Pastor’s Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 4:13-20 Bible study (November 6, 2023)

On this beautiful morning may the hope that is ours, that has strengthened the Saints in Christ for 2000 years, bring that very same strength of faith and hope to your day.

Yesterday we celebrated All Saints/Day of the Dead by placing an Ofrenda on the main floor of the worship space decorated with flowers and offering the worshipers an opportunity to place notes and pictures of their Triumphant loved ones on the Ofrenda.  It was a beautiful way to remember those who have joined Christ in His Heavenly Kingdom, who have gone before us.  Though this is the first time that we have done this on All Saints Day, it certainly has made the day even more significant for all of us.

Coming up at Church.  Next Sunday we will celebrate the 90th birthday of our member, Della.  After church we will have a reception on the patio.  On the 19 of the month we will have a pumpkin pie fellowship on the patio after worship, as we come together to give thanks to God for the abundant blessings of the nation in which we live.  The last Sunday of November is Christ the King Sunday and the end of the current church year.  We will start a new church year on December 3, which is Advent 1, and the day on which we share a chili luncheon after the worship service.  That Sunday is also our Gospel Music Sunday.  I hope that you will be able to be with us on that day as we begin our period of preparation for the celebration of our Lord's birthday on Christmas Eve.  This year we will be purchasing a herd of goats through the ELCA Global Barnyard to share with a family or small village to increase their food supply and economic security.  We would be happy to have you contribute for this purpose.  During Advent we also bring gift cards to the church for their distribution to families in need before Christmas.  At American we are diligent about our reaching into the world with the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Today we continue our bible study of the Parable of the Sower and the seeds in Mark 4:13-20.  As a beginning comment, let me say that in Mark we often see that the disciples are being a bit slow to pick up on the meanings of Christ's parables.  This is a characteristic of Mark.  The disciples and the people around Jesus would know well about the casting of seeds as a way of planting a field.  Today all of that is mechanized, or, if we are doing our home garden, we don't just cast seeds on the ground, instead, we would normally take great care to get them deep enough, but not too deep, appropriately separated for room to grow and produce.  But for the seed sower in Jesus' day, casting the seed would mean that it might fall onto all of these different types of soil.  Now we will take some time to consider all of the different types of soil about which the parable speaks.  

1. The side of the road.  This packed harder than hard area, trampled by the sower, the sower's animals, and wagon wheels would not be a viable place for the seed to take root and grow.  The sower, will inevitably run into some seed making it to that area along side the field.  The sowers are disciples, believers, and Jesus in the case of this story Jesus tells, so even Jesus knows that there will be hard hearted people who be unable to receive His Word. They are closed to the possibilities that the Word of God can bring to them.  These people have no interest in allowing faith to steer their lives.  This indifference make it nearly impossible for the Word to penetrate into their sense of self.  We need to understand that this is exactly what has happened to people who may have had faith, but even more to those whose lives have always been closed to Christ's Word.   Staying away from the church for a year or longer during the pandemic created in many people who were formerly faithful and active, a sense of being able to care for themselves and their emotional and spiritual needs.  Their hearts and minds have become closed / hardened to the Word of God for their lives.  The seed of the Word which once fed their lives no longer falls on an open field with good soil, now it comes to rest on lives which seem to have little or no interest in their life with Christ.

2. Next is the rocky ground.  We have all seen it.  Fields which yield tons of big rocks every year as they work their way to the surface.  They stand in piles alongside of the field they were taken from.  But if there are too many rocks, seeds may sprout in the limited soil, and then whither as the sun heats the rocks and the plants fail due to the lack of depth in the soil.  There can be great enthusiasm about becoming a Christian, but that enthusiasm fails when it becomes obvious that this faith journey is going to take more than just speaking the words "I believe".  Coming to Christ means that there is a call to full time involvement in the relationship.  No wonder Jesus talks about the believers as those who wait for the bride groom to arrive with varying success.  It is always wonderful to have those who are new to the faith in Christ to join our churches, but then they discover that there are big commitments to be made, and sacrifices are called for, and there is always work to be done, and all too often, when this happens, their faith shrinks and disappears.  I remember taking our first four children to a Canadian park on Lake Huron called the Pinery.  It was beautiful, but when it came time to go for a swim, the lake bottom was so full of rocks, much of the excitement and pleasure which we had expected fell away.   Sound familiar?  The joy of knowing the Savior always brings us to the mutuality of the relationship, and giving thanks for the victory of Christ over evil, which brings us to the fullness of God's Grace and Forgiveness.  This means we must say thank you with our very lives if we are to truly receive the Gifts which Christ brings to us as free gifts of God's Grace.

