An Abiding Hope Blog

Lesson 6: Becoming a Holy People

Background Scripture: Exodus 19 and 24; Deuteronomy 7:1–11

Key Scripture: Exodus 19:3–6; 24:3–8; 15–18; Deuteronomy 7:7–9

Key Idea: In the covenant relationship, God offers us abundant blessings. We honor this covenant throught the choices we make each day.

Throughout their Exodus journey, the Hebrews commited to covenant relationships with God, to life as a holy people. But, each time, they grew impatient and broke the relationships. Again and again, God renewed the covenant, extending grace and love to the people. Sound familiar? We are not unlike the Hebrews. We commit and fall short regularly. God's grace is always available to restore us. We work out our holiness in covenant with a steady, faithful God.

PW marketing associate Carissa Herold reflects below on choosing covenant, choosing holiness.—sjd

Choosing God

Janice Catron sums up lesson six, “Becoming a Holy People,” with a very thoughtful anecdote. “While traveling on a plane a few years ago, I sat next to a Jewish gentleman who observed kosher law. Through some mistake in the system, his meal was missing. As this was a long flight over lunchtime, I worried that he might be hungry, so offered to share my meal—‘If,’ I said, ‘there is anything here you are allowed to eat.’

“His answer was a theological education, all in itself. ‘I am free to eat anything, he replied, ‘I choose to eat only that which declares my loyalty to God’” (An Abiding Hope, p. 60).

Even in joy and love, let’s face it, choosing to become a holy people, is, well, sometimes inconvenient. Think of the staggering number of Sunday mornings, Wednesday night gatherings, Bible studies, devotions, Easter sunrise services, PW gatherings and Christmas pageants you have participated in, lead, attended, initiated. And since Presbyterian women are known the world over for always being first on the scene, ever ready to roll up our sleeves, I’m confident that you and your PW sisters have trod that extra kilometer through volunteering, staffing, supporting, and even founding, food banks, hospitals, seminaries and schools, and shelters; and bringing the good news to dark places such as detention centers, war zones and refugee camps.

But as the world increasingly clamors for our attention and promises a better (easier) way, staying true to our faith—declaring our loyalty to God day by day in the way that we understand (as encapsulated our dear PW Purpose)—can seem, even to the most cheerful and resilient, ever more outmoded in a world that offers a quick fix (or momentary distraction) with much less bother. Becoming a holy people, as one can observe in scripture and in our own lives, may seem at odds with our natural human inclinations and out of step with how the world thinks we should step.

Choosing Holiness

But becoming holy is ours to choose. Yes, the world offers an ever-increasing, almost dizzying array of choices. Here in the United States, one only has to visit the cereal aisle at the local grocery to prove my theory. Some choices are inconsequential (bran or oat) and many are consequential (health and family issues, end-of-life decisions). Not making a choice is a choice, too. Choices, made or disregarded, are ever present.

So how do we choose to be a holy people? Or perhaps more accurately, how do we not get distracted (or cave into an easier way) from honoring our God? Scripture makes it clear, as did the probably hungry traveler who chose to keep kosher, that God gave us instructions and happily/maddeningly, free will to respond or ignore these instructions and also the intellect to reinterpret how to live as we move away from the wilderness into a high-tech world. So how do we live our lives as holy people with instructions from such a distant time and place?

Thanks to this blog series, I can follow a thought from the study to where this thought naturally leads me. And that is why I am so grateful to have stumbled on two books written by two very thoughtful people who are grappling with the choice to observe Sabbath in this world of Sunday football practice and Thanksgiving Day shopping opportunities.

In the book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, Judith Shulevitz provides a very interesting historical look at the Sabbath against her own deeply personal walk as she grapples with the meaning of Sabbath in this 24/7, secular world. She writes in the introduction: “If you view the stuff of everyday life as the raw material of Judaism, and its rules as a framing device, then you grasp something essential about the Sabbath: It is meant to turn the ordinary into the singular. A weekly house scrubbing, when done on Friday, becomes a way of making one’s home ready for God. A dinner party for family and neighbors attains the status of a royal banquet, welcoming home the Sabbath queen. To the mundane satisfaction that comes from cultivating good habits—cleanliness, organization, family togetherness—is added the sublime sense of rightness that comes from following God’s commandment” (p. xxiv).

