Manna Alert

Next week, 11 of us from Trinity and 4 folk from First Presbyterian, Wichita will travel to San Salvador and 3 villages in El Salvador. Trinity has been in relationship with the village of Los Talpetates for 20+ years. So, even though many of our missionaries have never traveled with us to El Salvador, we return to sisters and brothers who know us well. Trinity has fostered a mutual mission relationship by sponsoring some of our El Salvador friends to travel to KS most years of this relationship.

While we are in El Salvador, we'll center our nightly debriefings on Matthew 14: 13-21 - the story in which Jesus feeds 5,000 people after teaching them all day out in the wilderness.

This is clearly a story of hospitality. While in El Salvador, we will experience generous and gracious hospitality Central American style. Our friends understand hospitality as an outpouring of all their resources upon us, overcoming language barriers with their warmth and love, and securing our safety wherever we go. I've experienced my former trips to El Salvador as a case of materially poor people with rich hearts lavishing themselves on us Americans who are materially full of abundance.

Jesus feeding the 5,000 is also a miracle story. But how do we define the miracle?

Is it a miracle in which Jesus opens people's hearts so that they share their meager bits of food with each other? Are the people so transformed by listening to Jesus that they are empowered to move beyond their own hunger to share generously? In the face of what looks like scarcity, Jesus may be the source of abundance by working through the people.

Or - perhaps it's a physical miracle in which Jesus is the source of physically multiplying what is already present as the disciples serve the people fish and bread and still have baskets of food left over.

As always, Jesus stretches our imaginations, our faith, and our responses to him. I anticipate that our mission trip will be a time of stretching for all of us in various ways. We look forward to sharing our stories with our family of faith in worship on July 31st.

Grace and Peace,

Pastor Shelley

Men in Ministry Sunday

This Sunday, July 24th, is Men in Ministry Sunday at Trinity. To prepare for worship led by Anton Ahrens, Jon Farrell Higgins, Greg Lee, and David Ross, read Romans 8:26-39.

Where do we find confidence to trust in God's authority and sovereignty and power so that we can believe that nothing will separate us from God's love in Christ. Perhaps we're the ones doing the separating - turning our backs on God. Perhaps we're challenged to look at our sense of independence, or our self importance, or our extensive ability to worry, or to stay so busy that we don't pay much attention to God's presence.

How can we stay connected to God so that we can believe in the promise that nothing will separate us from Christ's love? How we stay connected in our families - our personal families; our work or school families; our families of faith - may be one path of connection. Getting outside ourselves so that we actively connect by serving others is another path of connectedness.

Let us give thanks that God, in choosing us, awaits our attentiveness, holding the door open - a door that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can close in our face.

Grace and Peace,

Pastor Shelley

Casey Anthony, Harry Potter, and the Mixed Field

For those who had been following the Casey Anthony trial, the verdict seemed completely unexpected last week. How could she have been found not guilty? Facebook and Twitter were filled with people crying out about how wrong the jury was, how evil Casey is, and how justice did not prevail for the little girl who died.

Read this week the parable of the wheat and weeds (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43), complimented by the story of Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:10-19a).

Where is God in the face of perceived injustices? Where was justice, righteousness, or the truth? It seems as though no one will ever really know what happened with Caylee and the circumstances surrounding her death. Ms. Anthony will be released tomorrow, although where she will live or what she will do now is a mystery.

In the parable of the wheat and the weeds, we like to think that it is obvious that we are the wheat, and people like Casey Anthony or O.J. Simpson or Fred Phelps or Lord Voldemort are the weeds that have been planted in our lives by the evil enemy. We are in the right, and they are in the wrong, so why doesn’t God just pull up those weeds right now? Why doesn’t God let Her justice reign down right now? How can a good God let these things happen? Does God care about what goes on “down here”?

What we read and hear in the Genesis story is that in the most unexpected times and at the most unexpected places, surely the presence of the Lord is here. Here. Not over there, up there, or down below. Right here, right now, the presence of the Lord is here, wherever we go, wherever we are. And what that says, in the midst of our field/world of wheat and weeds, is that God does care. God is the great farmer, wiser than our impulsive and judgmental selves, taking care not to harm the wheat in order to rip out the weeds now. God knows that evil, as real as it is in our world today, is only temporary.

(image courtesy of fanpop.com)

The last Harry Potter movie ended on a note that felt like good would never triumph, that evil has all the real power, and that love was going to be defeated by hate. This Friday, when the last chapter of the Harry Potter series is released, the world will discover the true and final ending. And we as the church have our real ending as well. The real ending is the resurrection, not the crucifixion. The real ending is the promise we find in Christ – that He came, that He is in this place today, and that He will come again. Alleluia, and amen.

The Sower

This week's readings are Isaiah 55: 1, 10-13 and Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23.

Much as we'd like to examine the four soils in Jesus' parable in Matthew 13 for our receptivity and readiness to the gospel, it really isn't about us. Much as we'd like to bring our rational marketing research and preparation to how and where we share our faith with the soil of other souls, it really isn't us who do the sowing. This parable is about God. In this story Jesus speaks of a sower (God) who throws seeds out with reckless abandon - carelessly on a hardened path, wastefully on rocky ground, and haphazardly on thorny ground. This extravagantly generous God of ours also sows seeds on good soil, where the harvest is beyond imagining - and beyond any rational reckoning of a reasonably good harvest! What's with this God of ours?

God is equally extravagant and mysterious in Isaiah 55: 1: "Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price." In today's economy we know this doesn't make much sense.

But our sovereign God, whose harvest is hundredfold, reminds us in Isaiah 55: 10-11: "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it."

If we are able to trust that God is busy bringing in the kingdom, how do we engage in sharing our faith and our resources alongside Jesus?

We pay attention to opportunities without the need to scrutinize or anticipate every detail. We remember that God's kingdom is everywhere about us. We are as extravagant in sharing as God is in sowing.

Grace and Peace,

Pastor Shelley