Reconciling in Christ Sunday

Third Sunday After Epiphany

Third Sunday after Epiphany Series B

January 22, 2012 St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran

Keith Olstad

The texts:

The Call to Worship: a selection from Deep River by Howard Thurman

The first reading: Jonah 3:1-5,10 (NRSV)

Psalm 46 (TFF)

The gospel: Mark 1:14-20 (NRSV)

The children’s lesson:

Good morning! I’m so glad to see you again this morning. Thanks for coming up to spend this time with me.

When I read the gospel lesson in a few minutes, we’re going to hear Jesus talk with people who catch fish and sell them to make a living. Jesus tells them to follow him, and he will teach them to fish for people! Do you know what that means? Do you know how to fish for people?

Let me show you. Will you follow me, and we’ll go fish for some people. Because basically what fishing for people means is that you let them know that you want to be friends, and then you spend a little time getting to know them, and you tell them about yourself, too. You listen to them, and you tell them about what you care about, and what you do in order to feel good about yourself.

So, here’s a person I’d like to befriend, and I’ll introduce you, too, so that you can fish for people.

The sermon:

Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God, our Creator, and from our loving Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

It went viral on the internet some four years ago. I mentioned it in a sermon a couple years ago. A professional wildlife videographer filmed a young leopard killing one of its most mortal enemies, a baboon, only to find that the baboon was carrying a one-day-old baby. In a stunning turn-around, and in spite of having just killed the baby’s mother, the leopard gently nuzzles the scrawny baby baboon and then carries it up into a tree, out of reach of hyenas or other predators. There in the broad limbs of a spreading tree, the video shows the leopard spending hours caring for the baby baboon, licking it clean, cuddling it in its immense paws. The little baboon seems to accept the leopard’s caresses, eventually falling asleep for the night tucked in the leopard’s embrace. Sadly, without its mother’s milk for nurture, the baby baboon eventually succumbs to the cold temperatures and in the leopard’s tender care dies in the early morning.

The video makes the whole event undeniable, but it seems too bizarre to believe. It seems wrong on so many levels. In the African wild, the leopard and baboon are mortal enemies. The leopard has no capacity successfully to nurture the baby baboon. In its preoccupation with the baby baboon, the leopard basically forgets its hunger and ignors its recent kill, albeit the kill was the baby’s mother. What is happening here? What is the leopard doing? How could such a thing possibly be?

“The contradictions of life are not in themselves either final or ultimate,” wrote Howard Thurman in the reading we heard as our Call to Worship. An African American whose thought deeply influenced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Dr. Thurman is writing about the power of faith found especially spirituals in the African slave communities of the American South. He argues that when life’s contradictions are regarded “ultimate and final,” they serve the interests of people in power, because the contradictions then become “inescapable and binding.” “This undermines all hope for the oppressed,” writes Thurman, because there can then be no hope for a “future that is different from the experience of the past. The structure of the universe is stacked against” the oppressed.1

Certainly a leopard that cares for the orphaned baby of the mother baboon the leopard has just killed seems as stark a contradiction as nature can offer. Thurman wants us to see that life offers such exceptions to the way things are as signs of hope, as indicators that God speaks to us in life in ways that reveal a present that is not determined to be always the way it is now. Rather, reality can become something quite unlike the present, and in that possibility is a holy hope.

In today’s first reading, we encounter Jonah, obeying YAHWEH, our God, hiking through Nineveh bellowing a dramatic threat. Nineveh will be “overthrown,”2 he declares, just as in Genesis God destroyed Sodom.3 The destruction of Sodom was hellish and complete, so Jonah’s threat is that Nineveh is destined to unimaginable devastation.

Amazingly—almost as startling as a leopard tenderly caring for a baby baboon—“the people of Nineveh believed God.”4 Let me emphasize: according to our text, the people of Nineveh don’t believe Jonah. They don’t simply recognize that their ways have been wrong. Rather they recognize that Jonah is right in predicting what YAHWEH will do. The Hebrew language here implies nothing about developing a faith in God. The Ninevites simply recognize that YAHWEH will destroy them for doing what they have been doing. Jonah’s threat, they see, is true and valid.