Walter Brueggemann will soon release a book (February 2014), Sabbath as Resistance: Saying NO to the Culture of Now. In these pages (I have an uncorrected bound galley so do keep that in mind should this quotation differ from the actual printed book), he writes, “’No-Sabbath’ existence imagines getting through on our own, surrounded by commodities to accumulate and before which to bow down. But a commodity cannot hold one’s hand. … We may come to know, but likely not without Sabbath, a rest rooted in God’s own restfulness and extended to our neighbors who must rest. We, with our hurts, fears, and exhaustion, are left restless until then” (p. 89).

Living holy is a choice, a choice that honors God and, in turn and consequence, honors God’s people and creation. I am truly grateful for all of the Presbyterian women of faith who continue to choose to show up and live as a holy people, despite many pulls and distractions and unanswered questions.

—Carissa Herold

Until next time . . .

Hazel B. Sparks Receives Her Quilt!

Hazel B. Sparks of Clemson, SC (pictured). Hazel is 87 years young and is over the moon with excitement about winning the An Abiding Hope Quilt!

She is a lifelong Presbyterian and even went to high school and college at Montreat. She has served as president of the women of the church (and every other office), and is an Elder and still leads Bible studies! She is a member of Fort Hill Presbyterian Church in Clemson.

Congratulations again to Hazel B. Sparks and thanks to her daughter, Beth Sparks Batson, for sharing the above information with us!

Look Who Got Creative?!

Look who got creative? Carol Tigges from VA Beach! Carol worked all fall on creating this quilt using the quilt pattern found on the Horizons website at http://pcusa.org/horizons/ and took it to her PW Women's Christmas gathering on January 5th where it made its debut. The fabric-art quilt that originated with An Abiding Hope has a "Sister-Piece" sewn and quilted by Carol Tigges, PW Treasurer and Elder at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church of Princess Anne in VA Beach. Carol also presented a "Story Quilting" workshop at The 2010 Massanetta Synod of the Mid-Atlantic Summer Gathering. Thanks goes out to Ginny Sorrell for sharing Carol's lovely quilt with us.

The Official An Abiding Hope Quilt

Pictured is the official An Abiding Hope Quilt won this week by HAZEL B. SPARKS from Clemson, SC. Isn't it lovely?! If you are feeling creative and want to create your own An Abiding Hope quilt, go to http://horizons.pcusa.org/ and download the quilt pattern!

Winner of the An Abiding Hope Quilt

We have a winner! The drawing for the An Abiding Hope quilt was conducted on January 14, 2014 in the main office of Presbyterian Women, Inc. located in Louisville, KY. The winner is: HAZEL B. SPARKS from Clemson, SC! Check out the short movie to see the drawing take place and to hear Hazel's response when we notified her!

 

Lesson 5: God Provides

Exodus 15:22–18:27

Carissa Herold, PW marketing associate, offers these thoughts for Lesson 5.

With all due respect to all who do, I do not consider myself a collector. I do not seek out exotic stamps, or autographs from famous folk. I am not the curator of each first edition by my favorite author. Although I like these things, I do not search high and low for dancing resin raisins, nostalgic toys, comic books, trading cards, pottery or hymnals. And yet, despite my protestations to the contrary, I have amassed a lot of things. In fact, a quick glance to my windowsill and I see one collector’s tin, a dozen or so animal figurines, an angel, a smiling tear-shaped yellow doll (just give it a good pinch and it laughs!), a candle, a piggybank, and a basket bursting with greeting cards. Not a collector, indeed. In my defense, most of my happy collection is because people care about me and express their goodwill with cards and itsy bitsy glass and wooden creatures and coffee cups. But as I ponder my plenty, which goes well beyond my windowsill, I consider anew those who live as refugees in camps in faraway lands or, just three short blocks away, the men, women and children who have no place to call home except a shelter from 7 until 7. My ponderings on plenty and scarcity bring me to lesson five.

Lesson five begins with such an understated, quietly humorous, paragraph: “The last lesson ended with the single greatest event in the Hebrew people’s history: passing through the sea waters to safety under God’s power and guidance. Now we see that the people were barely past this experience when they began to complain.” (Let’s be honest, who among us cannot relate to the occasional lapse into petulance or dissatisfaction even during the rosiest of times?!) But when these newly freed people, who had probably experienced very few rosy days, complained of bitter water, God did not respond in anger but instead gave them sweetened water. And when the people fondly remembered the “fleshpots” and bread (Ex. 16:3) they were provided by their enslavers, while perhaps not fully allowing themselves to remember the true price they paid for these filling foods, God responded once again not with anger but with just enough food, not just for one day but just enough (and twice as much for the Sabbath!) for every day, day after day after day.

