seat of the One True God.  Their journey included being driven from their homes and worship, living for 40 plus years in exile in Persia, and finally receiving the support necessary for those who desired to return to head back and to begin the process of restoring their homes and worshiping communities, including the central Temple.

Ezra comes late to this party of restoration, some 100 to 150 years later. However, he comes as a priest and a specialist in the Law of Moses, the Torah.  If you have not heard this before, it is during the exile in Persia that the Pharisees came into existence during the separation of the people from the guidance of Torah for living in harmony with the ten laws of God.  So, in today's text Ezra is not named a Pharisee, but it is his effective role for the exile community returned to Jerusalem.  The first section of today ties Ezra through genetic heritage all the way back to Aaron.  He is also directly connected to Hilkiah, who was a priest of Jeremiah's time and the time of the last great king of Judah, Josiah, and as the Ezra text indicates to a long line of priests.  The text tells us that Ezra was an expert scholar and teacher of the Torah.  This is the definition of those who will later be named Pharisees.  As priest and Torah scholar Ezra is going to be faced with having to step up to move others out, and to restore God's Truth, to those who already have these positions in the new Jerusalem and Temple. 

What we discover through Ezra, is that he comes to teach both human laws and the Law of God.  In the Torah it is the Decalogue (ten commandments) which come from God via Mt Sinai and Moses, 10 laws written by the hand of God.  The remainder of the Torah is human created in support of a way to live in obedience to God's Laws.  This is really important because we already know God's requirement for His relationship with the Hebrews from the time of the wilderness journey from Egypt and the entry of the Hebrews, and all who identify as Hebrews, into the promised land.

God's rule simply says, I will be your God, and you will be my people, if you are obedient to my Law. (10 commandments) Prophets and Ezra came at God's behest to remind the people of this, and to call for reform.  This requirement of God is called the Old Testament Covenant. (Old Testament means the Old Covenant or contract between God and His people.)  Now you need to take the next step.  If there is an Old contract, does that mean that the New Testament is a contract also?  The answer is YES!  And here is the surprise.  It's the same contract.  I will be your God and you will be my children if you are obedient to my Law.  Of course, we know how miserably the Hebrews failed at doing this, and, by the way, we are really no better at it than they were.  But in the New Contract there is an addendum, and His name is Jesus.  By His blood sacrifice, through which He paid the ultimate price for all sin, and now, through Him, we are right with God.  Christ's merit makes this possible for every one of us to live in His gift of faith and be assured of forgiveness of sin, life with God now and forever, and Salvation.   Hence, Paul in Romans, assures us that we are justified by God's Grace, through God's gift of faith.  One of the great values of studying the OT is that it helps us to see how little we can do to really be righteous before God without Christ.

So far, we have been in Ezra 1-6 which concerns the restoration of the Temple, and now we move into 7-10 which tells us about the restoration of the community of people.  Chapter 7-10 happens at least 50 years after chapters 1-6.  This rebuilding in 7-10 is far more than constructing homes.  More importantly it tells us about bringing the new community to restoration before God, and in relationship with one another.  All this echoes the Great Commandment which Christ gives to us in the Gospels.

May God keep you in His Loving Care and bless each of your days with joy and peace.

In Christ, Pastor Kim