Each week during worship, we wade into scripture together and see what we can discover.
It’s scary, isn’t it? The silence, the questions, the not knowing, the wondering? Yes, it is. It scared me, too. And yet, it’s one of my favorite parts of the service because it engages us. For it to work, it asks the community to trust each other and to actively wrestle with scripture. It’s a time for your curiosity to get the best of you. For that question to find traction. To show your kids that curiosity about the Bible is…normal. That you and they are in a safe place where a question is expected, not suspected.
The Holy Spirit is at work in our conversation together and usually, at least once per week, a question sparks a whole new way to look at the reading that I hadn’t even considered. And instead of being threatened by it, that I should have thought of it and written the sermon that way, it instead opens up the word, like it’s an actual living word.
At least once a week I run into someone from our community who has been chewing on a question or comment that was made during this time in our worship, and they’ll say something like, “I don’t think I’ll ever ask a question, but…” and then we talk about what they’ve been chewing on and discovering in the days since that time.
My hope and prayer is that you can find yourself in this scripture in some way, shape, or form. That it will inspire and bother you throughout your week and throughout your life. It’s my goal as pastor to help you see just how connected to this story and promise you are.
Eugene Peterson, the man who wrote The Message translation of the Bible says this about finding ourselves in scripture: “When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves. ”
