Love All

As we did not have a worship service on Dec. 18, a link to the blog that contained the intended message is included below.

Love All—A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

“Love All” is the final theme of the four-week Advent Conspiracy study. It’s been an interesting challenge to connect those themes with the lectionary texts each week. This is how I did it today.

MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Idylwood Presbyterian Church
December 19, 2010
Fourth Sunday of Advent
Matthew 1:18-25

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Justice Devotional - Where is Your Treasure?

From 
Devotion to Justice
A series of devotions from the Justice table on the topics of

• Women and children
• Hunger and poverty
• Creation care
• Immigration

Where is Your Treasure?
Matthew 6:21

What we treasure most in life is what we tend to place our focus on. As we strive to live in our fast-paced, ever changing world that places emphasis on what you have and who you are according to material standards, we often lose track of what is truly important. All too often, we seek to fill the void in our lives with temporary solutions, food, alcohol, shopping, even success, instead of turning to God and the relationships he has placed in our lives. The quality of life we live and our level of joy depend greatly on our ability to develop healthy relationships.

The key to a happy life and making it count every day is spending quality time with God and those we love. As a mother it can be easy to take this relationship piece for granted, especially with our children, inadvertently placing it on autopilot to tend to the “things we need to get done”. This is fueled by the hope and expectation that this relationship will still be intact when we are able and ready to give it time. As life seldom slows down, we can go weeks, months and even years not investing time in those we love the most. Learning where to place our priorities (treasure) can be somewhat concerning, as there is so much seeking our full attention. Placing the focus on intimacy with God will help establish this priority in life around developing and investing in these relationships with those we love most.

If what matters most in life is relationships with God and others, let us ask ourselves then, what are we doing to strengthen these closest relationships? Where is your heart? Are you enslaved by the human desire to store up treasure in this world? Ask a child whether they would rather have a new toy or have a date with mom, more often than not, they will choose time with mom. If a mother’s children are her treasure, where will her heart be?

Children were precious to Jesus when he was here on earth, as they should be to every mother as we seek to nurture relationships with God and those we love. Look a child in the eyes today for within them is the foundation of a beautiful relationship from the heart.

Lori Tapia, Pastor Iglesia Alas De Salvacion, Gilbert, AZ Women and Children Read more!

Justice Devotional - May the Words

From 
Devotion to Justice
A series of devotions from the Justice table on the topics of

• Women and children
• Hunger and poverty
• Creation care
• Immigration

May the Words
Luke 13:10-16

Walking down a dusty road at camp, a young woman and I spoke about an incident from her life. While jogging, a worker in the neighborhood decided to whistle at her as she started her run and again when she was returning. The first whistle elicited a fierce glare. As her feet pounded the pavement, her heart rate and her anger increased. She wasn’t just miffed or mildly perturbed; instead, her anger reverberated within her. The second whistle unleashed the rage that had been building, and vehement words spilled out. The intensity of the response surprised her. As we walked on, we analyzed her reaction.

In a time when some legislators seek to redefine rape and make outrageous statements that disparage violence against women...in a time when girls and women are bought and sold as easily and sometimes with less thought than buying a cup of coffee...in a time when girls are emaciated by anorexia because their bodies do not match the bodies in the teen magazines...in a time when some girls are maimed for simply wanting to learn, smaller acts of unwanted comments and gestures toward women point toward even greater violations of selfhood. Words and images help shape how women perceive themselves and how women are valued in the world. Justice begins in how we describe those among us. Something as simple as how we describe an assertive woman versus an assertive man speaks to a continuing difference in valuing.

When Jesus healed a woman bent over for eighteen years, his actions and words spoke to her “bondage,” challenging those who had defined her by her gender and her condition. He confronted the powers that protested her healing. He directed her and all present to see her fully as a beloved and valued part of the community: “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16)

And ought not all girls and women, beloved daughters of God, be set free from bondage...all forms...on each day?

Blessed and Gracious God, who bestows the name Beloved on each and all, transform the words of our mouths, the thoughts of our minds and the longings of our hearts into gifts of justice. Amen.

Rev. Mary Jacobs: President, IDWM Interim Regional Minister Northern California/Nevada Women and Children Read more!

Justice Devotional - Back to the Garden

From 
Devotion to Justice
A series of devotions from the Justice table on the topics of

• Women and children
• Hunger and poverty
• Creation care
• Immigration

Back to the Garden
Matthew 21:12-16

I'd prefer to be an Earth Mother-type, a loamy smell of earth clinging to my clothes...as people in my presence discover in themselves a desire to plant flowers...and I suggest we all sing Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.” (We do have to get ourselves back to the Garden.) I’d rather nurture the agents of culture change gently, patiently.