Then, to a person, the Ninevites immediately perform ritual repentance and remorse. They engage in a thorough turning from their ways, crying to God to relent and turn from God’s anger. Their response is not even confined simply to the people, but to every living thing of the city. This is a whole, ecological repentance.

In this stunning response, the people of Nineveh reveal themselves to be creative people, open to God’s presence and expansive in their response. Jonah’s threat contained nothing about an alternative. There was no condition on God’s intention to destroy that great city. Nonetheless the people of the city—the ones who elsewhere in the story have been violent, abusive and wrong—in the words of Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, become “daring, imaginative and inventive in moving beyond the prophetic word.”5 The people of Nineveh claim hope and appeal to God’s mercy.

God does indeed respond mercifully to the people of Nineveh. The people of the city were right about YAHWEH. God is free and able to act as God sees fit. Even more to the point, God is willing to change God’s own mind, to repent even of God’s own judgment, as righteous as that judgment seemed at first. God is not prisoner even to God’s own declarations, but allows and even invites creative, imaginative response to God’s presence.

We find similarly challenging stories in our gospel lesson this morning. Frankly, I find the stories about the disciples responding on the spot to Jesus’ call that they leave their nets and follow him as hard to believe as I find the story of the conversion of Nineveh hard to believe. But while these stories stretch my capacities to believe, I also struggled to believe that video about the leopard and baby baboon. Perhaps even more to the point, in spite of my struggle, I need to believe the possibility of each of these stories. I need to believe for precisely the reason Thurman argues the importance of seeing beyond the contradictions in life, the seemingly perpetual struggle between good and evil, between predator and prey, between malicious and kind.

For if we cannot entertain that the citizens of a city can change their ways, or that fisherman can leave their livelihood and follow a spiritual master, or that a leopard might care for a baboon, then we will be hard pressed to believe that God is truly “gracious…and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”6

These stories come to us as confessions of faith, as essays about the nature of God. They are not episodes from history textbooks. Rather they are deeply faithful proposals about the nature of our God. They remind us that as God called Jonah so long ago, so God calls us today. We become Simon and Andrew, James and John. We are people of this city, called to be the ones who are daring, imaginative and inventive. We are created in God’s own image, in the image of a God who is anything but flat, unchanging and predictable. We are called to be the faithful people of a creative, free and passionate God.

As people of so passionate and responsive a God, we face the contradictions of having too much to do and too little time in which to do it, and to few resources to pay for it. Those of us who are shy are called to speak out, and those of us who talk too much are called to listen more carefully. Those who love to think about things are called to get our hands dirty, and those who are used to dirty hands are called to reflect and imagine.

Life’s contradictions may come to us as political referenda that try to define who is in and who is out, or as biblical stories that sound like fables, or as videos that contradict what we think we know to be true. These contradictions challenge us and provoke us. They also call us and lead us. They point us to pay attention to the God in whose image we have been created. And they call us to count on our God who is so gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. That is who our God is, and we are called to be God’s creatively faithful people.

So be it. Amen.

Commemoration of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

Commemoration of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Anita C. Hill, Co-Pastor, St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran Church

Listen and Speak

1 Samuel 3:1-2 and John 1:43-51

Grace and Peace to you from God, our Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer. Amen.

Have you ever heard your name called – in a crowd? Or maybe you’ve heard your name called in your sleep? Was it real? A dream? A whisper? A mistake? Or Somebody calling for you?

With a name like Anita, I learned early in first grade that some kid saying: “I-need-a pencil.” Or “I-need-a drink of water.” Would make me turn around to see who was calling me.

I imagine that some of you whose names are common in your generation have had the experience of having two or more girls named Susan or several boys named Steve, so you may be more used to this than I was.

Remember the Gospel hymn “Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name? Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord, what shall I do?”

Our Old Testament and Gospel readings this week are stories about individuals who received a call from God. God called Samuel to become a “trustworthy prophet of the Lord.” John’s Gospel tells the story of Philip and Nathanael responding to Jesus’ call when they realize that he is the one “about whom Moses in the law and also in the prophets wrote” (John 1:45).

