January 8, 2023

Happy New Year, dear siblings of Lake Merritt and Lake Park United Methodist Church.

 How is your new year going so far?  I wish I could say that all is well with me but it’s been a rough start.  How about you? 

I spent about six hours at the Apple store and my cell provider last night to get my cell phone back so that I could receive and send text messages out but and am still not successful at it.  What do we do without our phone functioning at 100% nowadays?  I know, right?  It’s been difficult but I’ve been telling myself that this is a first-world problem. 

Reading the bible, have you ever asked yourself, “man, what did Jesus mean by that”?  It’s difficult to understand what he meant!   Well, in the new year, we are invited to think about the difficult words of Jesus that we often encounter in the scripture and we are invited to wrestle with the ancient text.

We will be using a book inspired by Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish and a New Testament scholar, In The Difficult Words of Jesus, and she shows how these difficult teachings would have sounded to the people who first heard them, how they been understood over time, and how we might interpret them in the context of the Gospel of love and reconciliation.