3. The soil full of thorns.   Boy do we know thorns in the desert!  Though some cactus use those thorny plants as a nursery for their early growth and protection from the desert hot son,  little else is able to make it in such thorny circumstances.  These thorns which make our journey with Christ difficult, are the ones where we are so busy that we really cannot commit fully to this relationship with the Lord.  Work, play, commitments with friends, cleaning the house, doing the yard work on the weekend, and many more things that we choose to do, all too often finds us too busy to be involved in our life of faith in the ways which please our Savior.  Isn't it just so easy to stay in bed on that one day each week.  After all, didn't Jesus?  Lives in the 21 century are complicated and busy.  I get that.  What we have learned in the church is that 80% of the work for Christ's Kingdom gets done by the busiest 20% of the members.  We are going to see that these are the people who are the good soil for the seed of Christ's Word.

4. Yes, finally, the good soil, deep and rich, filled with every good thing that brings about incredible growth. The place where there is the right amount of sunshine, warmth, moisture, and nutrients to nurture and grow the seeds.  The ones who are the good soil for Christ's Word, take the time to hear, receive it openly, and take action to share the bounty of what the seed has produced.  The busiest people I know in the church always find the time to do more.  They are truly that wonderful good soil.   In our hymnal we have a song, "Lord Let My Heart Be Good Soil".  As an opposite to the Pinery Park's rocky beaches, the golden sand of the the Lake Michigan bottom was great for digging in your toes, or diving down to grab a handful of that wonderful sand bottom.

It seems that there may be so many who are unable to have a productive relationship with Christ according to this parable.  Yet the call is still there to sow the seeds of God's Word where ever we go, by our words, and through our actions.  In Christ's day the sower could do little more than cast the seed, and then wait of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to provide the right environment for that seed to germinate and grow, and produce its fruit for the well being of all people.  The same is true for us.  It is by the power of Jesus Christ that people come to believe.  We are the sowers of the Word, but through Jesus Christ, the LORD grows the harvest.  

Enjoy the imagery of the Sower and Seed.  Let it fill your senses.  It will open your heart to so many possibilities for Sharing the Gospel with others.       

I am sowing seed for Christ,   

In His Name and By His Love, Pastor Kim

Pastor's Ponderings: Old Testament Ezra 2:1-67 Bible Study

Grace and Peace to you this morning.

Today is the day that you get to practice pronouncing more names that you ever wanted to, and then there is the listing of how many from each family which was exiled in Babylon have made the trip back to rebuild the city of Jerusalem and the Temple.

We might ask why these people are so interested in getting back to their homeland. To understand the dynamic which drew them back all we have to do is look to all of the folks who travel to Europe every year to try to get a hold of where their ancestors lived, what work they did, what property they owned, and perhaps most importantly, why they left at all. For us today many of these places seem like romantic sites to get our lives reconnected, our marriages, and more back together again, yet the process of learning gives something to us that we didn't have before if family records were carelessly maintained. So, what we see before us in Chapter two of Ezra is an attempt to keep records of the Jewish tribes. For me, I am thankful that my grandmother knew so much about her side of the family. I even have a photo of my great great grandfather handling a team of draft horses as they pulled massive logs from the forest to the lake. I have heard the stories of the family's immigration to the United States during the civil war era, I also know the location of family homestead in Sweden. On my Dad's side of the family was a lot of British heritage, and some indigenous heritage as well. We also know that the family traveled two hundred miles by covered wagon from south east Michigan to the area where my Father was born, and the city where I was born and grew up, which is on the lakeshore of Lake Michigan. I know these things because I cared enough to ask, and search for the information. My forebears were the founders and charter members of the church where I grew up. But what about those Jews in exile for 50 years? Notice that all who are going back are descendants of those originally exiled, and they have never seen the Temple, and don't know what, at the time, will be filled with difficulties.

The names and numbers of people who are returning are significant historically for us. This list which is compiled in Ezra 2 helps us to understand who was taken away in the exile of Judah in 587 BCE, yet we know that the list appears to be incomplete because there are some who are returning who cannot prove themselves, or prove by the identification of others to have Jewish heritage. We really shouldn't be surprised by this, after all, it was not only the Jews who were over run by the Babylonians, but those who seized upon the opportunity to return to the area from which their families had come. It is impossible for us to know the totals of the numbers of people who came back, Without taking a few moments to total the numbers that are listed, we would not realize that the total mentioned is not the same as the adding up of all of the numbers. There is a very good reason for this. These names and numbers were recorded in different ways, sometimes people were listed by family name, sometimes by the name of the city from which they had come, or sometimes gathered together by a way that is unclear. Another thing that we would not know without expert Old Testament scholarship is that these numbers and names were gathered over a period of over one hundred years. Some of the returnees came much later than others, and folks trickled back to Jerusalem as the news of how things were going was encouraging.