God calls and it is up to us to listen to God’s voice.

It happened to Samuel, who heard, but did not understand God=s call in the night. It took Eli, Samuel=s mentor-priest, to interpret God=s call. Like Abraham before him and the prophets after him, Samuel was called to a special task. Eli told Samuel how to respond: ASpeak Lord, for your servant is listening.@

God called Samuel to a difficult task—to tell his mentor Eli that he and his house will be punished. He and his sons will be removed from priestly leadership and Eli’s lineage ruined. No doubt it was not easy for Samuel to deliver this news, which would be devastating to Eli. But by giving God=s message to Eli, Samuel became a prophet—a conveyor of God=s message. And “As Samuel grew up, God was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.” (1 Sam. 3:19)

God called Martin Luther King, Jr. God put in Martin great mind and a strong voice. King is like Samuel who had to say a hard truth to the one he served about the punishment God would bring down on the house of Eli. King had an academic’s intellectual bent coupled with spiritual depth and compassion for humanity. God called and King’s faith led him to places he probably never imagined. King’s voice as prophet still rings truth as we read his speeches that link oppressive systems of racism, militarism, and nationalism that haunt us still.

When we hear our name called, or feel a stirring within us, we need to be ready to say to God: “Speak, Lord, for we are listening.” God=s call may place us in a moral dilemma. It may be difficult to discern God=s call to begin with, and then faithfully living that call is even harder. But we have the promise that God is with us.

It seems that St. Paul-Reformation has long been called by God to be speak truth to power. St. Paul-Ref spoke to this neighborhood in the 1950s when the church opened its doors to Black members. You all spoke to the racism of the refugee resettlement by taking up the call to sponsor 70 Ethiopian refugees. Today, you speak through the many adoptions that have broadened the scope of our faith community. We are called, and we are speaking in these ways, too:

Our Isaiah folks are keeping racial and economic equity in front of us especially in this restless time of foreclosures and financial woes.

We are speaking about Nigeria, where our sister parish needs our prayers for peace between Muslims and Christians.

Wingspan Ministry is moving us to global justice-making on behalf of LGBT people in Uganda.

We are called in El Salvador, where our sister parish is surviving. Through floods, loss of crops and homes, still the children we support through scholarships all passed to the next grade this year!

Our Marriage Matters Task Force is working to defeat the constitutional amendment which would place discrimination in our state’s foundational document.

The numbers of people coming to the Food Shelf continues to increase, yet the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center struggles to keep its doors open.

We are called to engage the issues of our times, to get to know people beyond our comfort zones, to deepen our spiritual engagement with the world – God is calling us to that and more. Dr. King said: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

For King, non-cooperation with evil was as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good. He said we “have to repent not only for the actions of bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people.” 

We are called to listen to God and to speak.

Let us not be silenced by the number of things that need spokespersons.

Let us not be silenced by our despair that no one is listening.

Let us not be silenced by our own privilege which lets us pretend that we have a choice not to speak.

We cannot be silent about our lives and call to work toward justice because we are followers of Christ. Like Samuel and Martin Luther King, Jr., we have to speak when God calls us, even if it is a hard word. We know some things about exclusion and “isms”. We are called to respond to the racial and economic inequities of this decade.

The Word of God is speaking. Like Samuel, Nathanael, and Martin Luther King, Jr., God is calling our names. Listen. Amen.

The Baptism of Our Lord

The Baptism of Our Lord Series B

January 8, 2012 St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran, St. Paul

Keith Olstad

The texts:

The first reading: Genesis 1:1-5 NRSV

Psalm 29

The second reading: Acts 19:1-7 NRSV

The gospel: Mark 1:4-11 NRSV

The children’s lesson:

Good morning! I’m glad to see you. Thanks for coming up to talk with me this morning.

Did you get Christmas presents this year? I’m so glad! Why do you think people gave you those presents? Yes, because they love you. They give you presents because they want you to know how much they love you.

God gives Jesus a present today: the gift of baptism. And when Jesus has received the gift and is coming up out of the river Jordan, God’s voice tells Jesus that he is God’s own child, and that God truly loves him, and that God is very pleased to be part of his life. The gift of baptism confirms just how much God loves and cares for him.

