Mike Willock writes: Every now and then a passage of Scripture springs opens in a new way – revealing something that was always there but was somehow hidden from view. That happened to me as I read the March 18 devotion from Luther Seminary, which was the text that Travis preached on this Sunday. The passage was Luke 13:6-9 – the story of the man, the gardener, and the fig tree. Then Jesus told this parable: "A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, 'See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?' The gardener replied, 'Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'" The startling insight for me was that the man blamed the tree when it failed to bear the desired fru...

Ellie Stock has a piece that has just appeared in the Presbytery of Giddings Lovejoy e-newsletter and blog. She compares two deaths - that of Julius Caesar "dying as he tried on hold to power as Dictator for Life of the Roman Empire ... his death leading to continuing intrigue, chaos, and power grabs" and that of "Jesus, dying also betrayed and abandoned by his closest followers" but with a totally different undersatanding of power. Ellie asks the provocative question, "Is Earth moving towards an Ides of March—a death caused by the ambition, competition, hunger-for-power?" and what does the Jesus Way have to say about this? You can read the whole piece here.

As winter is slowly edged out by spring, here are two timely photos taken by Mike Willock in the church grounds recently, along his amusing captions. Thanks for the contribution, Mike. "Even the downspouts are saying what they think about winter" "I’m trying to get ready for spring."

Tim Woodcock writes: To return to the theme of the previous blog post about “ Poems of hope and resilience ,” I was struck by the power of Francisco X. Alarcon’s “ L.A. Story .” The context that gives rise to that poem is the Rodney King protests, referred not by name but simply by the date – April 1992 - that is attached to the poem. But the poem reads almost as well in the context of Ukraine or any other situation of high volatility. The poem is not a complex one. It paints a bleak, dystopian landscape, followed by this beautiful image: o god show us the way lead us   spare us  from ever turning into walking    matches amidst so much gasoline    

Tim Woodcock writes: Last week Nancy Quigley offered a poem called “What is Hope?” That prompted me to dig around in the Poetry Foundation’s themed collections of poems, anticipating there would be a section of other poems about hope. There was indeed, although it’s actually labeled “ Poems of Hope and Resilience .” It’s well worth a look. Some of the poems are very well known. For instance, Emily Dickinson’s Poem No. 314, with the line “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers” and Maya Angelou’s widely quoted and inspirational “And Still I Rise.” Among the 50+ poems there are some poems that are – by my lights – incomprehensible or willfully obscure but there’s far greater number of gems, some of which I thought I’d share in an attempt to answer the question, “What is Hope?” In this blog post I’m going to focus on one poem only, but I plan to return to the theme later on highlighting a couple more poems. The poem that initially caught my eye was the astonishingly powerful “ Lift Every V...

Nancy Quigley writes: I was talking to a friend last week about hope and the balance and necessity of maintaining a portion of hope in the midst of reality. Finding this balance in a way that is honest might be very difficult when helping a friend face a terminal illness. And it can be challenging in times such as these, when we have lost patience with facing yet another Covid surge and we are so discouraged with our present political divide and the deep division in our country about education and masks and voting rights. Is there still a place for hope? Someone sent this poem to me early in the new year. The author, Rubem Alves , was a Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, writer and psychoanalyst. He was also one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology  and also wrote poetry. This poem is called, "What is Hope?" Hope is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word. It is the suspicion that reality ...

Tim Woodcock writes: The carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” stirs up very specific memories in me and, perhaps more than any other piece of music, it has the ability to transport me elsewhere. No matter where I am when I hear it, I imagine myself to be in a Methodist chapel in Ketton, a village in England, where my mom’s family is from and where we would typically spend Christmas when I was a child. “Hark! The herald-angels sing / ‘Glory to the newborn king.’” My mom’s voice, my grandma’s voice (recognizably the same timbre yet older), my grandad – a farmer whose hands are a little too large for the keys on the organ – vigorously bashing out the tune. A small crowd singing with great gusto. This is absolutely a chapel not a church, a building that holds no more than 30 people, a good portion of whom I am related to, one way or the other. But beyond that idiosyncratic association for me, there’s something more universal at play. The rising notes of “Join the triumph of the skies...