First Reading: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9
1So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. 2You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you.
6You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!” 7For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to him? 8And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?
9But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children.
Psalm: Psalm 15
Second Reading: James 1:17-27
17Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. 18In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.
19You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. 21Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.
22But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. 23For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; 24for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. 25But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.
26If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. 27Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
Gospel: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
1Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around [Jesus], 2they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. 3(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) 5So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
7in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’
8You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
14Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
21For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
CHILDREN’S SERMON
Share with your neighbor a tradition that has been passed down through your family that is important to you.
Let us pray: Lord may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, my Rock and my Redeemer.
Tradition!
Today our text moves from Mark 6 and discussions about Jesus being the bread of life and eating his body and drinking his blood to Mark 7 and the Pharisees are cross examining Jesus about washing hands before eating. The transition seems a bit abrupt but perhaps it is not. The response to eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood was revulsion and many of his followers left. It is a tough teaching. So our text today shifts from that difficult teaching to the Pharisees and Scribes, teachers of the law, now observing how Jesus and his disciples eat. This sounds like an interesting transition from the discussion of communion to a deeper explanation on abiding in Christ.
The Pharisees ask:
“Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”
The Law, the Ten Commandments, had grown into a whole legal system through the years as the Jews sought to please Jehovah. They did not want to be sent into exile in Babylonia or Assyria again and go through all that humiliation, death, and disruption. They wanted to please Jehovah. They wanted to do it right and had pondered and legalized the implications of each commandment. We want to please God too and so we try to do the “right thing” and hope the other guy will too. Good is often seen as how
we do things and bad is the person who doesn’t do things the way we understand things should be done. Even we live in this tension and disagreement about how laws are lived out.
Most of you have seen “Fiddler on the Roof.” Can you hear Tevya answering his own question at the beginning of the movie as he points to the fiddler near the chimney of a house and whom he likens to the Jewish people balancing their lives as a persecuted minority in Russia. Tevya asks, “How do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word. Tradition.” “Because of our traditions every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.”
Our traditions express who we are and help us live out what we think God expects of us. Traditions are part of our identity. Laws are like our principles and traditions are how we live them out. Baptism and communion are traditional identifying marks of Christians. A dot on the forehead identifies a Hindu. A turban identifies a Sikh. Muslim women wear hijabs. Muslims go to mosque on Fridays, Christians go to church on Sunday and Jews attend synagogue on Saturday. We know Nike by the logo on the shoe and it sets expectations of what that shoe will be like. We see the Golden Arches and look for a Big Mac. Traditions and symbols identify us and help us navigate life successfully.
Let’s look at a couple examples. The President of the United States says the fourth Thursday of November we go to our house of worship and thank God for the harvest. We call it Thanksgiving. It is a holiday but traditions have grown up around this and every holiday. I thought I understood what Thanksgiving dinner is like…the turkey, sweet potatoes, rolls, cranberry sauce, mixed veggies and of course pumpkin pie. You can fill out the list. The matriarch, me, shows off her skills as the family gathers. You can imagine my shock when we arrived in Kenya and turkeys had to be bought through connections or bred. The thanksgiving that stands out in my memory was when we gathered at a station in the “bush” with friends and there were two Americans, a Canadian, and a European woman supervising the cooking of the turkey! That silly bird did not come out of the oven til 10 pm. It was corn fed and had an inch of fat all over it. It was a disaster. But then there came that inevitable day when my daughter-in-laws took over cooking the Thanksgiving feast and I, the matriarch, sat on the porch. I cried. I had no longer had that way of experiencing myself and had to face the label of “old.” This past year with Covid has been very disruptive for Christians who have had to adjust to worshiping at home and not in community. It’s just not the same and we become discumbuberated. Traditions are important and unintentionally impact our experience of reality. The Pharisees are aghast when the disciples don’t wash their hands. If Jesus is a rabbi then surely he taught them the law! Today many are aghast when asked to wear masks in public.
Tevya asks, “How do we keep our balance” on the roof? Our traditions are not an end but a means to an end, to keep our balance. The law identifies us but it has a purpose – to help us keep our balance in life. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explains that the Law says “do not kill” BUT if we do not kill with our hands but if we kill in our hearts, we are still murderers and have broken the law. Keeping our balance is a matter of actions but also a matter of intentions. We may be here in church on Sunday because it is a tradition but if we are at odds with the person next to us in the pew or gossiping about the person on the other side of the church or critiquing the sermon, our intentions cancel the value of the tradition. We loose the blessing and are off balance.
The Jewish body of laws like washing hands was a body of interpretations of the law but had become “musts” in the minds of the Pharisees and Scribes. It is possible for our traditions to become “laws” themselves and guidelines for understanding reality. If someone doesn’t show for Thanksgiving, we wonder if something tragic has happened or if we are being snubbed. My husband suggested we read the Christmas story in Swahili before opening presents. We had a family riot. NO DAD, that is not how Christmas morning is done! The tradition is an outward expression of an inward experience of who I am.
