Pastor’s Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 3:13-19 bible study (October 2, 2023)

Good morning in the name, and by the power, of our Lord Jesus Christ.  

We had great joy in our Gospel Music worship and our guests, along with our carry-in dinner after church service yesterday.   I hope that you were able to be with us.  Next month, we will celebrate All Saints/Day of the Dead on the first Sunday of the month with a carry-in meal themed as the Mexican Fiesta.  Bring a dish to share with that wonderful Mexican flair.  That day will also be Gospel Music Sunday and the Blood Pressure Clinic will be available that day. At the beginning of December, we will have our traditional chili Luncheon.  We usually have traditional Midwest chili, good spicy hot Mexican style, and if we are lucky,  a wonderful chocolate chili made by one of our members.  As always, please pray for the Church, and our church too.  The Body of Christ carries the power of Christ's Love for all people, and our important work of bringing Christ-like compassion and His Hope for the world, always proclaiming God's Grace in our Savior.  Pray too for all who serve our nation, and pray for the people caught in war all over our planet.   May the Peace which passes all understanding be in all of our lives.

Today in our bible study passage from Mark, we can also look at the choosing of the twelve disciples in Matthew 10:1-4 and Luke 6:12-16.  The Gospel of John contains a brief passage, only describing the call of Peter.   (John 1:42).  Perhaps by the time that John was written, the identity of the disciples was fixed in the hearts and minds of the people who had come to believe in Jesus, but Peter, also called Cephas, was the key to the new life of the Church which had already begun journeys of faith around Asia Minor, Italy, northern Africa, and more.  What John was seeking to do was to clarify and unify the theology which every church and its members should understand as being the truth about Jesus.

Today we see Jesus selecting a group of men,  yes, they were seemingly all men at this point, though it is certain that later there were certainly women who were active disciples of the Lord too.  I think that the most amazing thing is the diversity with which these men came, and even more amazing is that they dropped their lives, their livelihoods, their zealous feelings about the nature of their nation and their personal religious practices in Judaism.  After all, Jesus came undoing generations of practice and legalistically punishing Law for how a person must live to really keep the law and avoid the wrath of God.  Instead, He came with the message of God's forgiveness, love, mercy, and true pleasure in the love of His created children, and in their every day love for their neighbors as they loved themselves.

Important for you and me is to see that the earliest part of the Church was accomplished by Christ by calling together a group.  Today, whether we are in a house church, a small congregation like American, a big congregation like St. John's, Des Moines, IA,  it is the importance our being together sharing our faith journey and lives.  That first group would bear some pretty huge responsibilities.  Jesus chose these men because of their transformed hearts of faith, even from the outset of their journey with Christ.  Only God's Son could see into the future of these disciples lives and, in His omnipotence, trust them with the most important message and work of what would become the Church.  We do know that after Christ's death many of the disciples struggled in their outreach to the people of their own Jewish heritage.  One split off, and according to tradition and the early churches of India, traveled to that nation to share the Good News with pretty good success.  My Nazarene friend from seminary, Abraham Athially, who had grown up in the south of India, understood that the congregation where he worshiped has been created by the ministry of Thomas.  Of course, we must not forget the one who came late, and after his own transformation and change of heart when he had his Christ vision on the road to Damascus,  Paul.  He moved the new church of Jesus around the entire area outside of Israel.  In His wisdom, Jesus understood that it would be the diversity of the men that he called which would bring success to the movement of the Truth He proclaimed which would shape the new worship communities.

