After the Lord's Prayer, we read the Beatitudes responsively. This week, the check-in question was embedded in worship, as we shared about people in our recent experience who deserved a blessing or needed one. We heard about empathetic customer service reps on the phone, dedicated medical professionals, a generous educator, a neighbor and a sister who both stepped up and stepped in to help us, and Joyce, a sweet woman who struggles with her dementia. We prayed for them all with a collect; at the end of the evening, we recited new beatitudes for these people.
We all read the essay "'Doing' Theology." Christine found it helpful that the essay included behaviors and emotions as ways of knowing God.
Many of us focused on certain words in this essay that get a different spin than we're used to. Scott was helped just to think of the word "theology" as God-knowing instead of the much drier God-study. Along the same lines, Susan highlighted the full meaning of credo, "I believe" with all my heart. Pete, too, was struck that the word "dogma" can be a comfort and assurance rather than the cudgel used by modern pharisees. Nuno was struck by the word habitus and the idea that good theology "inhabits you." When Marilyn read that theology "rings hollow" unless "illuminated by service," she was delighted to imagine literal "illumination."
Scott asked about the author's postulate that every generation has to find its own theology: If Scripture hasn't changed, why should theology? Nuno pointed out how theology must respond to changing circumstances with the example of the new framework for life created by digital spaces. Discussion followed.
Living Faithfully in Your World:
1st yr: Scott 2nd yr: Marilyn, Pete, Nuno; 3rd yr, Susan; 4th yr, Christine. Mentors: Susan and Scott. Absent: None.
[PHOTO: In January, the school football team at Bethel Park PA cleared snow from over 100 homes. Scott lived in Bethel Park to age 7.]
We had all written answers to the last question in the essay about how we experience God. We found some common themes: experiencing God through closeness to others, through ordinary people we may only glimpse on the corner or behind the counter, and nature in its awesomeness and in its persistence. (I hope you'll all save what you wrote: these were beautiful.)
We chose to focus on a memory Christine had of waking early on a school day to see that her father had been shoveling snow, not only in their own steep driveway, but also on the sidewalk. As she watched, other neighbors joined in. Nuno observed that vertical driveway + horizontal sidewalk mirrored the cross and the commandments to love God and neighbor.
Exploring the world of the image, we saw coldness and burden, but also beauty and a drawing in of community. Sin in this set up would be staying indoors. Waking up to see the snow is like judgement, as you realize you've got to do something and you may already be too late. Redemption comes from ending isolation.
Harvesting manna in the wilderness is as close as we came to snow-shoveling in Scripture. But we saw the aptness of the psalm about faith as a "lamp for my feet, a light on my path." Of course, it occurs to me now, too late, that Isaiah prophesied "one crying out in the wilderness ... to make straight a path" for the Lord. We also compared the element of shared effort to the sharing of loaves and fishes among the 5000.
Our insights from this reflection centered on community, and on how this ordinary chore was in a way extraordinary. Susan spoke of "the sacredness of the ordinary."
Christine wrote this collect:
We're doing the readings for week 23, along with the "response" part at the end of the week's chapter in the RRG, where EfM asks us all to think of a time when there was a "gap" between our beliefs and our actions. Nuno volunteered to share his for a TR. Susan will lead worship.
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