Jesus confronts his critics: “8You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Jesus turns to the critics and points to the problem. They are talking about the traditions, but they have lost focus on its purpose. He refers back to Isaiah 29:13 where God is talking to Jerusalem about their hollow lip service and superficial adherence to God while all the time their hearts are far away. God will humble them so their hearts seek God and then he will restore them and bless them. Laws can become traditions that help us express ourselves but if we live into those traditions with false hearts, we have gained nothing and probably lost our balance on that rooftop. We become hypocrites. We are people full of hot air. We go through the motions but we get no results. We fail to embrace the purpose of the tradition.
Food is eaten to strengthen our bodies, not our souls. We eat, our body uses what it needs, and we poop out the unneeded. The problem is not the food. The problem is not the tradition. The problem is the heart. Over eating at Thanksgiving makes us sick. Gossiping about who’s at the meal creates tension. Not going to church causes loneliness. Our “rules” for achieving the good life and being in sync with God impact our experiences. We might almost say that the heart and the soul are very closely tied together. It is not just a cognitive, mental understanding of events but how we interpret, absorb, and decide to respond to events. When the heart is blind, we loose balance.
Today we would not struggle with washing hands but like our Thanksgiving traditions, like our church traditions, any challenge to our traditions are challenges to our hearts. How we will respond? I’m going to step out on a ledge and share something on my heart. Refugees are fleeing horrible chaos in their own countries due to political or economic or gang issues. They are fleeing to our borders and whether we want it or not, we are going to be in contact with people who do not wash their hands like the elders taught us. This is a big block to sharing faith and fellowship. Bethany understands that challenge as we have had street people and homeless on the edges of our property – in my time! Now we watch the television or listen to the radio and realize “other” people are coming. I think this passage today may be calling us as we respond to the “different person” to evaluate our faith, our hearts. Cross-cultural encounters are painful and require prayer, forgiveness, and going the extra mile.
Perhaps that is a bit dramatic. But we shall see how this all unfolds. On a more normal level we might ponder how do we respond when we interact with our child’s spouse who does tradition so differently than our family tradition? When the guy in the car ahead of us goes through the yellow light or if the person cuts us off in traffic what words come to our mouth? Or perhaps we are triggered by the person who does not mask, endangering my young unvaccinated grandchild. The newscasters spend a lot of time weighing in on all the opinions on this. None of these are easy issues with easy answers but they do draw reactions from our heart and provide an opportunity for us to reflect on our faith. As outward forms of expression are challenged, our inward expression of ourselves is challenged. Jesus reminds us that what goes on outside cannot defile us as “this too will pass.”
I think Jesus is telling us that traditions are not the problem and the conflict is not the problem. The different traditions are bound to clash. What we need to be aware of is the response of our heart, what comes out of us. Will we respond with racial slurs, fear and closed hearts, with hatred and strict rules?
21For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
How we respond to conflicts of traditions is a challenge to our faith.
“Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
So let us get back to my original theory. Might Jesus be responding to the exodus of the people who were offended by his teaching about eating his body and drinking his blood? Many stopped following him because he was talking about something that offended their dietary “rules.” The text today seems to be saying, it is not the dietary rules when broken that defile us. Eating with dirty hands, drinking blood (we might call it gravy), or eventually a new tradition of communion will develop and will not defile our bodies. The issue is what happens in our hearts. What is important is our relationship with Jesus.
Do we come to the communion table to get our card ticked, to fulfill tradition demands, or do we come for a genuine encounter with the God we believe is present and active? That does not mean each communion is a big emotional experience but it does mean we are bowing at the altar of God and meeting with him personally about our lives. He knows who we are and how desperately we are trying to keep our balance through our traditions that express us. Ultimately we are that person created by God and interacting with him in the experiences of our life.
I like to say that in the mysterious handshake between us and the unseen God who is known through Jesus, in those times when we don’t remember who we are, can’t express who we are, may even be ashamed of who we are and may fear who we are — God is there holding on to us just as we are. Communion reminds us that he will build us with his body so our bodies can go through tough times. His blood will be nourishing and life giving so we have the strength to be more than we thought we could be, to be our better selves. He is here today, that close to us and that involved with us. As our traditions are challenged and we feel wobbly on the roof of our lives, God will be there helping us keep our balance and play our violin. That is something for which to rejoice! Amen!
14th Sunday after Pentecost
First Reading: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9
1So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. 2You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you.
6You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!” 7For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to him? 8And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?
9But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children.
Psalm: Psalm 15
1Lord, who may dwell in your tabernacle?
Who may abide upon your holy hill?
