Spokane Friends Meeting

One of the hardest things any of us has to do is to part from those we love. It is even harder to let go of someone on whom you have come to rely. As our text picks up the narrative, Jesus had just told his disciples that it would only be a little longer that he would with them. They must have wondered what would become of them once Jesus was gone. Jesus gives them a promise. He is not going to abandon them. He will be with them – but not in a way that the world could see or understand. Instead, he tries to help them understand what it means for him to abide with them in Spirit, a spirit he characterizes as being the Spirit of love and truth. It is through this Spirit, that they and we are able to enter into the divine life. It is the experience of those who love God and follow Jesus’ commands who will be in God – and God will be in them. To our human ears this sounds like an extraordinary privilege. But how can human beings be part of the eternal and divine? And yet such is the promise made by Jesus to His friends.

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This past week when a major player in the world of International Finance was arrested for deviant behavior my feelings were that his actions were simply criminal that he should be punished to the full extent of the law. But, when, this week, a Senate Ethics panel referred the case of a former Senator to the Department of Justice for prosecution, not for his moral failures, which were scandalous enough to cause him to resign, but for the illegal ways he used monies and people I felt quite a different burden.

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Psalm 116 verse 1 is my starting place for today. “I Love that God listens to my voice”.

Did Easter make any difference to us after all? This seems a good time to examine what we are now to do this side of the resurrection. And Psalm 116 may be a very good place to begin. It is a delightful and rich psalm of thanksgiving, a heartfelt call to God, thanking God for all those many things that have been done for us. The psalm begins in a truly memorable way; let me share a quite literal translation of the first two verses:

I love that YHWH listens to my voice, my requests for grace.
Clearly, God has inclined the divine ear to me when in my days I call.

There is such intimacy when the psalmist begins with that simple, “I love that YHWH listens.” In our present cultural climate to think that God actually listens to us is a matter of some contention. We Quakers spend a lot of time considering how we listen to God, but this is quite the reverse. How can we know that God listens to us when out of our distress we call, when we implore of God aid in our troubles, or when we thank God for favors we believe we have received from the divine hand?

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Psalm 116 verse 1 is my starting place for today. “I Love that God listens to my voice”.

Did Easter make any difference to us after all? This seems a good time to examine what we

are now to do this side of the resurrection. And Psalm 116 may be a very good place to begin. It is a delightful and rich psalm of thanksgiving, a heartfelt call to God, thanking God for all those many things that have been done for us. The psalm begins in a truly memorable way; let me share a quite literal translation of the first two verses:

I love that YHWH listens to my voice, my requests for grace.
Clearly, God has inclined the divine ear to me when in my days I call.

Continue reading →

Psalm 116 verse 1 is my starting place for today. “I Love that God listens to my voice”.

Did Easter make any difference to us after all? This seems a good time to examine what we

are now to do this side of the resurrection. And Psalm 116 may be a very good place to begin. It is a delightful and rich psalm of thanksgiving, a heartfelt call to God, thanking God for all those many things that have been done for us. The psalm begins in a truly memorable way; let me share a quite literal translation of the first two verses:

I love that YHWH listens to my voice, my requests for grace.
Clearly, God has inclined the divine ear to me when in my days I call.

Continue reading →

In 1919 Norman Angell, a British commentator, published The Great Illusion. He recognized even back then that national economies were so interdependent that war among the leading economic powers would be unimaginably destructive. To engage in warfare, he argued, would so undermine the network of international trade that no military venture by a European nation against another could conceivably lead to economic benefits for the aggressor. He predicted that once the costs and benefits of war were clearly understood war itself would cease.

Economically speaking, Angell was correct. But, less than four years after he published his book, World War I broke out which was followed by a great depression.

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Maybe it’s a man thing. Susan will ask me to bring her something and I’ll go and look where she has told me I’d find it and then holler back – “I can’t find it.” And you can guess the rest of that story, she comes and lays her hands right on it. Maybe that’s the reason God sent the women to the tomb first. As we read in the Easter story, Peter, James and John looked but were not able to see what was quite evident to Mary of Magdala.   Maybe because it is a familiar story, we tend to look at it casually. As a result there are things that we easily miss, like seeing the unusual prominence of women in all the versions of the story. It’s important to remember that if the evangelists were constructing resurrection stories for common acceptance they absolutely would not have chosen women as the first witnesses.

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There is no mistaking the fact that the raising of Lazarus was the moment that the religious leaders decided that Jesus had to die. Was Jesus searching his own heart to know whether he loved Lazarus enough to lay down his life for him. Was his groaning and even his tears at the tomb, which caused bystanders to remark on how Jesus had loved Lazarus not just for Mary and Martha, but for himself, and for what he was about to set in motion. Was this the moment when Jesus actually let go, and laid down his life?

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Ken Tuinstra was asked to prepare and share a message for Meeting for Worship on March 13.  “What Can I Know About God From Nature” follows.   

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…from the third chapter of Malachi we have this fascinating note where the Lord of hosts says: “the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight is here, here already…”. This messenger, who Matthew argues to be Jesus was already at work in the time of Malachi and according to 2^nd Peter through the early years of the church, and I am here to tell you that that same messenger is the Spirit of Christ for those of us who revere the Lord, those who are attentive to this lamp that does shine in a dark place, this light that is the morning star that seeks to rise in your heart and mine.

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