One of the big mistakes that the European churches made was to have membership that was ethnically pure and homogeneous.  It was done to help new communities there, and here in the new nation across the Atlantic feel like they had not left their homes to immigrate thousands of miles to a new home.  This seemed to be the same issue that the 12 had in Israel when they kept trying with minimal success to proclaim God's Truth to people so steeped in the habituated worship and legalistic lives that had been led generationally.  Today, though, many churches are smaller, our diversity is our strength.  Members with a great deal of life experience and gathered wealth, with generous hearts, young families needing the Spirit's presence to make it in this difficult world of inflation and through the roof expenses, to singles and couples, and with great educations, and some folks who struggled to complete GEDs, business owners and laborers, the wise and the foolish, all together to be the Church of Christ, our Savior and Lord.  It is exactly in that diversity that the church is able to carry out its singular message of Christ' Love for all people.  God needs every one of us to be together for the sake of the work of the Gospel.  We do that work not only in worship, but in Christian fellowship too, as we saw in our widely varied Sunday morning gathering to celebrate the Sacrament and to share in the love and bounty of God's creation in our carry-in meal.  By the way, as I stated above about the disciples, we bear some very important responsibilities too.  We need to speak our faith, and share the love of Christ that fills us, so that others will know by us what a treasure the Love of Christ truly is.  I can not say it enough, we are here, because at the very beginning, this diverse group of men committed their lives to Jesus, and over many generations many more people did the very same thing, and now, it is our turn!

Tomorrow we move on to Mark 3:20-27. I will also be offering the beginning day of our study on Ezra in the Old Testament on Thursday morning this week.

Please remember that I will be on vacation from the 6th-13th, except back for worship on Sunday the 8th.   

In Christ's Love and calling on all of our lives, 

Pastor Kim Taylor

Pastor's Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 3:7-12 bible study (September 26, 2023)

Blessings and Peace be with you in the Name, and by the Power, of our Lord Jesus Christ!

I am so thankful for your joining me in these short daily studies of the Gospel of Mark. I have intentionally kept them short enough so that ten or fifteen minutes is plenty for a first read. I encourage you to take the time to consider how each of these passages that we are studying speaks to your heart for what it means to be a follower of the only Begotten Son of God. Today we will talk about the term "son of God " and how it fits into "demons", or those who are convinced that they are possessed with "demons" and how they respond to the presence of Jesus and His healings.

Today, please keep the United States Government in your prayers as they work to prevent a shutdown which will ultimately affect the lives of government employees, contractors, National Parks, and even the safety of our nation when the military loses its pay. Whether we support more stringent spending, or moving forward in spite of the cost, we all know that creating a national crisis of confidence is not good for our nation, its citizens, or her place in the world. Please pray too for Georgia who suffered a seizure on her way home on her school bus yesterday. Continue prayers for John, Sarah, and Barrett as John works to balance his emotional life, and the family seeks to help him build a more stable sense for himself.

In our bible study passage for today in Mark chapter 3, we find Jesus leaving the synagogue and heading out to the shore of Galilee. He has not fled the synagogue, or escaped for fear, but because He has so much more to teach and do before He heads to Jerusalem and the Cross. However once Jesus moves out to the shoreline of Galilee, He is faced with the new reality that people have already heard of His presence, and the miracles which he has been doing as He has healed those who have come to Him. This is really an amazing time for Jesus. People are literally coming from near and from very far to him, many have journeys of days and weeks to arrive and find Jesus. Many came from 100 miles away in Jerusalem. Others came from Idumaea, and the area of Edom between Palestine and Arabia. They came from the east side of Jordan, and from Phoenicia, a foreign nation where the cities of Tyre and Sidon are northwest of Galilee. These varied peoples came in masses, crowding to see Jesus, rushing on Him to touch Him, or seeking to have Him touch them for healing. Huge groups of people like this can, and often do, become aggressive to achieve their goal of getting to Jesus. He has his disciples prepare a boat a short distance away offshore, so that he can move to safety if His life is endangered. It is a picture which we have witnessed at world class soccer matches, or rock concerts, where people are sometimes crushed as others move over them to get to the event. In the midst of these masses of people, Jesus is faced with another issue.