2Those who lead a blameless life and do what is right,
who speak the truth from their heart;
3they do not slander with the tongue, they do no evil to their friends;
they do not cast discredit upon a neighbor.
4In their sight the wicked are rejected, but they honor those who fear the Lord.
They have sworn upon their health and do not take back their word.
5They do not give their money in hope of gain, nor do they take bribes against the innocent. Those who do these things shall never be overthrown.
Second Reading: James 1:17-27
17Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. 18In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.
19You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. 21Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.
22But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. 23For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; 24for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. 25But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.
26If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. 27Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
Gospel: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
1Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around [Jesus], 2they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. 3(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) 5So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
7in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’
8You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
14Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
21For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
CHILDREN’S SERMON
Share with your neighbor a tradition that has been passed down through your family that is important to you.
Let us pray: Lord may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, my Rock and my Redeemer.
Tradition!
Today our text moves from Mark 6 and discussions about Jesus being the bread of life and eating his body and drinking his blood to Mark 7 and the Pharisees are cross examining Jesus about washing hands before eating. The transition seems a bit abrupt but perhaps it is not. The response to eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood was revulsion and many of his followers left. It is a tough teaching. So our text today shifts from that difficult teaching to the Pharisees and Scribes, teachers of the law, now observing how Jesus and his disciples eat. This sounds like an interesting transition from the discussion of communion to a deeper explanation on abiding in Christ.
The Pharisees ask:
“Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”
The Law, the Ten Commandments, had grown into a whole legal system through the years as the Jews sought to please Jehovah. They did not want to be sent into exile in Babylonia or Assyria again and go through all that humiliation, death, and disruption. They wanted to please Jehovah. They wanted to do it right and had pondered and legalized the implications of each commandment. We want to please God too and so we try to do the “right thing” and hope the other guy will too. Good is often seen as how
we do things and bad is the person who doesn’t do things the way we understand things should be done. Even we live in this tension and disagreement about how laws are lived out.
Most of you have seen “Fiddler on the Roof.” Can you hear Tevya answering his own question at the beginning of the movie as he points to the fiddler near the chimney of a house and whom he likens to the Jewish people balancing their lives as a persecuted minority in Russia. Tevya asks, “How do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word. Tradition.” “Because of our traditions every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.”
Our traditions express who we are and help us live out what we think God expects of us. Traditions are part of our identity. Laws are like our principles and traditions are how we live them out. Baptism and communion are traditional identifying marks of Christians. A dot on the forehead identifies a Hindu. A turban identifies a Sikh. Muslim women wear hijabs. Muslims go to mosque on Fridays, Christians go to church on Sunday and Jews attend synagogue on Saturday. We know Nike by the logo on the shoe and it sets expectations of what that shoe will be like. We see the Golden Arches and look for a Big Mac. Traditions and symbols identify us and help us navigate life successfully.
Let’s look at a couple examples. The President of the United States says the fourth Thursday of November we go to our house of worship and thank God for the harvest. We call it Thanksgiving. It is a holiday but traditions have grown up around this and every holiday. I thought I understood what Thanksgiving dinner is like…the turkey, sweet potatoes, rolls, cranberry sauce, mixed veggies and of course pumpkin pie. You can fill out the list. The matriarch, me, shows off her skills as the family gathers. You can imagine my shock when we arrived in Kenya and turkeys had to be bought through connections or bred. The thanksgiving that stands out in my memory was when we gathered at a station in the “bush” with friends and there were two Americans, a Canadian, and a European woman supervising the cooking of the turkey! That silly bird did not come out of the oven til 10 pm. It was corn fed and had an inch of fat all over it. It was a disaster. But then there came that inevitable day when my daughter-in-laws took over cooking the Thanksgiving feast and I, the matriarch, sat on the porch. I cried. I had no longer had that way of experiencing myself and had to face the label of “old.” This past year with Covid has been very disruptive for Christians who have had to adjust to worshiping at home and not in community. It’s just not the same and we become discumbuberated. Traditions are important and unintentionally impact our experience of reality. The Pharisees are aghast when the disciples don’t wash their hands. If Jesus is a rabbi then surely he taught them the law! Today many are aghast when asked to wear masks in public.
Tevya asks, “How do we keep our balance” on the roof? Our traditions are not an end but a means to an end, to keep our balance. The law identifies us but it has a purpose – to help us keep our balance in life. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explains that the Law says “do not kill” BUT if we do not kill with our hands but if we kill in our hearts, we are still murderers and have broken the law. Keeping our balance is a matter of actions but also a matter of intentions. We may be here in church on Sunday because it is a tradition but if we are at odds with the person next to us in the pew or gossiping about the person on the other side of the church or critiquing the sermon, our intentions cancel the value of the tradition. We loose the blessing and are off balance.
