Pastor's Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 4:26-29 (November 20,2023)

As you prepare for the celebration of our nations Thanksgiving day, please be sure to give thanks to God.  All of the benefits that are in our lives are from the Father in Heaven.  May the holiday be filled with joy for you and your family and friends.  At our home we will gather with 17 people.  We will enjoy our meal together, and then I will get an outside fire going in our chiminea that we can enjoy and gather around socially.  Today I am asking prayers for our son Joshua who has been unemployed for six months.  He is interviewing but nothing has developed yet.  We will speak with him again on Thanksgiving Day.  Prayers too please for Becky P's former husband Dave.  He has been diagnosed with lung cancer.  He is a Lutheran Pastor in the upper midwest. May the Lord bless him with healing and sustain his hope in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

Today we continue our study of the statements which are made, according to Mark, sequentially by Jesus.  As I told you, they appear as separated statements in Matthew and Luke.  This statement is unique, because it is only found in the Gospel of Mark.  What it does do though is fit well with the pattern of Jesus to speak in terms that would be easily understood by the people to whom He was preaching.  They understood the growing of crops in fields or private gardens.  So let's get started.  The best interpretation of the beginning of this passage is to use "reign of God" in place of Kingdom of God.  This passage is talking about the day when all of the world will come to know God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of Life. (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).  We know that there are many believers in God, Jewish, Moslem, and Christian in the world, but there are hundreds of millions of people and more who do not yet know the One True God!  Yet, it is God's plan that every person know Him, and indeed that the whole of the Universe comes to know Him as God.  

So in using the imagery of growth of crops, Christ is telling those who are with him, and through Mark, us, that the wisdom of this parable helps us to know how this all inclusive knowing of God will unfold before us.

1. It tells us, that in the face of such an overwhelming task, to which we all are called, it is only by God's hand that what seems to be a small beginning will unfold before us, and we will not really know how it has been moved to happen.  It is like the navel orange tree in my north yard.  It get fragrant flowers in the Spring, and then they all fall off the tree, and look as I might, I rarely can see any thing that looks like a beginning orange.  Yet later in the month of June, oranges appear as little green balls that get bigger through the summer and fall months.  I can't see them get bigger if I sit at the tree and watch, but certainly they do.  I know they will be ready by late December, and that they will be bright orange in color.  That color appears in the same way, without my help.  This whole process occurs by the hand and power of God through His creation.  By Christ's words in this parable we can know that the unfolding of this faith knowledge is happening as I write this study, and as you read it.  God is amazing in the ways that He chooses to work in His Creation.  What I am really talking about is how the Freedom of the Will is moved to change.  It is, at first, very self centered.  Yet God's faith gift continues to move with quiet power to bring itself into the life of God's children, and to convince the self that there is a Holy One above all things, and most certainly above me, and with me and you.  It is constantly moving into the lives of all living things.  

• a. Sometimes, the growth of the reign of God is imperceptible, but if we wait, perhaps hundreds of years, we will know that God has always been working.

• b. So we know that the reign of God has always been growing.  It is constant!

•  c. And like plants that are cared for, the reign of God is inevitable.  

This all makes such good sense to us, yet we are continuing to see the work of the Gospel dismissed by our youngest generation, and boomers seem to think that they don't need the Church to have faith and to be faithful.  The Church is the gift of Christ for His people.  It will be restored one day to its importance in everyone's lives.  

This parable also tells us that like the produce of the land which will mature and be harvested, because that is the inevitable outcome.  That the reign of God shall have its consummation just as inevitably because it is God who is making it all happen.  By the way, have you been watching, and then wondering if the reign of God is going to make it?  

You should only have doubts if you are thinking that people will never get the work done.  What looks impossible, with God's Work, Jesus Christ's forgiveness, and the Spirit's guidance, everything that God's Reign is meant to bring, will be provided.  

Finally, it is a foolish farmer who has not gotten ready for the harvest,  So what we need to know - it is our time to be certain that we are getting ready and will be prepared for the reign of God to become our full reality, along with the rest of God's creation.       

I am getting all of my vaccinations this morning, so tomorrow's study may be late, or not happen, if I am off my feet recovering. 

In Christ Love,   Pastor Kim.

Pastor's Ponderings: Old Testament Bible Study on Ezra 3:6-13 (November 16, 2023)

May the bountiful Love of God be in, with, and around you this morning.

