Hi there! You can almost taste it, can't you? Spring, I mean. It's in the air every now and then. May you feel it in your bones this week as you go about the business of being you. This week is the firs  t full week of Lent, the journey to Easter, to hope and a promise of new life. Here at Hope, we've begun our journey by studying the Beatitudes together using a book by Erik Kolbell (see sidebar at left). This week's Beatitude is Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. What, one wonders, does it mean to be blessed, or to be poor in spirit? Is this some ontological mumbo jumbo or does it have some practical application for everyday life? Exciting questions like these are on our minds this week as we explore this teaching at our Friday gathering. If you'd like to participate in the discussion but can't make it on Friday, you can join us for an online discussion using omething called Coursesites. Just drop us a note at sower-@ecclesia-newburgh.org and we'll send you an invitation to the "course." |
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Great expectations . . .
Five ships were headed south on the ice-choked Hudson River Friday afternoon when I crossed the Mid-Hudson Bridge into Poughkeepsie. The largest, a freighter, led the way. Following it were smaller vessels - two oil barges and two even smaller carriers. It was slow going. They'd only made it about a mile when I recrossed the bridge 30 minutes later. But, they were moving, making way when there seemed to be none, following one by one in the wake of the one ahead, their pilots trusting their knowledge of the Hudson, the ways of river ice and the skill and confidence of
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Ice jams covered Newburgh Bay from one side to the other Saturday morning.
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the pilot leading the way.
If you've ever been on a ship working its way through ice, you know that it's not as quiet and peaceful as it seems from afar. The sound can be deafening. Below decks, the sound of a ship moving through thin, fresh ice sounds as though someone is pouring an endless supply of marbles on a tin roof. I imagined that Friday's ice was more of a deep, loud thunder-rumbles with some scraping sounds thrown in for good measure. As annoying as the sound may be, there's something comforting about it. Maybe that's because if you can hear/feel the sound, you know you're still moving, that the ship's not stuck.
Next Sunday's gospel reading - John 3:1-17 - is about a man from whom no rumble was heard, a man who was stuck, stuck in his own expectations about the young rabbi who was causing such a stir, standing the Law on its head, hanging out with the riffraff, and saying the most outrageous things in his journey across the Galilean landscape. You probably know the story by heart - Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish religious establishment, visits Jesus in the dead of night. He wants to know who Jesus is or, at least, he wants to know more about him. He listens to what Jesus has to say but doesn't really hear him. He leaves the story perhaps even more confused than he was when he showed up.
That's the way it is with Jesus and his teachings - we think we know what he's saying only to discover later that we were mistaken, that there was more to his message than we thought. Like Nicodemus, we hear with one set of ears but not with the other . . . We slow down and get locked in by the ice of our own preconceived notions and need to put Jesus in some kind of box. We somehow think that faith is a noun when it's actually a verb, a very active verb that calls us not to be born again but to come to a new way of thinking, a new way of being in the world, a new way of living and to act out of that new understanding.
In an every-man-for-himself world, when the navigational buoys on the river of life have become knocked off location or hidden by the ice, it's great to know that we don't have to go it alone, that there's someone who goes before us helping us to see what we might otherwise miss.
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