Friday's thoughts
"What Do You Expect?"
It is a remarkable message we find in Psalm 147:16. It tells us, "God gives snow like wool; God scatters frost like ashes." In the sermon I am struggling with the Grace and Gumption of what we face in 2007 and I've been thinking about what to say to prepare us for the year to come.
If it is true that our expectations will have a major role in determining the way the year will unfold. In fact I think there is something of a hersey related to expectations. It's called the "heresy of too low expectations". I plan to hold high expectations for the coming year. Everything that happens will have the potential to teach us. Everything that comes to us will be seen as a gift. Nothing will be wasted. All is a part of something we can use and move forward.
Irwin Kula has some interesting and important insights in his book, Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life. We find this thought:
"Isaac Luria was a sixteenth-century mystic who had a wondrous vision about how the world came to be...As he read and reread Genesis, imagining and reimagining the world's beginnings, Luria wondered: How can an all-perfect, all-encompassing God create something less than itself? The essential paradox of creation, Luria thought, is how the unity of the Divine gave rise to the multiplicity of this world. How does Oneness make room for otherness? In other words, how did God make room for life? Luria imagined that God contracted, became smaller, in order to allow life to unfold...He envisioned God as a series of vessels, luminous containers of all that is. When God contracted, the vessels shattered from the incredible energy and force, and shards were scattered throughtout the universe. Each of these fragments contained a spark of light, a grain of God."
Luria concludes that it is our job to take the scattered shards and put them back together to bring God into a state of wholeness again. In other words the promise of the year to come is that we will find broken fragments of God and scattered sparks of light. Our job is to put them together as we work toward our own wholenss and as we work to put the world(and God) back together. The future provides both challenge and opportunity.
How will we find the spark of light and the grains of God?
How will we try to put it back together?
If you have thoughts you would like to send to me personally write me at charlesschuster@fcfumc.net. If you would like to have others in the congregation see your response click on the 'comments' box. I look forward to hearing from you.
Charles