This morning let us continue to pray for all of the victims of the war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas. In our world it is easy to point a finger at one side or the other, but the harsh reality is that there are no winners in a war, not the ones who started it, or the ones who will finish it. What is needed are the prayers of the world for the wisdom of God, and His Peace to be in all of their hearts, to intervene. Please pray for our member Annette who had 14 injections around her spinal column to try to stem the pain issues with her back. At this time, I am not so sure that the direction she has consented to is the best. Pray for relief of pain and healing for her.

Today we get a better idea of how the rebuilding of the "House of God" began to take shape. Unlike the Romans in 70CE who obliterated the city of Jerusalem and the Temple, the Babylonians destroyed the temple, yet left partial walls standing on the site. That meant to those who were coming back, there was at least a framework visible and usable for worship. In the seventh month that reconstruction was only just barely beginning. After two years, under the guidance of Cyrus, and funding for the project, it all began to come together. The passage talks about how arrangements were made with local people, though from other tribes, craftsmen to undertake the immense task. And though Solomon stripped the cedar forests of what we know today as Lebanon, that is where the people return after a 50-year growth period to acquire the cedars that would be required to do the work, and just like our midwestern people did in the 1800s, used water to move larger logs into place. They floated in the Mediterranean along the coast, and then dragged or carried up land to Jerusalem. Of course, it is critically important that this work is overseen by the ones who know what the law of Moses requires, and also the Psalms of David offer guidance for the sense of what must be present to do this all really right, and they are the Levites, the traditional priests of the Temple. These Levites would not only oversee the building, but they would also get the whole affair started with their vestments, trumpets, and cymbals presenting quite a picture of the pomp and circumstance of this event for their own people, and for people who were not Jewish or those who had returned from Persia, from their exile.

When a new church is started, there has already been a great deal of preparation done. A mission developer has already been at work, preaching the Gospel, and finding people who are willing to make a commitment to the chartering of the new place of worship and community gathering. When the ground is broken to begin construction there is always a large group of people present who are filled with excitement, praying with thanksgiving to God, and singing hymns of praise. We see a very similar response on the part of the people who gather for the start of the Temple reconstruction in Jerusalem. It is probably good for us to know that the Temple was never fully returned to its former glory as a "Palace for God", yet this event of getting started brings great excitement and emotions of joy. However, there were, according to Ezra, tears of sadness for those who knew the glory of the previous Temple structure before its destruction. It is no different when a church, which has been a vibrant member home for many years, and for many of its members, must close its doors, be sold, and all too often, deconstructed for other kinds of structures to occupy the land. Those who would have remembered the previous Temple would have been in their very senior years. The very same emotions that all of us might feel in such a situation were part of the community gathered at the rebuilding of the Temple which would not any longer be Solomon's Temple, but the renewed worship place for the returned exiles.

Next Thursday in our bible study of Ezra, we discover that all of this excitement, and the construction, was not without major problems.

Thanks for taking some minutes with me today.

In Christ's Love, Pastor Kim

Pastor's Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 4:25 bible study (November 14, 2023)

Grace and Peace to you in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I am thankful to God for your willingness to be a part of this on-going Bible Study which comes to you from American Ev. Lutheran Church in Tucson, AZ. After the pandemic it became more difficult to gather, and we had gotten out of the habit of coming together in person each week for a Tuesday morning Bible Study at my office. Since then, I have been doing three shorter studies online each week. I would be interested in hearing if you would like to return, or perhaps. come for the first time to an in-person study after the first of the year. That is certainly something which we can move back into if we can gather a group of at least three or four people to come. Let me know please.

One of my 17-year-old young men who is a senior in high school this year stated to me this morning that he was very surprised that 2023 was already close to being over, and that it would already be 2024 sooner than he had really thought about. I suspect this comes from the fact that he knows this next year will find him job hunting for a summer employment, and having to start thinking about what it might be like to not have Mom and Dad cover all the expenses, cleaning (though he does help some) laundry, cooking, and, heaven forbid, he will have to buy his own fruit loops. It is his go to cereal. I told him that he will feel like he has just turned around a couple of times and he will, if all goes well in his life, be looking at being a senior citizen of 74 years and wondering how it all went by so fast! No wonder our lifetime acts of generosity, compassion, and love are so important in this life. With time flying by so fast, is it any wonder that there is barely enough time to truly be the children of God in this world. I am thankful to have parents who took me to Sunday School, and nearly every Sunday, to church. Christ's gift of faith has shaped my life for as long as I can remember, and I cherish the 74 years with which I have been blessed. I am thankful to God for His abundant and forgiving love that is mine through our Savior, Jesus Christ. At 74 the flame of faith and living thankfully are still powerfully present, and I would say, continuing forward empowering my service of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in my pastoral call, which fills every day with new hope in the Lord.

