Walking the Divining Line 8-3-2014

John 1:14-16, 29; I John 1:1-2:2

“By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought

to walk in the same way in which he walked.”

Sometimes, I think we Christians go out of our way to complicate Jesus. Was he human? Was he divine? Was he more human than divine—or was it the other way around? How could he be fully human and fully divine at the same time? In seminary we used to say ad nauseum, Is it both/and or is it either/or? Oh, we were so sophisticated in the way we split hairs. Those comparatives can describe the divining line: can Jesus be both human and divine; can Jesus be either human or divine. One way leads to truth; the other way leads to heresy.

In John’s day, “there were teachers who replaced the incarnation of Christ with the idea that Jesus was a supernatural being (not God) who seemed human but was really only so in appearance, a messenger who could not die for sins.” That’s called Docetism, and it is heresy.

Generation after generation has tried to reason its way through to the truth about Jesus. Yet, as I said, when we try to reason our way to the correct answer, we run the risk of getting all twisted up in the “isms” and “ologies” of belief systems and we may not find the answer we are hoping to find. This joke about Sherlock Holmes and Watson demonstrates what happens when we see the trees but can’t find the forest.

“Holmes and Watson are on a camping trip. In the middle of the night Holmes wakes up and gives Dr. Watson a nudge. "Watson" he says, "Look up in the sky and tell me what you see."

"I see millions of stars, Holmes," says Watson.

"And what do you conclude from that, Watson?"

Watson thinks for a moment. "Well," he says, "astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I see that God is all-powerful, and we are small and insignificant. Uh, what does it tell you, Holmes?"

"Watson, you idiot! Someone has stolen our tent!”

Has Christianity gone on a camping trip and found itself without a tent—you know, one truth about the Lord under which all can sleep soundly?  It’s our nature to seek answers, to understand our world down to the protoplasmic prelude to life, but even that idea creates controversy! Such unpacking of the layers of the world requires a different skill set when it comes to analyzing heaven.  We want answers, facts—names, dates, your mother’s maiden name and the last four digits of your social security number to believe that you are you.

Jesus is Jesus—was, is and always will be—even though his mother didn’t have a maiden name and he never had a social security number. The human mind will never fully understand this side of the O-Zone the divine mystery of Jesus. Somehow, many of us tend to go the way of Watson—explaining investigating, compartmentalizing, inducing, deducing, and reducing all the information we have about Jesus to the facts, yet God did not send us facts; God sent us truth—and they are not always the same thing.

Truth expands dimensions; itself, truth never changes, but the truth can change a person; it can set people free; it is timeless—that is, it is as true today as it was a thousand years ago and it will still be true a thousand years from now. Is it possible for human beings to tell the difference between what is real and what is truth?

Remember Sherlock Holmes? Was he real? His most devoted fans, his groupies, might argue the reality of his existence, after all, Holmes’ “biography” is as easy to find on the internet as Winston Churchill’s. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote prolifically of the famous detective known for his heightened skills of observation and eccentric personality. Holmes was both memorable and beloved—and he was entirely fictional. Holmes himself once said, “The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.”[1]

The bane of our humanity is that factions of Christians—Churches/temples/kingdom halls— think the way they “do” Jesus, the way they worship God, the way they read their scripture is not just the best way but it is the RIGHT way.

At stake for Christians walking the divining line is that this line can divide us, and separation is so far from the plan that God purposed for his people ever since the day the animals walked onto the ark two by two.  Even then, the divine plan was to save the world…and so it is with Jesus. He is real and he is present; he’s not on Memorex.

John wrote us a whole gospel on the divinity of Jesus Christ; yet when followers relied too much on the spiritual side, John wrote letters to help Christians  understand the human side. To understand Jesus, we need him as incarnation and enfleshed—it’s a both/and situation, not an either/or.

So, friends, tonight, when you look up in the sky and the Lord asks you, “Tell me, Watson (or Jim or Mary, etc), what do you see?” It’s not necessary to wax poetic, it’s hardly acceptable to profess prophetic; it’s only necessary to say from your heart, “Lord, I know you…and I promise you that I will abide in you, keeping your commandments and walking not against you, but close to you on the divining line.  Amen.