The Jewish body of laws like washing hands was a body of interpretations of the law but had become “musts” in the minds of the Pharisees and Scribes. It is possible for our traditions to become “laws” themselves and guidelines for understanding reality. If someone doesn’t show for Thanksgiving, we wonder if something tragic has happened or if we are being snubbed. My husband suggested we read the Christmas story in Swahili before opening presents. We had a family riot. NO DAD, that is not how Christmas morning is done! The tradition is an outward expression of an inward experience of who I am.
Jesus confronts his critics: “8You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Jesus turns to the critics and points to the problem. They are talking about the traditions, but they have lost focus on its purpose. He refers back to Isaiah 29:13 where God is talking to Jerusalem about their hollow lip service and superficial adherence to God while all the time their hearts are far away. God will humble them so their hearts seek God and then he will restore them and bless them. Laws can become traditions that help us express ourselves but if we live into those traditions with false hearts, we have gained nothing and probably lost our balance on that rooftop. We become hypocrites. We are people full of hot air. We go through the motions but we get no results. We fail to embrace the purpose of the tradition.
Food is eaten to strengthen our bodies, not our souls. We eat, our body uses what it needs, and we poop out the unneeded. The problem is not the food. The problem is not the tradition. The problem is the heart. Over eating at Thanksgiving makes us sick. Gossiping about who’s at the meal creates tension. Not going to church causes loneliness. Our “rules” for achieving the good life and being in sync with God impact our experiences. We might almost say that the heart and the soul are very closely tied together. It is not just a cognitive, mental understanding of events but how we interpret, absorb, and decide to respond to events. When the heart is blind, we loose balance.
Today we would not struggle with washing hands but like our Thanksgiving traditions, like our church traditions, any challenge to our traditions are challenges to our hearts. How we will respond? I’m going to step out on a ledge and share something on my heart. Refugees are fleeing horrible chaos in their own countries due to political or economic or gang issues. They are fleeing to our borders and whether we want it or not, we are going to be in contact with people who do not wash their hands like the elders taught us. This is a big block to sharing faith and fellowship. Bethany understands that challenge as we have had street people and homeless on the edges of our property – in my time! Now we watch the television or listen to the radio and realize “other” people are coming. I think this passage today may be calling us as we respond to the “different person” to evaluate our faith, our hearts. Cross-cultural encounters are painful and require prayer, forgiveness, and going the extra mile.
Perhaps that is a bit dramatic. But we shall see how this all unfolds. On a more normal level we might ponder how do we respond when we interact with our child’s spouse who does tradition so differently than our family tradition? When the guy in the car ahead of us goes through the yellow light or if the person cuts us off in traffic what words come to our mouth? Or perhaps we are triggered by the person who does not mask, endangering my young unvaccinated grandchild. The newscasters spend a lot of time weighing in on all the opinions on this. None of these are easy issues with easy answers but they do draw reactions from our heart and provide an opportunity for us to reflect on our faith. As outward forms of expression are challenged, our inward expression of ourselves is challenged. Jesus reminds us that what goes on outside cannot defile us as “this too will pass.”
I think Jesus is telling us that traditions are not the problem and the conflict is not the problem. The different traditions are bound to clash. What we need to be aware of is the response of our heart, what comes out of us. Will we respond with racial slurs, fear and closed hearts, with hatred and strict rules?
21For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
How we respond to conflicts of traditions is a challenge to our faith.
“Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
So let us get back to my original theory. Might Jesus be responding to the exodus of the people who were offended by his teaching about eating his body and drinking his blood? Many stopped following him because he was talking about something that offended their dietary “rules.” The text today seems to be saying, it is not the dietary rules when broken that defile us. Eating with dirty hands, drinking blood (we might call it gravy), or eventually a new tradition of communion will develop and will not defile our bodies. The issue is what happens in our hearts. What is important is our relationship with Jesus.
Do we come to the communion table to get our card ticked, to fulfill tradition demands, or do we come for a genuine encounter with the God we believe is present and active? That does not mean each communion is a big emotional experience but it does mean we are bowing at the altar of God and meeting with him personally about our lives. He knows who we are and how desperately we are trying to keep our balance through our traditions that express us. Ultimately we are that person created by God and interacting with him in the experiences of our life.
I like to say that in the mysterious handshake between us and the unseen God who is known through Jesus, in those times when we don’t remember who we are, can’t express who we are, may even be ashamed of who we are and may fear who we are — God is there holding on to us just as we are. Communion reminds us that he will build us with his body so our bodies can go through tough times. His blood will be nourishing and life giving so we have the strength to be more than we thought we could be, to be our better selves. He is here today, that close to us and that involved with us. As our traditions are challenged and we feel wobbly on the roof of our lives, God will be there helping us keep our balance and play our violin. That is something for which to rejoice! Amen!
On the Way to Wonder 