Week 9
Thoughts from Class
This week there were a collection of student presentations to engage with - cancel culture, “Opening Doors: Celebrating and sharing in the value and gifts in others and ourselves,” and ageism.
Response to Scripture
The scriptures for this week were: Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12
Isaiah and Psalm: both of these passages call into mind images of abundance
Matthew: coincidentally, I was assigned to preach on this text for my preaching class. While I plan to make a whole blog post with the sermon in it, here are a few thoughts.
“Change your life!” John repeats. As other translations of the text say, “repent.” In fact, the Greek word for repent is metanoia and it means “to change one’s perspective.” As we journey through this season of Advent, awaiting the birth of Christ, we hear the same message. “God’s kingdom is near. Change your life.”
Resources
(1) A song or hymn connected (2) a media piece - art, film, music, cartoon, meme, blog post, etc. (3) an action someone could take - prayer, legislative action, meditation, petition to sign etc. Each resource is related or connected either the lectionary text or the focus area of expansive language.
Song/Hymn
Pop Culture Reference or Media Piece
This is a clip from the movie The Shack, adapted from the book of the same name by William P. Young. For those of you who have not yet read the book or seen the movie (both of which I highly recommend), here’s the summary from the back of the book:
“Mackenzie Allen Philips’s youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during à family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four ears later, in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.”
This scene depicts Mack meeting the Trinity - Creator, Redeemer, and Spirt. As you can see, some of these characters don’t quite fit the bill of what people imagine. In the same way that the author imagined these manifestations of the trinity, I invite everyone to expand their idea of what the trinity is and looks like.
Action
Truthfully, my action might be the recommendation to watch The Shack. It’s such a powerful movie, the whole story, and pushes people to go beyond themselves in the way the understand themselves and the world.