August 3, 2014

First Parish Federated Church of South Berwick, ME

The Reverend Donna Lee Muise, Pastor

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[1] Carattini, J. A Slice of Infinity: The Detective and the Theory. www.rzim.org. May 21, 2014.

THE POWER OF A HEART’S DESIRE

 THE POWER OF A HEART’S DESIRE 

 Exodus 20:17; Matthew 22:34-40

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife…”

We have arrived…arrived at the end of this four-part sermon series on the Ten Commandments. Have we learned anything beyond what we already knew about the Decalogue before we started on this July journey?

One of the biggest ideas that I hope you caught was that the Laws are not there to restrict our lives to the point of boredom and oppression—the laws are there to explain how we are to be in relationship with God and with each other.

A second major idea is that the 10 Commandments teach us what is expected of us morally, physically, and spiritually—in order that we can experience what lives lived in the freedom of Christ look like, feel like, and yes, even taste like.

A third important message regarding the Ten Commandments is that Perfect Love is God’s design—so much so that God put it in writing and used his own finger to do so. With Laws written in stone it makes it kind of hard to argue the point, doesn’t it?

Jesus summarizes all the law and the prophets with the commandment to love God with all your hearts, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor, you know, as yourself. That’s an order hard to fill for anybody, even we Christians who have had the privilege of hearing and reading the gospels and the letters to the new churches.

Humanity is always the weakest link in God’s design, so much so that it makes me wonder if our character flaws are not also part of God’s grand design. If I have learned anything throughout my faith journey, my studies and my life’s path it is that God wants us to rely completely on him for our every need.

Oh, but we are proud of our self-sufficiency, and even the best of us can be virtually vulnerable to the wiles and guiles of our hearts’ desires. That’s when things get ugly.

“The desire of our hearts will lead us astray. We are to love God. We are to love neighbor. We are not to desire our neighbor’s spouse or house….and we cannot do it.”1

1 Jacobson, Rolf. “Commentary on Exodus 19;1-6; 20:1-17.” Narrative Lectionary. www.workingpreacher.org. June 15, 2014. (emphasis mine)

The sheer and staggering numbers of faith-personality seminars, retreats, cruises, as well as the Christian self-help books that smother the market are all clear demonstrations of our desire to find SOMETHING to conquer the elephantine word of the day: covet.

The importance of the coveting commandment is made abundantly clear by the numbers: the covet word is the only admonition to be repeated twice. If God says something more than once, we best be paying attention to it.

Covet: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s spouse.” We are not supposed to long for, be jealous of, or take anything that belongs to somebody else.

We are not to beg, steal or borrow—and we know this, right? It’s not the obvious coveting that I think we have to be so careful about; I think it’s the more subconscious kind that can really lead us away from the finger of God. “Many (perhaps most) big sins start when we set our gaze on something that belongs to another.”2

2 Ibid.

We are pretty familiar with biblical coveting:

 Adam and Eve coveted knowledge, wanting to be like God. So they bit and consequently lost paradise. David spied Bathsheba bathing: he wanted her, he got her; they made a baby, and Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, ended up gored through the heart, literally.

 King Ahab and Queen Jezebel coveted neighbor Naboth’s vineyard. When he refused to give it to them, he ended up planted in the garden, not tilling it.

 Do I have to mention Samson and Delilah? How about Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5? While all the other believers were selling everything and putting all the money in the common purse, Ananias kept some of the profit for himself and his wife…well, you guessed it, they both ended up dead, too.

Coveting can lead to physical death. Yet, I think we should be “lasered” in on spiritual death that coveting is known to cause. It sneaks up on us; it slithers around—waiting and watching for our most vulnerable moments, then the fangs come out. We’ve all seen huge corporations coveting power and finance and politics.

But what about you and me? Haven’t we been caught in the clutches of the claws of covetousness, from time to time?

I remember a summer as a young teenager, when I strained my gaze out my bedroom window toward a neighbor’s yard. They had a swimming pool there, and I could hear all the fun they were having. I wanted a swimming pool more than anything!