Our passage today is Mark 4:25. These words from Jesus might seem to be Wisdom language, and in some ways they are. But in this third independent comment of Christ in this section of Mark, they are far more. Christ sees in our lives how our interactive faith relationship with Him can and will continue to grow throughout our lives if we are involved and living every day as a day of thanksgiving to God by our faith active living and life-commitment to being His children. The reality in our lives is that if we fail to remain active in any part of who we are we will begin that long slide to no longer being able to do what we could before. So, let's look at a few of these things.

1. Perhaps one of the most important is knowledge. We all know that as we age, some things seem to float away, like remembering skills that we used to have pretty much together. Personally, I think of learning to speak Spanish in high school. I was pretty fluent, but not like my wife who used to read novels in Spanish. I still know some of it but considering that I worked for Stokely Van Camp as a migrant interpreter in high school, I am nowhere near proficient anymore. I can pull some of it together to offer a blessing, or a greeting, or get a drink of water, or to ask where the bathroom is. Pretty basic stuff. But our member Nancy G speaks fluently after using Spanish in her work life. The same is true for me about piano. I am a better player, even with the arthritis in my hands, today than I was 15 years ago. I can take on more challenging pieces, and even do pretty well with the drummer who sets an insistent tempo with which I must keep up regardless of errors and my own desired tempo changes. Practicing between 6 and 8 hours a week, continuing to challenge myself, has meant that my playing is getting stronger and more competent as I play for worship. And since you are studying the Bible with me several times a week, you are getting your knowledge boosted regularly, and you must know that it is really good for me to.

2. Effort is something that can leave us too. We all know that we have to be intentional as we age about keeping up our flexibility and strength. It is true for every one of us. Even when we are younger, if we assume the strength that we had as teenagers will continue into our twenties, we are in for a big shock. The saying, "Use it or Lose It" is a truth that we all face. My first job was at least in part moving hundred-pound blocks of ice in the only icehouse in town in the 60's. Later at another workplace, I brought in all of the heavy boxes of sale goods, and I even helped to move safes from our office supply store. As a young married, I work hauling canoes in the late spring through the leaf color season in the fall. Some days I would handle as many as 120 canoes by myself. After that time, my life became quieter, though for about 7 years I cut and split black oak logs for heat in our turn of the century farmhouse. Needless to say, graduate school does not contribute to much exercise, and neither do calls to parishes. Over the years that nice trim strong muscled body has gone away. Now I swim with mostly aerobic style pool exercises.

3. Skills and Crafts can also be lost without use. If this is your gift, I don't think it is mine, and if you fail to participate in doing that special skill or craft it will definitely weaken over time. In our current house I have done work on a small tile floor, and tiled the back splash in the kitchen, I also, along with some help from my boys who are now in their 30s and 40s, built our entire Scandinavian style kitchen. Along the way I also had the expertise of some of our members. As I think back that some 13 or 14 years now, I can't really believe that I built all of the cabinets and drawers, and doors pretty much on my own on the living room floor and the dining room table. Today I would have less of that beginner’s confidence to take that on.

4. Finally, another character trait that we can lose is our ability to carry responsibility. This is one that we hope will strengthen in all of us, and we are especially hopeful that it will be a trait that our children will have all of their lives. However, if we avoid this by placing blame on others for our shortcomings, or if we just, plain old, will not do it, then our abilities in this area will gradually seem impossible to gain again. This is certainly true, as our Lord knew it would be, when it comes to this statement. That those who have will have more, and those with little will have even less.

Though it seems harsh to say this, we all know that it is true. Continue to participate, and faith grows and matures and gives us the growing gift of confidence in our Savior and His promises. However, if we have fallen away, when we really need our faith in time of crises, it won't be substantial enough to carry us through our troubles. When that happens, despair sets in and takes over our lives. When the disciples and people with whom Jesus was speaking hear this, they have all probably been caught in the despair of the true practice of their faith, and because of that, many will have chosen to let their relationship with God fall away. On one hand you have the faith of the Romans in their multiplicity of gods, and on the other you see the corruption of your own religious leaders as they lead with money and power as their gods. Falling away seems only natural, yet Jesus makes it clear that doing so will bring difficult consequences and loss.

Monday we will see a parable unique to Mark. Thanks for being with me today.

In Christ's love, Pastor Kim