That happened for you, too, when you were baptized. God touched your forehead with water and word, and God confirmed God’s love for you. So let’s listen to the story about how God spoke to Jesus at the time of Jesus’ baptism.

The sermon:

Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God, our Creator, and from our loving Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today is the third day of the Epiphany season. It falls just two days after the day when, according to Matthew’s gospel,1 the magi from the East came to visit the baby Jesus with exotic gifts. Those sages—those wise folks from the east—found Jesus, Matthew says, by following a star.

Have you ever tried to follow a star? A hundred or more years ago, sailors were able to travel with some confidence by reading stars in the night time sky, when the sky could be seen. So could travelers in desert caravans. But I’d have to say that I personally have had some rough times trying to navigate by reading signs in the sky or even the lay of the land.

During my first summer in Minnesota’s boundary waters, I worked briefly as an assistant to a greenhorn guide from California. He was a nice college guy named Pat, but he was completely out of place in Minnesota’s wilderness. For his first canoe trip he was given a Boy Scout group from Illinois—and me. At one point our group was spread out on a large lake in Canada’s Quetico Wilderness, and Pat was confused about which way to go. So he took a compass reading, and then intently studied the map on the floor of the canoe. While focused on his map, Pat didn’t notice the gentle breeze turning his canoe around. So when Pat looked up, proud of himself for his map reading, he led us all off in a direction exactly the opposite of where we wanted to go. It’s not easy to read the signs in the sky or the lay of the land.

But there is sense to the way things are in the natural world. There is order there, and it is possible to find one’s way. That is the essential point of our first reading this morning, though it is certainly not a scientific explanation. Rather, in mythic terms, it expresses a deep conviction that God is the author of earth’s rhyme and reason. Initially, says Genesis, “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.”2 But God’s Spirit, in the form of breath or, according to our translation, “wind,” swept over the face of the waters, and God made order from the “formless void.” God created light and separated light from darkness, creating day and night. So it became possible that by using the light of a star shining brightly in the desert darkness, one could find one’s way.

Nonetheless, the magi apparently were none too sure of themselves, wise as they were and apparently accustomed to travelling the faceless deserts of the Middle East. Matthew says they went to Jerusalem asking for directions to the baby they sought. In a wrinkle terribly unfortunate for babies in the region,3 the magi ended up in King Herod’s court, where ancient prophecy suggested Bethlehem as a likely spot to find the baby born King of the Jews.

I have considerable empathy for the magi, those wise folks from the east who had a pretty good sense of the direction to go, but needed help along the way. In my own life, I have many times felt an urging, a calling, even a conviction about where to go with my life, but I’ve never been completely sure. I certainly didn’t know the details. When in high school I headed off for my first summer at the canoe base, I sure didn’t know how to find my way in the wilderness. When during the summer between my junior and senior years in college I went to New York to “experience the city,” I sure didn’t know how to find my way in the city on my own. Even when I went to seminary, I could never have imagined that my life’s path would lead to what I have become now: one of your parish pastors. I hear other folks talk about the clarity of their call or their certainty about where they plan to go in life, and I feel much more kinship to those magi who needed help in order to find where the star is taking them.

There’s a curious sense in our second reading that the good folks who encountered Paul in Ephesus needed a course correction as well. Paul begins to talk with them about the complexity of God—part of God, after all, is Holy Spirit—and they confess that they don’t even know about a Holy Spirit. Their baptism was the baptism offered by John the Baptizer, a baptism of repentance. So Paul tells them about the fuller possibility of the baptism practiced by the followers of Jesus. Upon receiving this baptism, these Ephesians found themselves visited by the Holy Spirit and doing the very things characteristic of that early church movement: they began speaking in tongues and prophesying. Then in a telling end note, the author of Acts, Luke, says that there were “about twelve of them.” Why not simply eleven or thirteen. What’s so special about twelve? Hmmm…

So isn’t it remarkable that those Ephesians apparently received the same baptism that Jesus received, but what was good enough for Jesus was not good enough for them? Mark’s gospel, as well as Matthew’s and Luke’s, makes clear that John’s baptism, in the words of this morning’s gospel, is “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”4 This claim has for centuries been irksome for Christian theologians—especially for those for whom Jesus’ divinity is paramount. Because if Jesus were sinless—if he lived his life free of the foibles and failings of common humanity—what on earth would bring Jesus to seek out a baptism for the forgiveness of sin? If Jesus is sinless, why seek forgiveness for sins?