When I went to work for Houghton Mifflin when I was 19, one of the first things I bought was a swimming pool for the family; yet somehow it wasn’t as great as I remembered. The pool was filled with water, but it wasn’t filled with fun and friends and family, which is what I was really wanting.

The interesting, tricky piece about coveting is that we want some thing that we believe will make us happy, will make our longings or sorrows disappear, will fulfill our hearts desires.

We can be fooled by the power of our heart’s desires: never, ever underestimate the power of the heart’s desire to lead us to places and people where we should not go.

The only place and person to whom we should go is God, for he spoke all these words, “I am the Lord, your God.”

 Only God can deliver us from our Egypts, from the places where we have become enslaved. Living the commandment faith keeps us from falling victim to coveter’s deception.

 Only God has the power to lead our hearts to God’s deepest desire for our lives, finding and fulfilling the freedom that comes from God to us in the expressed love of Jesus Christ, who died to buy us back from all the things we thought would buy us happiness.

Thanks be to God that our journey toward salvation is God’s heart’s greatest and most powerful desire. Amen.

July 27, 2014

First Parish Federated Church of South Berwick, ME

The Reverend Donna Lee Muise, Pastor

The Neighbor Laws

THE NEIGHBOR LAWS
Exodus 20:3-11; Matthew 22:34-40
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Have you heard about the new neighbor laws in California? You know that the entire state is in its worst drought since almost ever. Cities all over the state are now encouraging residents to tattle on their neighbors for wasting water.

Actually, tattling is sugar coating it a bit. The real goal is to shame people into not wasting water—on their lawns, on their driveways and sidewalks, on their cars, even in the shower—don’t ask how the neighbor knows you’re taking too long in the shower.

Shaming is immensely popular, too— residents have responded in droves, outing water wasters on talk radio shows, in the twittersphere, and via facebook, etc. Sacramento, for instance, has received more than 6,000 reports of water waste this year, up twentyfold from last year.

Drought-shaming may sound like a petty, vindictive strategy, and officials at water agencies all denied wanting to shame anyone, preferring to call it “education” or “competition.” But there are signs that pitting neighbors against one another can pay dividends and reveal drawbacks.
“In Santa Cruz, dozens of complaints have come from just a few residents, who seem to be trying to use the city’s tight water restrictions to indulge old grudges. ‘You get people who hate their neighbors and chronically report them in hopes they’ll be thrown in prison for wasting water,” said Eileen Cross, Santa Cruz’s water conservation manager. People plead water-waste innocence, and suspiciously ask: “Was that my neighbor? She’s been after me ever since I got that dog.”1
So much for “love your neighbor as yourself”; so much for the greatest commandment; so much for bringing out the best in one another! It’s far easier to focus on what the neighbor has that we don’t have, or what the neighbor’s doing that they shouldn’t be doing—or even better, what the neighbor’s getting away with that we want to do, too.

We can try to resolve the issue the California way, by shaming, but God’s way is far superior to any of our earthly efforts. When God gave the law to the Israelites in the desert, the Ten Commandments were meant to be a gift, not a curse, not a limitation, not a blaming/shaming kind of rule book. The Ten Commandments, as I’ve said over the last two weeks, “show us how a liberated people who have been freed by Jesus Christ from the powers of sin, the world and self can live a new life.”2
Many people are looking for new life. We’re bored, tired, overwhelmed, ashamed, guilty, troubled or some other combination of life events or situations that have really got us hurting, yearning, reaching, wanting a better life, a different life, another life. The thing is, we have life and God gave us life, and God gave us Laws to keep us free from the sin and circumstances that derail and shame and punish folks who stray from God’s plan for our lives.

1 In California, shaming the water waster. By Ian Lovett / New York Times News Service. Published Jul 5, 2014 at 12:01AM

2 The Second Table—Turned Toward the Neighbor. www.workingpreacher.org. June 29, 2014.
Let me say this, “the purpose of the Law is not ‘your best life now’ (the title of one of Joel Osteen’s books based on the theology of prosperity); the real purpose of the Law is for our neighbors to have their best life now because of the way we treat them, relate to them, encourage them. This is what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves.

