We are in the Liturgical Season of Epiphany: The coming of Jesus, the Light of the World – Enlightenment & Wisdom. This weekend we will have gained one full hour of light since the shortest day on December 21, 2013.
I awake just a bit earlier in the mornings to the sun’s light reflecting on Carver’s Pond and shining in my window. Funny the dogs don’t seem to want to get up any earlier. ☺ By the time I leave for school the upstairs temperature has increased by one full degree without the addition of wood in the woodstove. It seems the daytime light is just a bit brighter, even when it’s cloudy, and there is light across the harbor with colors of dusk, instead of darkness, when I return home. Am I truly experiencing these changes in the light or is it wishful thinking? Or, could it be, that because I know the sunlight is returning I am more apt to look for differences in light?
That was, and is, one of Jesus’ most powerful teachings. That light, as both Knowledge and Wisdom, comes when we sit quietly and truly observe the world around us. Time and again Jesus stopped His disciples and told them to LOOK & LISTEN and then CONSIDER what they had just seen. It’s not enough to simply look and listen. We must consider, delve deeply and even wrestle with what we see and believe in the world. There are lessons to be learned. There are assumptions to unlearn. There are mysteries to enter into. There is more than beauty within the lily. There is more than an old woman placing a penny in the box. There is so much more.
Epiphanies frequently challenge our long, held-fast opinions and beliefs and so, too often, we brush them off or refuse to consider them as an alternative to what we already know. How funny human nature is, we know that our own knowledge is insufficient and incomplete and yet we sometimes deny or refute other’s experiences and knowledge because it is different from our own. Jesus challenged the teachings and laws of His day because He took the time to LOOK & LISTEN & CONSIDER the real tangible effects they had on real people’s lives and on the world.
Consider the lilies? Consider the old woman and her penny?
Consider the foreigner among you? Consider the poor?
Consider the children? Consider the woman ‘caught in adultery’?
LOOK / LISTEN / CONSIDER – What Would Jesus Say about this?
What Would Jesus Do?
Are we not called to do the same?
Wisdom and Light to us all,
Pastor Chellie
John Street United Methodist Church 