I had never connected the dots between Exodus’ manna story and the words “give us this day our daily bread” from the Lord’s Prayer until I read this lesson. “For Christians, the image of ‘bread from heaven’ (16:4) has remained a meaningful part of our tradition. For example, in the Lord’s Prayer, when we pray that God will ‘give us this day our daily bread’ (Mt. 6:11), we remember and re-experience God’s gracious gift of manna in the wilderness. We remember and celebrate that God provides for the physical and spiritual needs of the community of faith—and we trust that God will provide for us.” (page 49)

But a closer read of the scripture yields something very surprising to this blogger: God discourages hoarding and storing by turning sour any surplus manna. That must’ve been quite a lesson for these ancient people and, let’s face it, perhaps quite a lesson for us in this new world of ever so much stuff.

My takeaway is that we are to trust that God will provide sufficiently today and craving more than enough is not part of God’s plan for us or, let’s face it, our planet. “Give us this day our daily bread.” And although I like my things and do live in this place and time where the U.S. economy depends on things, for better or for worse, I trust that we can trust God’s astonishing benevolence in ensuring that there really is enough for everyone. Perhaps our job as people of faith is to remember those without access to partake of God’s intended abundance for everyone, while always staying mindful that hoarding and storing was discouraged in the wilderness.

 Until next time,

Carissa

Lesson 4: Passing Through the Waters

Exodus 15:22–18:27

The blog for Lesson 4 is offered by Carissa Herold, PW marketing associate.

The book of Exodus is brimming with very unsettling images: a burning bush, a pillar of fire, and even three sets of three plagues! But perhaps the most frightening of sights—before them a sea, behind them Pharaoh’s army—were frightening with an exponent because of when these threats appeared and what was newly at stake. The deeply persecuted people found themselves literally between the sea and an army as they were on the very threshold of their freedom. So close, so close, and yet ….

I love what Janice Catron writes in chapter four: “The strain of the people’s panic led them to mentally ‘rewrite’ history. Suddenly, they no longer remembered crying out for help in Egypt but claimed to have never wanted to leave! They turned on Moses, saying, ‘Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’?” (14:11-12) (p. 40).

I think most of us who have had a prayer answered can attest to the initial urge to rewrite our own history in protest or fear. Change, even good change, is often more terrifying than staying with the familiar.

So the people had two choices before them. They could turn around and return to the terrible familiar or step forward into the unknown in trust that the God who brought them to that place would help them find a way to freedom. Moses tells them, “Do not be afraid. [S]tand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today” (Ex. 14:13). And so they did.

Do not be afraid. J. Gerald Janzen writes in his Exodus commentary on these words: “Moses responds in words that occur some eighty times in the Bible, from Genesis 15:1 to Revelation 1:17: ‘do not be afraid’ or ‘fear not.’ Twelve times this phrase in the Old Testament is translated into Greek with a verb that means ‘take heart,’ ‘be of good cheer,’ or ‘courage!’ Of the seven occurrences of this expression in the New Testament, especially noteworthy are Mark 6:50 and John 16:33. So this expression goes to the heart of the biblical message. Where our spontaneous response is fear, and we cry out in that fear, God’s reassuring response is ‘don’t be afraid’” (J. Gerald Janzen, Exodus, Westminster Bible Commentary, 1997, page 100).

When I think of a wall of deep water, I am certainly afraid, army at my heels or not! But stepping forward into the water in faith, loosening the tight grip I have on my life, keeps me from sinking into unhealthy routine and deadening apathy. We are meant to swim forward but not alone. Or perhaps we aren’t really meant to swim but to let go and float. I am reminded of Kathryn Threadgill’s message at the closing worship at the 2012 Churchwide Gathering of Presbyterian Women (whose theme was aptly, River of Hope) where she shared the message that “hope floats”: ““So, what do we do when we leave this place? God says “be still.” We float and we come to know God. We float in the River of God’s hope.”

Although the ancient people physically walked (rode or were carried) through the sea’s parting, I like to think of them floating to freedom in God’s hope. Do not be afraid, indeed! Float on!

Until next time,

Carissa