The long and the short of it is, the Law isn’t about you or me. It’s about our neighbor. “And God loves our neighbors so much that God gives us the Law.” Yet, before we get our knickers all in a knot, the converse is also true: “God loves us so much that God gives our neighbor the exact same law.”3

Imagine a neighborhood in which all families loved the Lord our God with all their heart, and with all their soul, and with all their mind. If we love God, truly loved God, then how in the world could we ever engage in shaming our neighbor, grinding axes and retaliating for old grudges against our neighbor? That’s not love.

We cannot claim to love God and do ugly things to any other person.

You see, we have this neighbor law that’s as old as the faith of desert wanderers, and we cannot disregard or overrule the neighbor law because doing so is the same thing as doing it to God. Hating your neighbor is the same thing as hating God; loving your neighbor is the same thing as loving God.
Our love for God is not to be half-hearted or just pretend or only when it’s convenient or just on Sundays. We are to love God with all our hearts, with all our soul, and with all our mind—and let me tell you, it takes more strength to do all that than we can ever gather on our own.
Without Jesus to teach us, without neighbor to reach us, we are as lost in the desert as the ancient Israelites.

And I don’t know about you, but I hate to be lost, to feel lost. I want to be found. I want the Lord to find me worthy of his name, but I cannot do it alone; and neither can you. We need God and we need each other; the only strength that will bind us with God and each other is love.
Friends, let’s leave shaming to California. God has given us a different and far better neighbor law: it’s a law about a greater love—love for God and love for other people. When we live by God’s neighbor laws, there will never be a drought of love among us. Thank God for the Law!
So, with the greatest commandment written on our hearts, minds and souls, we charter a new course, the best course, the heavenly course for our lives: freedom in Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen.
July 20, 2014

First Parish Federated Church of South Berwick, ME
The Reverend Donna Lee Muise, Pastor

3 The Second Table—Turned Toward the Neighbor. www.workingpreacher.org. June 29, 2014

The Call to be free 7/6

The Call to Be Free

Exodus 19:1-6, 20:1-2; Galatians 5:13-15

“…If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples…you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.”

A woman has a problem with her closet door. Every time a bus passes by, the door would pop open. She calls a repairman to fix it. The repairman says, “I’m gonna see what is going on; just close the door behind me.”Meanwhile, the woman’s husband comes home from work, opens the closet door and finds the repairman. He says, “What the heck are you doing in here?!”The repairman replies, “Well, you’re not going to believe it, but I am waiting for a bus!”[1]

The other morning I had the car all packed, and I was ready to go to work when I remembered I needed one more thing from my bedroom closet. I rushed back in and opened the closet door and my cat Stella popped out! I wasn’t looking for her, but it sure is a good thing I remembered what I forgot! Otherwise, Stella would have had a hard, hot day stuck in there, and I might have had an unpleasant surprise waiting for me when I got home…sometimes you never know, like the husband in the joke, just what you might find when you open your closet door.

During this summer sermon series on the Ten Commandments, I will use the metaphor of a closet to explore the context, meaning and importance of the Law for Christians today with this clothes’ rack I had moved up from the vestry! Through the weeks ahead, we will find some strange, wonderful and even uncomfortable items in our closet that will bring light—good news—into our lives rather than perpetuate our secrets and shadows, which keep us behind closed doors.

I know that we can get a bit squeamish or downright frightened about looking into our spiritual closets. Yet, the first thing we need to understand is that God’s Law is for us a call to be a free people. While modern minds may conceive of the Ten Commandments as a rule book that hems us in, I suggest that we look at the Decalogue as God’s declaration of our higher calling to a greater freedom. How fortuitous it is then that we should begin this series on the weekend our country celebrates its declaration of independence.

