Intersections

     Destruction. That’s what awaited Jonah as he walked into the town of Nineveh. Nobody wants to be the bearer of that news! But he’d recently been through a rather traumatic event, and so there was no turning back from the task that he was told to do by God. I don’t want to get too deep into it, but how many times in the last ten-odd years have we heard that “The end of the world is coming!” The biggest of which I remember happened in 2012 because of the Mayan calendars, along with other conspiracy theories that there would be a collision of Earth with another planet, aliens arriving, and a bunch of other nonsense. But people were caught up in it! We don’t want to be the last ones at the end of the world, do we? Just because someone has personal convictions doesn’t mean that they have proof to back them up, right - I mean - there were movies made about this, and it just added to the anxieties people feel toward ancient prophecies. We’ve lived through the Y2K sca...

  Last week, the scripture was out of 2nd Kings, and the story about Elisha and Naaman. Naaman had been struck with leprosy and wanted to get healed. His wife’s servant knew of a man who could do just that. He had to listen to the Spirit and go into his enemy’s land to get healed. At any point, he could have refused but he also knew that his goal of healing wouldn’t happen.  But if last week was about listening to the Spirit and follow as you’re lead, our scripture today is all about looking around and seeing who may be prophets around us. We are switching from a narrative story told more from the kings perspective to individual prophets. Before we dive too deep in, let’s zoom out for a second. This book takes place about the same time period as the stories from last week. We are talking about 8 centuries before Christ. The Israelite nation are still split into a northern kingdom (known as Israel) and the southernmost kingdom (known as Judah). Amos was from the southern kingdo...

  This morning we are celebrating Trinity Sunday - that may not mean a whole lot to each of you, but it’s a celebration of the triune nature of God - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the celebration of these three - in some pastors, there’s a desire to try to explain the relationship between these, and so this might be a really quick sermon or much more than anyone bargained for today. To help out - let’s take a twenty minute meditation as I have my children come in here with blown up photos of puppies and kittens.   Ok - they’re not coming. But this is one of the most difficult concepts in the whole Bible to try to explain. And any of my words will not do it any justice, even if I was an expert on the topic, but I am not. What do you think of when you think of wisdom? Your teeth? - all four of my wisdom teeth are out. Do you think of the term “collective wisdom” - wisdom seems to be more than just one individual thing, right? Like - let’s put our brains together...

  Here we are, one week closer to Christmas. Hope you are starting your preparations well. Who is done with their shopping? For the first time in a long time, I think we are done, if not very close to being totally done with our preparations in our own home. Our tree is up, and decorated, even if our cat likes to nibble at the branches at the bottom. The outside lights are up, and we even have a spotlight for our garage that has various snowflake shapes in it. We were gifted it from my mother-in-law last year, and it ended up in the garage, but somehow got moved (let’s be honest, I was probably the culprit of that) and so it fell BEHIND some of the shelving, and behind a piece of plywood on the floor. Thankfully, Tadjena is amazingly thorough and relentless, so she was able to find it after looking for what feels like two weeks. So - yeah - we’ve gone through our to do list, and making sure it’s getting done, and with that comes a sense of peace. Are you one who really likes being ...