There is another discussion that we need to have about his verses too. In some way do these passages indicate a failure of God to keep His covenant promises? Absolutely not! In spite of all that has happened to these people, the evidence that these widely varied peoples are returning, even when most of them have never been to their home land, or have never seen the Temple when it was in it's glory, but who still have a sense of being family to one another, with some having been adopted into this community of people, and are now, with the help of the Persian king, Cyrus, going home, is the firm indication that God is keeping His commitment to these heirs of the Hebrews. Another indication is that the people involved in worship at the Temple, all considered Levites of the priestly class, are still being identified in the listing of this passage as such, indicates that they and God have been continuing to be involved with one another while the people were in exile. The numbers of this Levite class indicate how active the Temple was every day before they were all removed in the exile. Just a quick note: the Pharisees gradually came into existence during this exile, and they will be ready to return with a heretofore unknown authority as they participate in re establishing the "true" faith.

One of the things that we can look for in Ezra, and in Nehemiah, is the animosity that will come between those who were taken away into exile, and those who for whatever reason were able to remain in Judah. The people who were left behind or who came back after the first exile of the northern kingdom, see these returning people as very imposing outsiders. There will be difficulties, and this may well be the indicator of the problems between Jews and Samaritans during the life of Christ.

Thanks for being with me today. Sorry that the study is a little late getting out to you today.

In Christ's Love for our Lives,

Pastor Kim

Pastor’s Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 4:10-12 Bible study (October 31, 2023)

"Faith, Hope, and Love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is Love". I hope that on this day the Love of Jesus Christ for you will move you to greater grace in your life.

Just a reminder for every one. Sunday is All Saints Sunday / Day of the dead. At church we will offer the opportunity for worshipers to bring a photo or name card to worship to place it on a special remembrance altar called an ofrenda. There will also be flowers available for you to place in the vase on the special altar. Though we will not place food on this altar which is the practice of our central American and South American brothers and sisters, we will instead share a carry-in meal in the parish hall after worship. If you were unable to sign up in advance, please plan of bringing something to share (if you are able just come and join in this fellowship in Christ's name.) Since All Saints is the first Sunday of November we will also be led in worship by our Gospel Music Group. Worship is at 10AM on Sundays. We will also share a Pumpkin Pie dessert time after worship on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, November 19th. The last Sunday of November is Christ the King, and Advent One will be the first Sunday in December which will be followed by a chili luncheon.

Today we are going to consider a short, but troubling passage from the Gospel of Mark 4:10-12 Bible study. Let's begin by saying that this quote from Christ would seem to be directly opposed to Christ's normal approach and expectations for people who would hear Him preach and teach. Normally we would say that Jesus would be most hopeful that the use of parables would make understanding the complexities of God's Truth and His Kingdom grow as they heard Jesus preach. But here it seems to be something different, and, on the surface at least, it seems to reveal to us an angry and vengeful Jesus. The Authorized Version of the Bible uses a different word for knowledge. It interprets the early Greek in his passage with the word mystery. However, it is not the kind of mystery that we most commonly think of. It is not the solving of some number of clues to arrive at a revealing conclusion. In this interpretation mystery simply means incomprehensible. So Jesus says that the disciples will understand all of this mystery because He is with them to explain, (because they are the initiated) but the others (and our temptation here is to think that Jesus is talking about everyone who seeks Him out) have closed minds and hearts, and therefore the purpose of the parables is to confuse and cloud any chance that these people might have of Knowing God's heart of compassion for His children. But that is not correct. What Christ is saying is that there are those people who are so closed to God's Love , their hearts are hard, and their minds are dull, to the point that they will never be able to understand the Truths that Christ offers about the Kingdom of God.

This passage has its origin in the prophet Isaiah 6:9 & 10. "And He said, Go, and say to this people, "Go on hearkening, but understand not; go on looking, but perceive not." Make fat the heart of this people, and its ears make heavy, and its eyes besmear; lest it see with its eyes, and with it ears hear, and its heart understand, so that it should be healed.", but when the Greek Version was translated in about 300 in the Common Era, it read instead, "And He said, Go and say to this people, "Ye shall hear indeed, but ye shall not understand; and seeing, you shall see and not perceive, "for the heart of this people has become gross, and with their ears they hear heavily, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.

This second version out of the Greek does not say that God is preventing them from knowing the truth. Instead is says that they are already in such a state of mind and heart that they will be unable to understand. Regrettably, we seem to be in a similar situation today with younger generations thinking that all they need is a video game and social media, life's pleasures, and the comfort of plenty of money, and like the Jews of Isaiah's time, many are unable to hear the Truth of Jesus Christ for their lives. They too are caught in the trap of thinking that their own way is good enough, even when God's Spirit attempts to intervene to warm their hearts to the compassionate love of God.

I hope that all of this really helps you to understand how on the surface this passage seems too difficult and so unlike Christ, when , in fact, it really reveals the fullness of Christ, some of his disappointment that some will inevitably be lost to Him, and the best way that He has available to teach and change the hearts which are already hardened to Him, is to reveal the ultimate Truths of the Kingdom using the form of parabolic teaching and preaching.

God Bless you always,

In Christ, Pastor Kim.