Our forefathers signed their names with their own pens in hand upon a document Americans consider sacred, and with their signatures the 56 men set forth their deepest desire to live in a land where “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”[2] Abraham Lincoln later summarized the vision of our forefathers as the desire to live together in “a new nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”[3]

The preamble to the Declaration of Independence and President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address follow the same format that God declared before Moses on Mt Sinai. The first words spoken establish the “foundation-ship” of relationship. In the American documents, how people are to live together are set forth first.

And so it is with God in the Ten Commandments.  God establishes the relationship first. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” The Law is given only after the holy relationship is declared.

Christians tend to confuse the loving and faithful relationship that God wants from us with a drudgery of religious rules and rituals. Apologist Nathan Betts writes, “If the drive to live for God comes from a sense of duty, our faith will become one long arduous journey.”[4]  

The Decalogue is truly about God’s grace-intention to free us to live purpose-filled, liberated, and abundant lives, and its purpose is to help us fulfill our inherent spiritual desire to be in loving relationship with our God, not to coerce us into loving him.” There’s nothing freeing about coercion. God calls us to be free, and this calling is written in stone by a finger from the hand of God, not by a pen in the hand of a human.

The Law does not limit our freedom by telling us what things we are not free to do—though they do exactly that—the Law tells us what lives freed in Christ look like.

To live freed in Christ, truly, means live for him and with him, to listen to him, to receive him, to eat with him at his table, to stand by him in the hour of his passion—and to live the same way with our neighbors.  And we can only do this when we remember that through Christ’s death and resurrection we have been freed from the power of sin.

It is my hope and prayer that these next few weeks will find us reexamining our call to be free in relationship with God through Jesus Christ; to open the closet doors behind which our sin hides and shedding the light of the good news in such ways that we shall desire to live joyfully and obediently for God.

We are not meant to spend our days standing around waiting for a bus. It’s time to go behind the door, examine our relationships with God and our neighbors, and answer the question, “What the heck are you doing in here?

So…what’s in your closet? Come back next week and let’s dare to open the door to a new relationship with God, to whom we are a treasured possession, a priestly kingdom, a holy nation. It’s time to remember what we forgot! Amen.

July 6, 2014/1^st Parish Federated Church of S Berwick, ME/Rev Donna Lee Muise, Pastor

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[1] www.funnypart.com/funny/closet-repairman

[2] Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

[3] Lincoln, Abraham. “The Gettysburg Address.”

[4] Betts, Nathan. “Why the Rules Make Sense.” In, “A Slice of Infinity” June 6, 2013. RZIM.ORG.

“GOSPEL LITE” June 1, 2014

Luke 6:43-45; Philippians 2:1-13

“…for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

 

Paul’s letter to the Philippians is filled with exhortations of practical Christianity—he writes constantly of unity, humility, obedience, love, faith—yet, these virtues are not uniquely religious nor uniquely Christian.

 

Wherever the Buddha went, [H]e encouraged everyone to have compassion for each other and develop their own virtue, "You should do your own work, for I can teach only the way."[1] What is the way? Finding happiness and ending suffering. In Hinduism, the belief is that all beings and all things in their deepest essence are made of a pure, or divine, spirit and are full of peace, full of joy, full of wisdom, and completely united with God.[2] The goal is to reach that place of Nirvana.

During the first century B.C.E. a great rabbi named Hillel was asked to sum up Judaism while standing on one foot. He replied: "Certainly! What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary, now go and study." (Talmud Shabbat 31A.)[3]

 

With the golden rule in religion’s back pocket, Is Christianity just another spiritual philosophy? Is it just another religion with some beautiful ideas and noble ethics? What say you? NO! If no, then what makes the difference? What separates Christianity from all other religions in the world?

 

Buddhist scholars will admit that it doesn’t matter at all whether the Buddha actually lived on earth or was myth because Buddhism should be judged as an abstract philosophy—a system of living. Believers are to imitate Buddha’s way of life not his actual life. And as for Hinduism, it is a conglomerate of thinkers and philosophies and gods—as if God needs little deities to help orchestrate the universe God created! 

