Thank you Sara!

Thanks to my guest blogger. The picture she posted is one she took along the Mississippi down by Kiwanis Park. I am hoping to get Nick on to the blog too but he is off to a church camp this week.

I am not going to post the sermon from this morning. It was on Mary and Martha and one of the comments I made was that Martha was telling Jesus what to do. "Jesus, don't you care. Tell my sister to get up and help me."
But Mary is in the listening position. She is sitting at the Lord's feet. It is a spiritual image of attention, stillness. and awareness. She is listening to Jesus, not telling Jesus what to do!
I talked about how hard it is to just attend to the spiritual listening in our life and we are tempted to get up and get busy; get distracted with many good things, try to be in control and so on. I will repeat the closing story that I used. (Sorry, I don't know the source that I borrowed this from.)

I read a story about Paul Tillich. Paul Tillich was a great theologian of the mid-to-late 1900s.
(I had to read his sermons and his systematic theology in seminary.)
But . according to the story, this very conservative student, a fundamentalist student,
was in this class and he believed that Tillich did not have a high enough regard for Scripture.
So in every class the student would ask Tillich if he believed that the Bible was truly the Word of God. And Tillich would give one of his long and philosophical answers .But the student thought those answers were too evasive.

So one day during class, the student walked up to Dr. Tillich and waved his Bible in front of his face and said,
"Dr. Tillich, I demand that you tell me.Is this or is this not the Word of God.?"

Dr. Tillich answered slowly, he said
"It is the Word of God if, instead of you gripping it,
you let it grip you."

That's what I see in the image of Mary...
And I think that is how we can be Mary

Let it grip you ....
with your ears open to the Word of God
May it be so with us.




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