The Weekly View

Sunday, January 31, 2021

Dear St. Luke family:

This Sunday we look at the Jesus’ very first act of ministry in Mark’s Gospel.  It’s a healing miracle in which Jesus restores a man possessed by an “unclean spirit” to health and community.  Some people have an easy time believing in biblical miracles, while others are skeptical. 

Author Brian D. McLaren ponders: What if, instead of debating whether the miracle actually happened or didn’t happen, we asked another question: What happens to us when we imagine miracles happening? Perhaps a miracle story is intended to shake up our normal assumptions and make it possible for us to see something we couldn’t see before.  Perhaps the miracle that really counts isn’t the one that happened back then, but the one that could happen in us today as we reflect on the story. 

Perhaps, by challenging us to consider impossible possibilities, these stories can stretch our imagination, and in so doing, can help us play a powerful role in helping God create new possibilities for our world.  Doesn’t that sound rather … miraculous?

We’ll hear how after people met Jesus, they started telling wild, inspirational stories full of gritty detail, profound meaning, and audacious hope.  They saw new possibilities; they imagined new life.  Their faith and courage grew.  They were transformed.  That’s why they had to tell these stories, and that’s why we still tell them today.  You may or may not believe in literal miracles, but faith still works wonders.

See you Sunday!

Grace and peace
Joanne Whitt
Interim Pastor

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Dear St. Luke Family:

In his inaugural address on Wednesday, our new President called for healing and unity.  The question facing our country now will be: do we really want it?  The short, comical story of Jonah we’ll hear this coming Sunday might have something to say to us about this.

Last Sunday, we heard about Simon Peter, Andrew, Philip, and Nathanael.  In John’s gospel, these four men are Jesus’ first disciples.  Jonah is nothing like them.  He doesn’t leave what he’s doing and immediately follow God’s call.  Instead, he jumps on the first boat going in the opposite direction and he hides in the hold of the ship, hoping that somehow God won’t notice.  Imagine if, upon encountering Jesus, Peter and Andrew jumped into their fishing boats and rowed like madmen for the opposite shore, as far away from this dangerous itinerant preacher as they could get.

Jonah did just that, trying to get as far away from God, and God’s bizarre instructions, as he could.  Go to Nineveh?  The capital of the Assyrian Empire, that destroyer of Israel, that brutal occupying force?  Those bad guys?  It was unthinkable.  Jonah spends a little time in the belly of the great fish before he finally complies with God’s request. 

Here’s what Jonah eventually learns: God is God, and does not act as we think the Almighty should act.  When we go where God calls us, what we find is that God is already there, ahead of us.  We find that no people, and no place, not even Nineveh, can properly be called God-forsaken. 

Jonah was not at all happy about this.  Are we?

Grace and peace,
Joanne Whitt
Interim Pastor

Sunday, January 17, 2021

Dear St. Luke family:

In a Facebook post I read this week, a young woman reflected on an article pointing out that people can experience God everywhere, not just at church.  The young woman said she totally believes that.  As do I.  God is everywhere; we can meet Christ in anyone, not just in church.  These ideas aren’t New Age or spiritual-but-not-religious; they are actually supported in Scripture.

 What this young woman wondered is whether we would notice God’s presence everywhere if we didn’t practice noticing it somewhere.  She said that going to a particular building on a particular day at a particular time helps her practice noticing God’s “everywhere-ness.”  This was written before the pandemic; I assume now she goes to a particular church website, YouTube channel or Zoom meeting.  But in any event, she invited her Facebook friends to stop and notice today, and if it’s in their tradition, to go to church.  Church is not perfect, she said.  It’s practice. 

In the passage from John’s gospel we will consider this coming Sunday, one of Jesus’ brand new disciples extends an invitation, as well.  He tells his skeptical friend to “Come and see;” come and see who Jesus is, what his ministry is, how it fulfills God’s promises.  That is exactly how the Christian faith has spread from the time of the disciples to the early Church to the present day: one person tells another, “Come and see.”  As with the young woman on Facebook, the invitation isn’t a sledgehammer of truth.  Rather, it’s having an experience that makes you sure that if somebody else simply saw, it would be enough.

 Come and see.  Church is not perfect.  It’s practice.  I’ll probably remind you many more times how much I love St. Luke’s mission statement: “Practicing love by following Jesus.”  Our calling as the Church is to keep extending that gracious invitation to others (and to us!) to practice love, to become the people God calls us to be and the world needs.  How might St. Luke extend that invitation?  “Come and see!”

Grace and peace,
Joanne Whitt
Interim Pastor