 

Is Christianity similar? Could God have sent another instead of Jesus? The answer is most categorically ‘NO.’ Jesus did not claim to be a prophet in a continuum of prophets. Jesus is the unique Son of God, part of the very godhead that Christianity calls the Trinity.”[4] So what separates Christianity from all other faiths? It’s Christ; Christianity is Christ. Jesus Christ is indispensible to the faith we live. Theologian John Stott writes, “If Jesus was not God in human flesh, Christianity is exploded.”[5] Any attempt to avoid Jesus as fully human and fully divine at the same time, or reducing Jesus’ role to being a really good prophet, a really wise man, or a really great teacher simply reduces the potency, the power and the promise of the gospel—turns it into Gospel-Lite, the way artificial sweeteners or fat substitutes in sodas, candy, potato chips and French fries reduce our caloric intake so we think we are sticking to our diet. But have you tasted that stuff? C’mon; are we really fooled?

 

The answer is most categorically “NO!” When we substitute living virtuously for living the full Gospel we sacrifice our salvation, we make a mockery of Christ’s death, we deny the resurrection, and we reject the God of love, life and eternity. If it’s the Gospel-Lite way of life we desire, then why bother with church at all?

 

We could sleep in on Sunday mornings, we would not have to spend one or two nights a week in meetings, and we could save everybody a whole bunch of money. Why do we create problems for ourselves? Our passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians today can help us understand what’s going on with us, why the Gospel-Lite version of life and faith just doesn’t mean much to anybody, especially to Christians, and that’s where the problem comes into play.You see, the problem with Christians is that they are human, and humans by nature overwhelmingly prefer to live intuitively.

 

Christianity, however, is a counterintuitive system of living. Counterintuitive means something is contrary to intuition or to common-sense expectation. 

For example, Maine is north of Massachusetts, right? When I leave Gloucester, Mass to return to North Berwick, Maine, I first have to drive South on 128 before I can go North. That doesn’t seem right or natural, does it? Yet, it’s true. Look again at verses 5-6: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”

 

And picking up in verse 8: “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” It’s inexplicably counterintuitive in our ways of thinking that Jesus would choose to do these things for us. It’s profoundly counterintuitive to accept that the unique Son of God would be obedient to God’s will, take the sins of the world upon himself, and die—let alone die, humiliated, upon a cross. And it’s most emphatically counterintuitive to understand that the Jesus who was crucified and buried is still the one, the only one, on whom God has exalted and bestowed the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (vv10-11).

 

The list of counterintuitive exhortations in scripture is expansive; we’ll never live long enough on this earth to study them all. The Christian faith is not just about studying the word; no, our faith consists of far more than that.  The purpose of obedience to God in believing that Jesus Christ is his son and in following Christ’s counterintuitive way of life is not to eliminate suffering and find happiness, as Buddha taught; it is not to find perfect peace in becoming one with God, which Hindus seek (Christ himself did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped; it is not to make the golden rule the only rule we need to find world peace; it is to eat his body and drink his blood as the ultimate gift of being one with him…forever.

 

Paul states that the ultimate promise of being one with Christ, living as he lived and loving a he loved, and in all things seeking humility by counting others more significant than ourselves, is our salvation.  With fear and trembling, another counterintuitive phrase for “awe and reverence,” Paul calls us, each one, to turn ourselves completely over to God, who deeply desires to work through us in ways that lead us “both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (v13) so that we will be with him in paradise. That is full-strength gospel, my friends.

 

Do not succumb to an intuitive Gospel-Lite life.  Believe in the LIGHT of the counterintuitive gospel “so that if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy” (v 1) God’s joy in you will be complete because you, I, we, are of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” with Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

 

 

June 1, 2014

First Parish Federated Church of South Berwick, ME

The Reverend Donna Lee Muise, Pastor

 

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[1] http://online.sfsu.edu/rone/Buddhism/footsteps.htm

[2] http://www.uri.org/kids/world_hind_basi.htm

[3] http://judaism.about.com/od/judaismbasics/a/whatdojewsbelieve.htm

[4] Zacharias, Ravi. “Christianity without Christ?” In “A Slice of Infinity.” Rzim.org. January 23, 2012.

[5] Ibid.