But Earth’s climate has changed on us. It’s happening fast, and it’s accelerating. In the last year, the Atlantic Ocean made a bid for a midtown Manhattan address, the Arctic ice cap looked like an endangered habitat, and “heat wave” became too moderate a term for infernal weeks that cooked crops and killed the sick and elderly. The climate has gone mad. I’m mad and getting madder along with it. I hate feeling this way. But I’m angry at bumper-sticker arguments that say global warming is a hoax. (How can anyone believe that, over a dozen decades, thousands of observers in hundreds of thousands of locations conspired to fake millions of measurements?) I feel crazy when I’m told, “It’s not us, it’s sunspots.” And I thought I would drop off the deep end when the House passed a bill which abrogates half a dozen laws in order to sell a trans-continental corridor for toxic oil sludge to foreign money changers.

What is this crazy culture I’m in? Who are these people I live among? How can they...how can we...be so blind to relationships? How can we have so forgotten the covenantal foundations of community? How can we ignore our children’s future like this?

Jesus confronted his culture’s craziness, and it made him crazy-mad. He took changing his culture hands-on. He opened the eyes of at least some of the blind. Then, by some standards, he lost. By others, however, the story’s still unfolding.

I think if we don’t change our culture, climate change will do it for us. That future horrifies, and its setting doesn’t look like a garden at all. So I’m glad to be mad after all. Anger is energy at and for change.

Are you mad, too? Welcome ... there are millions of us, of every tribe. In our brother Jesus’ footsteps, let’s walk together. For all that God called good, let’s work together. Let’s change the ending.

Douglas Job: Evergreen Christian Church (DOC) Green Chalice Congregation, Athens GA Creation Care Read more!

Justice Devotional - When Jesus Comes Back Let’s Be Sure the Earth is Clean and Green!

From 
Devotion to Justice
A series of devotions from the Justice table on the topics of

• Women and children
• Hunger and poverty
• Creation care
• Immigration

When Jesus Comes Back Let’s Be Sure the Earth is Clean and Green!
Genesis 2:5-17

Way back in 1979 my wife Julie and I attended a lecture by a very popular Pentecostal preacher from Southern California. He was there to tell us exactly when Jesus was going to return to earth.

At that time in my life, I was beginning to question the sort of theology that tried to predict the second coming. After all, Jesus himself says that “no one knows” when that will happen. If Jesus doesn’t care about the date why should we?

What I really learned from that night was in the question and answer period after the lecture. The preacher had just predicted that Jesus was coming back, sometime in 1981. The first question was about the environment. “If Jesus is coming back then we don’t have to worry about care for the earth, right?” Many similar questions and comments followed. I don’t remember the preacher’s answers but I have never forgotten how quickly the audience decided that the earth was no big deal.

Isn’t that surprising? At the beginning of the Bible, we have a marvelous image of humankind being placed in the middle of the garden where the humans are given the command to “till it and keep it.” Another way to translate that phrase is to “serve and protect.” Maybe you’ve seen that on the side of a police car. The Genesis author seems to be saying that we are the police force that oversees care for the Earth!

I thought about our experience in that lecture when I read NT Wright’s, essay in The Green Bible titled, “Jesus is Coming — Plant a Tree.” As the title of his essay implies he believes that the idea of Jesus’ return is a call to Christians to care even more deeply for the environment.

Wright gets this conclusion from the Bible. He quotes the Apostle Paul who wrote in Romans 8 that the creation will be “set free from the slavery that consists in corruption.” This is the promise that the creatures who bear God’s image, that is you and me and every other human being, will one day live in harmony with the garden in the way that God has always intended. This ancient idea seems to have been forgotten. However, a basic reading of the Bible reveals that this teaching is central to the biblical story. The Bible teaches that Creation will be redeemed. All of creation, the Bible promises, is under the care and nurture of God and we are called to be God’s coworkers in this work. The second chapter of Genesis is an intense theological presentation on creation and humanity’s interaction with it. This story is a reflection on power and control, on anxiety and the way we respond to it.

When we lay this story over the top of our world today we see that these issues have not gone away. Power? Control? Anxiety? When it comes to the environment we have all too often eaten the forbidden fruit while failing to serve and protect the garden of the earth itself.

Perhaps what we need is a reminder of the simple fact that we have come from the dust and to the dust we will return. When our Genesis story teller relates this story of creation he uses a play on words. When humankind is created, the word for human is adam. It can be translated as man or humankind. We think of it as the name of the first male, Adam, but it is not a proper name; it’s just a regular word for humankind. The adam, humanity as it were, was created from the soil. The word in Hebrew for soil is adamah. Do you hear the word play at work here? Adam has come from adamah. Humans are soil. We are basically lumps of clay. This implies that our lives are interwoven with the life of the soil, of the dirt. The health of our bodies depends on the health of our soil.