When Jesus heals those who are "possessed" he is called the son of God. Whether we believe that these people were possessed by demons is not the issue here. Yes, we certainly can say that there may seem to be people who are so enmeshed in evil that for all practical purposes they live as though it is demons moving their every choice. Or perhaps you are one who believes that evil is a presence seeking to invade the lives of people. Whatever the case - at their healing they speak the words identifying Jesus as "son of God". This phrase has a long-standing presence in the Old Testament. The angels are named the sons of God. (Genesis 6:2) Job 1:6, indicating the angels came as the sons of God to present themselves to the LORD. The nation of Israel is called the son of God. God called His son out of Egypt. (Hosea 2:1) God says that Israel is His son, my first born. (Exodus 4:22)

The king of the nation is also named the son of God. (II Samuel 7) in which God promises the king, "I will be his father, and he will be my son". In the intertestamental books, those written but not considered canon, (i.e., the books widely accepted as authoritatively presenting God's Word and Will for His children) the good man is the son of God. So, we see in Mark that people are widely familiar with speaking this claim on a person's life, a person who is especially close to God. In the New Testament Paul names Timothy as his son, or in I Peter 5:13 Peter calls Mark his son. So why does Jesus so sternly forbid the speaking of this phrase / name for Him?

Jesus reason for strictly forbidding the speaking of this phrase is that His knowledge that He is the Messiah of God is very different from the idea the people have about that future king of their nation. In the new messianic king, all the enemies of the people would be militarily defeated, and the nation itself would prosper greatly. Jesus instead saw His Messiahship as the greatest opportunity for service, of sacrifice, of Love, on His way to the Cross. If word got out that the Messiah had arrived, it would have meant chaos and pretty much the end of His ministry of teaching and healing. Those in power would have immediately sought to "take Him out". Jesus needed time to help people understand that they needed to see the Messiah as God's gift of love for all people. What on the surface might seem simple, was for Christ a complicated journey of balance and confrontation, sharing God's Truth of the Love given in the fullness of God's Grace for all people.

Next week we will study Mark on Monday and Tuesday, and on Thursday I will introduce the study of Ezra in the Old Testament.

In the Love of Christ, Pastor Kim Taylor

Pastor's Ponderings: Meandering through Mark 3:1-6 bible study (September 25, 2023)

Blessings and Peace be with you every hour of your day today. 

God's richest blessings often come to us in times of difficulty and trouble.  This is the time for faith growth and the compassion of our sisters and brothers in the faith to step up to offer their prayers and, often, much more, undergirding our journey in Christ's love. 

Please continue prayers for Linda on the death of her husband Keith, for Jim who has eye and kidney issues.  For all who, in their journey of faith, come to doubt Christ's wisdom to Love your neighbor as yourself.  For John as he works to regain normalcy in his life.  The time for teaching each of us comes in our every day living.  Prayer, Scripture reading, Bible Study, Sunday Sermons may all help, but, at times, we are unable to allow  the Spirit to break through to change our hearts and minds.  As we talked about this past Sunday, if we are offending God with our anger or our disbelief, Our God is The God of second chances, never ceasing to seek us out to work on us again and again.   Pray for all, who after the pandemic have chosen to isolate themselves from their life in the Body of Christ, the Church.  That temptation is probably there for most of us from time to time, however, many of us respond to the Spirit's movement in our lives to restore us to the Family of God.   May all come to know the important place that the Church of Jesus Christ is for everyone's life.  A quick reminder - there will be no Bible Studies the week of October 9-13.  I will be away on vacation from October 6-13 except for Sunday Worship on the 8th.

Today we move on to chapter three of the Gospel of Mark bible study, verses 1-6.  Now first things first.  My apologies for forgetting to give you the Gospel Parallels to the Mark passages the past several times we have studied together.  Today's Mark reading is Found in Matthew 12:9-14, and Luke 6:6-11. 

As you might expect the Gospel of John does not present this passage in its writing.  I hope that as I share these readings from the other Gospels that you at least begin to get an idea about the sourcing that must have occurred that writers of the Gospels used, perhaps borrowing from one of the Gospels as the primary source.   John is really written much later, as late perhaps as the beginning of the next century, so the writing of Mark, Matthew, and Luke is already well known with no need to repeat much of what they wrote in John.  With that in mind we find that John carefully chose from what was there already, but then wrote other unique acts of Jesus and words of Jesus that had remained in the heart of the author for many years.

