One More Thing

In this season of newness, we continue to examine various dimensions of our shared faith and practice with fresh sight. This Sunday, Pastor Mike jumped back into our recent conversation about our rhythms and relationship to scripture. Engaging with the Bible is always an invitation to humility, and as we look to Jesus’ encounter with a certain young man we consider the things (tangible or not) that we cannot seem to release, including our own assumptions and certainties.

Scripture & Quotations

John 1:1-5

Mark 10:17-27

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control, power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everyone else.

-Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps

If even the most authoritative teaching, the most sacred text, leads to dehumanization, to humiliation, to harm, then we must reject it. The Bible itself shows us how to do this… [The rabbis] worked to align the text with their moral understanding. And in doing so, they give us permission - no, an obligation, to do the same… Our role in reading sacred scripture is to ask two questions: “What does the text say?” and “Who may be harmed by this text.”

-Elie Wiesel, quoted in “Witness” by Ariel Burger

Reflection

• As you meditate on the encounter that Jesus shares with the young man, how might you have responded in the young man’s place? When you consider what is most difficult to release in your own life, are there possessions that have become an idol, or perhaps there are old fears, resentments, judgments of which it is time to let go? This season of Lent is a perfect time to let the old things pass and be buried, so that the new life can rise from the soil.