Grace Notes in the Desert

Grace Notes in the Desert is written for the saints of Rio Grande Presbyterian Church and the surrounding community.

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Grace Notes acknowledges we need God's grace and forgivness as much as the desert water.

6/19/2008

Beyond Standard Fare?

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst..." -Matthew 5:6

This summer’s scripture readings, taken from the Lectionary, are full of poetry (Jacob sleeping on stone pillows, dreaming of heavenly ladders); and problems (Esau selling his inheritance for a bowl of porridge); and, parables: about the need for seed and flour, God’s leaven, to sustain a hungry world; and the patient endurance to ‘keep on keeping on’, believing in God‘s goodness,in a world where weeds and flowers grow together in an unlikely garden, and the harvest not yet come.

Anyone who says the Bible is boring has, frankly, never read it; or heard it preached. Ask my children (who simply cannot get enough of it). Ask people hungry, for more than bread, on city streets throughout the world who long to read it. Ask the leaders of nations who, in a candid moment, might tell you why it is their country’s number one banned book: because its poets, prophets, saints and Savior have power to change the world…their world…with just a word…God’s Word.

Thank you, saints of Rio Grande, for sending me to hear it, again, in this country’s largest “Festival of Homiletics” held this year in Minneapolis, MN, with over 2,000 people from around the world in attendance. Hearing from preachers and speakers like Will Willimon, Barbara Brown Taylor, Michael Slaughter, Naomi Tutu (Archbishop Desmond Tutu's daughter), and others, inspired those of us there to hope and pray that our worship, prayers, study and service may, likewise, fill all who hunger and thirst (including ourselves) with ‘something more’!

Yours in Christ’s Service,
A Pastor in the Desert