Today, Mark tells us that Jesus once again returns to the local Synagogue, probably with the intent of worship and the opportunity to reveal God's Truth for His Children which has been buried for years by the legalistic bent of the religious leaders.  Christ's Truth at this gathering is that every day is the day for doing what is right and good and just, and He returns to the synagogue to challenge those who would attempt to dismiss and move to harm Him.   However, why were those other leaders at this synagogue?  They were not there to worship, but instead to judge Jesus and begin to unravel His ministry through their accusations of His apostacy to the Law as created in their own image, and not God's Truth.  Their law had little to do with Love and Compassion and Mercy.  They knew God as an angry vengeful punishing God!  In a gospel named the Hebrew gospel, which has only been found in fragments, and so is not canon along with any other of the Gospels we know so well, the man who Christ heals is known as a stone mason, now injured, whose pride had kept him from begging, who now comes to the only one who might be able to restore his hand.  Obviously, this man already knew of the healings of which Jesus was capable.  In Jewish law for what was considered work, illnesses and injuries could be treated so that they might not get worse, but even a healing ointment could not be put on a wound because that was considered work.  This rigidity of belief meant that one could not even defend his or her own life on the Sabbath, or could not defend the nation on the Sabbath!  We must remember that Jesus certainly knew all of this.  This man would be no worse off if healing had to wait until the next day.  But for Jesus, this was a test case.  By His Words, Jesus truly tested the level of compassion and love for this man who had become such a wretch of a person, unable to work, or to provide for himself or his family.  As Jesus called the man out, he was able to assess the crowd gathered for worship.  They would all have to see him again rather than leaving him in the background to be forgotten and left to suffer.  "Is it lawful to do good, or to do evil, on the Sabbath?  Jesus had already caught them, placing them in a dilemma of faith and practice.   They were bound to respond that evil was never alright on the Sabbath, leaving the alternative as being something that could be done on the Sabbath.  Surely it was an evil thing to continue to ignore and allow this man to suffer.   Then, "Is it lawful to save a life or to kill it?  They remained silent.  They were caught between their hearts and minds, and the written restrictive laws on what could be done on the Sabbath.  The religious authorities then departed to hatch some plan to entrap Jesus.  They were so determined to do so that even they interacted with the Romans who they considered unclean, breaking the law which they held up with such esteem.  So here is what is fundamental about this passage.

1. To the Pharisees religion was ritual.  It means obeying certain rules, laws, and regulations.   They would be like the person who, at least on the surface, appears to be a really good church member, attending worship, giving money, doing Bible Study, etc. yet in life never does anything for anyone besides himself.  That person has no sympathy, no desire to sacrifice for others, yet is serene in their fulfillment of the religious requirements for life.

2. Here is the great difference.  For Jesus religion is service.   Simply, love of God and love of people!  The ritual of worship is intended to move us toward all that Jesus believed - move us to answer the cry of human need.  

When we call for peanut butter to be given for the Episcopal food bank, or move bread from a local restaurant to that same food bank, or ask for offerings for CROP, or seek to purchase a herd of goats during Advent to be given to a family or community in need to move them forward economically and dietarily, or when we call for contributions for World Hunger, or ELCA Disaster Relief, or support immigration through Alice's family, or ask for blessing bag items or money to buy them, or we seek to invite others to come and know the love of our Lord Jesus Christ for their lives, we are fulfilling the Great Commandment.  We Love God above all, and by His love are moved to sacrifice for others in our own lives, and similarly, we love our neighbors as we love ourselves, then we are truly being the Kingdom Workers in the harvest of new believers who are moved by to faith because we moved their lives to come to Christ by our words and deeds of love for them.

Tomorrow we move on in chapter three of Mark.  Next week on Thursday, October 5, we will have our first day of the study of the O.T. book of Ezra. 

With Christ's love in my heart and mind, serving His Gospel, 

The Rev. Kim R. Taylor

Master of Divinity