Epiphany: Reading 4 FOURTH SCRIPTURE READING Ephesians 3:1-12 I, Paul, am in jail for Christ, having taken up the cause of you outsiders, so-called. I take it that you’re familiar with the part I was given in God’s plan for including everybody. I got the inside story on this from God himself, as I just wrote you in brief. As you read over what I have written to you, you’ll be able to see for yourselves into the mystery of Christ. None of our ancestors understood this. Only in our time has it been made clear by God’s Spirit through his holy apostles and prophets of this new order. The mystery is that people who have never heard of God and those who have heard of him all their lives (what I’ve been calling outsiders and insiders) stand on the same ground before God. They get the same offer, same help, same promises in Christ Jesus. The Message is accessible and welcoming to everyone, across the board. This is my life work: helping people understand and respond to this Message. It came as a sheer gift to me, a real surprise, God handling all the details. When it came to presenting the Message to people who had no background in God’s way, I was the least qualified of any of the available Christians. God saw to it that I was equipped, but you can be sure that it had nothing to do with my natural abilities. And so here I am, preaching and writing about things that are way over my head, the inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ. My task is to bring out in the open and make plain what God, who created all this in the first place, has been doing in secret and behind the scenes all along. Through followers of Jesus like yourselves gathered in churches, this extraordinary plan of God is becoming known and talked about even among the angels! All this is proceeding along lines planned all along by God and then executed in Christ Jesus. When we trust in him, we’re free to say whatever needs to be said, bold to go wherever we need to go. FOURTH STORY I believe that it was Timothy Merrill who pointed out the following reflections on Sue Halpern’s book, Four wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly. Throwing herself fully into the subject, Sue Halpern hits the road and studies butterflies in Mexico with a cowboy entomologist, tags and raises monarchs with her 8-year-old daughter at their home in the Adirondacks, and takes a glider ride to better understand the thermal forces that propel the butterflies for much of their journey. Monarchs are not guided by memory, she explains, since no single butterfly ever makes the round trip. Three or four generations separate those that spend one winter in Mexico from those that go there the next. A monarch butterfly born in August in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state, for instance, will fly all the way to Mexico, spend the winter there, and leave in March. Then it will fly north, laying eggs on milkweed along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Florida before dying. The butterflies born of those eggs will continue northward, breeding and laying more eggs along the way. So will their offspring. By August another monarch, four generations or so removed from the monarch that left New York for Mexico the previous summer, will emerge from its chrysalis and do the same thing. It will head south, aiming for a place its never been, an acre or two of forest on the steep slopes of a particular mountain range. If you hike into those mountains, you can see monarch butterflies so heavy on the branches of the pine trees that the branches bend toward the ground. You see more butterflies than you ever dreamed possible, 20 or 30 million at a time. Every available place to roost is taken. There are butterflies on your shoulders and shoes, butterflies in your hair. The clamor of butterfly wings is as constant and irregular as surf cresting over rocks, says Halpern. It feels like a holy and blessed place. We are many generations from when Jesus, the twelve, and Paul walked the earth, yet we still can find our way to God’s heart – a place holy and blessed. youtube/watch?v=Ajb1m6qHkJU
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 23:16:30 +0000
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