Easter Sunday,(April 24, 2011)

The epistle passage  from Colossians 3 says 

    "you have been raised with Christ ... for you have died,

     and your life is hidden with Christ in God."

TTh

This is baptism talk and baptism promises lived out. It is in the act of baptism that we die with Christ, go to the tomb with him, and are raised up with him. And we live that new and renewed life through faith, according to Russell Rathbun (Hiding with God and from Myself: The Hardest Question), because in being dead and hidden with Christ .... we are hidden from ourselves. We only glimpse what we have already become in the love and mercy of God.

 

Oh, yes, and his hardest question? If I am clothed with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator, how do I make sense of the self I see in the mirror?

the restroom at Hell's Kitchen, Minneapolis, MN

May we all be blessed with a new glimpse of the self we already have become in the covenant promises of baptism this Easter Sunday and throughout the whole of Eastertide.

Waterfall garden at New Hope Presbyterian Church

 

4th Sunday in Lent (April 3, 2011)

The man born blind  (John 9:1-41) has greater insight into who Jesus is than do the Pharisees. Thanks to John Shearman's Lectionary, Russell Rathbun's The Hardest Question and Laurel Dykstra in Sojourner's Living the Word I think I have some new 'in-sights' about this passage. 

Jesus uses this healing as another of so many teachable moments. In the blind man's affliction  being healed Jesus' true identity is more clearly revealed, yet the Pharisees fail to see it.  They are not only fearfully blind to God's power and glory in Jesus, their inability to fathom how God continues to do 'new things,' to create newness in the world, is fully exposed. They stand bare naked, not only before God, but before those who have eyes to see.

Sunset over Dover, PA

Do we have eyes to see the beauty of God's new creating in bareness? Are we able to stand fully exposed before God and humanity? Are we ready for God's continued work of new creation in and around us?

Woods near I-70 (Taylorstown)

 

Cattails along New Salem Road

Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Chapel