Snowy Sunday

Hi everyone,

Well, it looks like snow might be what’s happening on Sunday.  Let’s plan on a 10:30am zoom gathering unless the weather forecast spares us. 

This week I’ve been hanging out in Washington DC, while Libby has been doing a one week internship. It’s been a good week of time with her, as well as time to take in so many of the wonderful free museums. A highlight for me was going to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. It was of course an intense experience taking in all the exhibits. I want to share one aspect in particular.

Early on in the exhibit the Jewish people are described as those who shape their lives around the Hebrew Bible and hold a theology to worship one God. This quick definition which I’m paraphrasing caught my attention because of it’s accuracy and also how it made me feel. I want to be like that, identified by being part of a community of believers who worship the one, true living God of the bible. 

And at the end of the exhibit there were video testimonies of survivors of the holocaust, many of whom where children held in concentration and death camps. Part of their stories which nearly took my breath away were the accounts of how faith sustained them or those around them, as well as stories of how they practiced their faith in this horrible, traumatic time. They talked of prayers being offered to God, secret middle of the night songs of Hanukah and other ways that somehow they knew that God was the only way they were alive.

I still don’t know how to comprehend the evil which flourished, and I am carefully thinking about the ways the organized Christian church has been complicit in structural antisemitism. I am inspired to to be even more careful in my teaching and thinking about the Jewish people and the writings of the Old Testament.

 I offer this all to say, that faith in God does set up apart. It does something. I’m not sure if I will ever understand it, but no matter what, a life connected to the God Jesus’s declared is the good life. We are not promised ease and pain free lives here and now, but we are promised that God will never leave nor forsake us if we claim his free invitation to belong to him. 

I hope you will join us on Sunday at our house if the weather permits, or on the screen. Let’s enjoy the freedom to worship and encouragement of one another’s company.