I suspect that the mystery exists in large part because it was not a question that the gospel writers found perplexing. The gospel writers would say, I think, that Jesus was extraordinary, even holy, but he was also one of us. Jesus, too, had a sense of the direction his life should go, but he needed some guidance, some help along the way. So we have the story of the Syrophoenician woman who would not accept Jesus dismissing her as a dog unworthy of food meant for the people of Israel.5 She reminds him that even dogs get the crumbs from the table, and Jesus, recognizing the power of her faith and her worth as a child of God, heals her daughter.6 That woman, like John the Baptizer, may be one of those who help Jesus see more clearly the path to which YAHWEH, his god, is calling him.

In other words, Jesus goes to John the Baptizer for a baptism of repentance

not because of his sinfulness. That’s not his concern. Rather, I suspect that Jesus seeks the Baptizer’s baptism because it becomes a clarifying moment for him, a time when he acknowledges a course-change in his life.

God, according to our gospels, affirms Jesus’ course-change, his submission to John’s baptism, in undeniably clear and resonant terms. In Matthew and Mark’s gospels, perhaps only Jesus himself hears God’s declaration that he is God’s son, God’s beloved, with whom God is well pleased. In Luke’s gospel, it appears that everyone gets the message about God approving of who Jesus is.7 What an affirmation that would be: that everyone around you could hear God’s delight and affirmation of each new effort you make to become what God calls you to be! How reassuring simply to know for yourself that God is with you in your decisions, in your choices, and to be reminded how deeply and fully God loves and cherishes you.

In our Men’s Christian Fellowship gathering last Thursday evening, several older men reflected on the weaving and wandering that characterized their long lives. Each of them has found considerable peace and satisfaction in the course their lives had taken, but none of them had known with any certainty early on where their lives were headed. They, like Jesus, needed friends along the way—women and men alike—to provide gentle encouragements and perhaps firm reprimands. They weren’t so different from those magi from the east who needed to stop for directions in Jerusalem, or from those Ephesians who discovered from Paul that there’s more to God than they had been thinking.

Each of the men in that conversation last Thursday, and each of you here this morning, are well served in the course of life’s twists and turns by remembering God’s voice ringing with those loving words of affirmation and encouragement in baptism. For God so spoke to you once, when baptismal waters first dampened your head. And God so continues to speak to you and to all around you at the beginning of each new day, when the light of Christ again cuts through the darkness and claims you as God’s own, as God’s beloved.

So be it. Amen.

First Sunday After Christmas

January 1, 2012

Anita C. Hill, Co-Pastor

St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran Church

First Sunday After Christmas

First Sunday After Christmas

January 1, 2012

Anita C. Hill, Co-Pastor

St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran Church

Hands

Luke 2:22-40

Grace and peace to you from God, our Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit. Amen

I imagine that Simeon’s hands were weathered, large, and wrinkled. They showed spots that spoke of age. Strong hands that had worked hard over a long lifetime. Hands that had held on to love and that had been loved with touch that spoke of hope and promise. His hands were now shaky but had once been steady and true in motion. Simeon picked up the infant Jesus with his old, worn-out, but wise hands.

Hands like those of men certain of their trade. Hands that just seemed to know what to do. Capable hands that simply sought out the familiarity of touch and movement they were made to do. Hands with a wisdom of their own.

Simeon’s hands were like those we have seen in our families and in our community of faith. Hands like those that form a cradle to receive Jesus in bread and wine during worship services here at St. Paul-Reformation.

Visits with our community’s elders during this Christmas season have revealed hands worn and wise as well. Hands that have washed communion glasses, ironed the fair linens, and prepared the sanctuary for festivals as well as funerals. Hands of faith used to holding Bibles.

