In our spiritual tradition, God is found in the community of faith (to be sure everywhere else also, if one pays attention). Our Wesleyan tradition values this affirmation highly. In the beginning, the spiritual path was the small group meetings where people shared their own faith with each other and in the sharing found God's Presence and direction.
In the last decades the world has grown wary of experts. We all know the feeling of being duped by someone playing games with statistic and our media attention has wide enough scope to get evidence of almost any view. So, people are beginning to turn to places where real people share what they are going through. It is much more messy than experts, and probably a whole lot less penetrating, but in the mess we find the comfort of authenticity. This is the real strength of blogs, we see not only the resulting reflection but the process. Which is exactly what we found in Wesleyan class meeting. God is not sought in the answer, but in the process, and so the Spirit we discover is a flowing Presence -- a river of life, not a rock of salvation.
This week's sermon and for the next few weeks will flow with this conversation as we learn to discover God's word in our community. We will explore together various aspects of our good news of this conversation.
August 9, 2009 Waiting for God Psalm 130
August 16, 2009 Asking for Wisdom 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
August 23, 2009 Taking off Thick Skins Ephesians 6:10-20
August 30, 2009 Arising to the Beloved Song of Solomon 2:8-13
How did you feel about that this week?
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