Ellen Davis, a professor at Duke and a contributor to The Green Bible, has helped me remember all of this. Our health depends on the health of the food we receive from the soil. If the soil goes bad, the food goes bad, and, well, you can fill in the blanks, can’t you?

The first human sin is connected to eating. God sets a boundary and says, “Stay away from here.” We don’t know why. We don’t know what is wrong about this forbidden fruit. All we know is that the boundaries are clear. “Do not cross this line. It will be bad for you.” And like we so often want to do today Adam refuses to take the responsibility for his sin. Have you ever noticed this? Whenever I teach on this text I always ask the class, “Who does Adam blame for his sin?” They almost always say, with one voice, “Eve!” But, no. The story is clear. Adam is asked about his sin and he says, “The woman that YOU gave me, caused me to sin.” He points his finger at God and says, “It’s your fault.” We do the same thing don’t we? We see the city of New Orleans destroyed by a hurricane and we call it an act of God. Then, to make things worse we avoid the deeper issues at work in the city, things like racism and poverty and crime and unemployment and we turn it into a political football while all the time failing to face our sin, our weakness and our refusal to care for the environment and the people therein.

This reminds us that when we fail to care for the earth the first ones to experience the pain of the soil are the poorest of the poor. Check your political concerns at the door for a moment. We should, every one of us, fall on our knees in prayer asking for the forgiveness of our sins and the way we have abused the planet and its resources at the price of the poor.

The first result of sin in the Bible is the ruination of the ground. The soil is affected. The ground is cursed. It is filled with thorns and thistles. It will now be a labor to till and work. Professor Davis read this text with a group of farmers and asked them to interpret it. They said: “It is obvious. When humans are disconnected from God, the soil will be the first to suffer.”

They had not been to seminary but they helped her, and us, see something that any Hebrew would have already recognized: the degradation of the land is a sign that humans (the adams) have turned away from God. When the land is flourishing it is a sign that humans have returned to God. In other words, the single greatest indicator as to whether or not we are in good relationship with God is the condition of the land!

As Professor Wright proclaims, “Jesus is Coming — Plant a Tree”

Dr. R. Glen Miles: Senior Minister, Country Club Christian Church, Kansas City, MO Creation Care Read more!

Justice Devotional - Child Nutrition

From 
Devotion to Justice
A series of devotions from the Justice table on the topics of

• Women and children
• Hunger and poverty
• Creation care
• Immigration

Child Nutrition
Matthew 18:10

Babies! Whether it is mom, dad, grandparents, aunts or uncles, we get so excited about babies. When we hear the news of expectant parents we throw parties and buy gifts and start planning what the life of this child will look like. We think about bright eyes and chubby cheeks and smiling, happy faces.

I planned all of those for my first pregnancy, too. At 7 months I began to have problems with my health. In spite of the blizzard outside, I was sent to the hospital for tests. A quick x-ray (before the day of sonograms) showed that there were, in fact, two babies. “Oh no! I need a second crib and a second car seat and twice as many clothes and bottles and diapers.....” Well, at least I had two months to get all the plans made.

Regardless, the snow was still falling and we were told to double up in houses in case the grid couldn’t handle the demand of heating everyone’s home. Ten hours after my x-ray, in the midst of the blizzard, I went into labor. The doctor said not to delay...to get to the hospital immediately because they were coming too soon and we needed to be certain to be there before they were delivered. They arrived two hours later. They lost weight, had breathing problems, had to be fed intravenously. It was 16 days before I was permitted to hold them in my arms.

Scary? Challenging? Yes. But within a year they had gone from a weight of three pounds up to within normal development range. After those initial challenges they grew and developed normally and there were no residual difficulties.

How can preemie babies thrive so well? How is it that some babies go full term and still struggle? The truth is there is a whole host of reasons. One of those reasons can be addressed: nutrition for the child for the first 1,000 days from conception to her second birthday. I was blessed to have proper food, vitamins, and medical care during my pregnancy. When this unexpected challenge came along my daughters were healthy enough to be able to overcome those early difficulties. How different might the outcome have been without that safety net? If they survived, they might still have had emotional or learning challenges. Full term babies without the proper care face those same challenges.

As we face the challenge of child nutrition, may we recognize the hope that lies in the fact that WE CAN DO something about it.

Rev. Dr. Patricia Donahoo Disciples Women Indianapolis, IN Women and Children Read more!

A Word About US Elections - Sharon Watkins

http://disciples.org/sharon_blog/word-u-s-elections/ Read more!