(Interested in joining us? Link to our Visitor's Center.)
Marilyn selected prayers that fit both the year's theme and our own individual personalities.
Before class, we learned that Nuno's family is now mourning the loss of two beloved pets in three weeks. We also heard from Kathy, suffering a setback in her recovery from surgery. They were in our thoughts at the beginning and end of the session.
Living Faithfully in a Multicultural World:
1st yr: Jessica; 2nd yr: Susan; 3rd yr, Pete, Nuno, Marilyn, Kathy ; 4th yr, Scott. Mentors: Susan and Scott. Absent: Nuno, Kathy.
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| Bob Marley relates to the church in ancient Ethiopia. |
Jessica started us off with her reaction to reading so many instructions in Leviticus for slaughtering lambs, bulls, and other animals: "It makes me want to be a vegetarian." Scott picked up on the sacrificial lamb, mentioned in the Y4 book as one of many metaphors by which we understand how Jesus saves (e.g., ransom, conquering warrior, advocate, husband, Second Adam), metaphors that can "intensify" feeling and devotion.
Pete compared reading about the minutiae of temple sacrifice to reading about the hair-splitting that resulted in so much bad blood in the early church. Marilyn agreed. Scott asked for any modern-day example of emotional conflict over semantics. Susan cautioned everyone, "Semantics do matter." Jessica told us thta the difference between "marriage" and "blessing a union" caused the break-up of a church just this week. All agreed that, reading between the details, they did sense believers struggling to create community with God and each other.
Susan enjoyed Powells' charts that show at a glance differences among the gospels and different theories to explain how some portions of different gospels seem to quote each other or some unknown common source. Pete and Marilyn enjoyed learning about peoples that don't come to mind when Euro-Centric Episcopalians think about church history: Ethiopians' strong identification with Jews, and Syrians' affinity for the story of Jonah (as in, any enemy of Nineveh is a friend of ours). When Susan mentioned that the Ethiopian connection continues in Jamaica, we went down a reggae rabit-hole.
With two of five absent, we put off tonight's TR for next week.
Instead, we thought about ways that visitors to our class could get a good idea of what we do. Our ideas went into our blog's new Visitor Center. The link is located at the top of each new blog post and also in the upper-right-hand corner of our blog, over the EfM logo. And here it is again:
(Interested in joining us? Link to our Visitor's Center.)
Pete will lead worship; Scott will bring a source for the TR.
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