Think of the hands of people you know. Remember the hands that taught you to write. Hands that showed you how to make art projects, how to play a musical instrument, or to whittle. Hands that cooked up delicious treats to eat. Hands that kneaded bread until they were as soft and pliable as the dough. Hands that felt rough from hard, demanding work.

Consider all that wisdom en-fleshed in human hands. Picture again the wizened hands of Simeon as he picked up the infant Jesus. Simeon cradled the baby tenderly, like a grandfather holding the life of the generations in his hands. Simeon looked at the baby Jesus in his hands and could see him all grown up. Simeon saw the Christ, the Promised One. Wouldn’t it be lovely if each of us could see the Christ in one another, and in every single person we meet?

Simeon held Jesus with the strength of a man of righteousness and devout faith. Simeon cradled Jesus in his arms as an elder guided into the temple by the Holy Spirit. He was there waiting when Mary and Joseph came to the temple with their child.

The Scriptures tell that this pair of faithful Jewish parents brought their son to present him to the Lord when the time came for their purification. They followed the law of Moses and brought their son to the temple, the first time at 8 days for his circumcision and now at 40 days for purification and presentation.

It had been revealed to Simeon that he would not see death before he had seen the Messiah. In the temple that day, led by the Holy Spirit, Simeon took Jesus in his arms and praised God, saying:

ALord, now you are dismissing your servant in peace. . for my eyes have seen your salvation… a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for the glory of your people Israel.@

This was no chance meeting. Luke describes the encounter of Simeon with Jesus as the work of the Holy Spirit. Simeon was a righteous and devout man. His longing for the Aconsolation of Israel@ was a desire to see the fulfillment of the messiahCthe hope that was prophesied by Isaiah. Simeon=s personal piety is matched by his longing for peace, justice and righteousness. Mary and Joseph must have been amazed as Simeon took Jesus in his arms and spoke to them. Especially Mary, for men rarely spoke with women outside their family. The Spirit=s presence must have been palpable.

Simeon blessed the holy family and told Mary that her child was Adestined for the falling and rising of many… Simeon said that Jesus was Ato be a sign that would be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many would be revealed.@ Something more for Mary to ponder in her heart about Jesus.

And as if the affirmation from Simeon was not enough by itself, we also have the witness of Anna, who at age 84 was also a prophet. She was of the tribe of Asher and had lived to a great age. Can you see her body, bent from all her years in prayer in the temple? She was a widow who Anever left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day.@

Anna led a life of worship. And she also saw Jesus as the Messiah, because Ashe began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.@

Anna’s message is aimed at a broader audience than Jesus= parents. She tells anyone who will listen. Anna can be understood as the first preacher to tell others about this infant Jesus who was their Messiah. Anna is a biblical pre-cursor of the women who ran away from the empty tomb to tell others what they saw on Easter morning.

Both Simeon and Anna are elders searching for the holiness and presence of God. As Christians, we stand in their tradition, as people of faith who search for signs of God=s presence with us today, too.

God once was among humanity as Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who came as a baby and grew up to be our Savior. God continues to be present with us still.

We know God is with us when we see the hands of the elderly and praise God for their lives.

We know God is with us when we remember at all that came to pass at that first Christmas long ago.

When we thank God for the tiny hands of infants and children in our families and communities.

When we come to the font to be baptized, with water and the Word.

When we put our hands to work for those who do not have shelter, clothing, and food.

When we deepen our relationships with the children and families of our Sister Parishes.

When we work for racial and economic justice.

When we care for LGBT folks both here in Minnesota and across the globe.

We know God is with us…when we stretch out our hands to receive the body of Christ at Holy Communion.

When we share the peace among us and embrace the world as we leave worship and return to our homes and workplaces.

When we carry out the mission of the churchCtelling the Good News and sharing what we have, we carry baby Jesus with us.

When we claim Christ and act as Christ=s church, we hold Jesus now, just as surely as Simeon held him in the temple.

When we praise God and live as the Body of Christ here and now, we are God=s hands in the world awaiting us in 2012. Amen.

(Resource: Emphasis, Nov/Dec 2002)