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...a word from the Pastor

As United Methodists, we have an obligation to bear a faithful Christian witness to Jesus Christ, the living reality at the center of the Church’s life and witness. To fulfil this obligation, we reflect critically on our biblical and theological inheritance, striving to express faithfully the witness we make in our own time.

Has it become almost a children’s story, a Bible story, a fairytale, or has it become the greatest event in your life.  This also is the time to consider where you place your faith, because even if you study the story and know in your mind that it is true there is one profound decision that has to be made.  What am I going to do with Jesus?  Is he going to be that beautiful picture that I have on a wall, or my emergency escape if I do something really wrong, or will he become the center of my life, my decisions, my compassion, my everyday walk.  I hope and pray you can be with us on Easter as we celebrate this great historical event.  He Arose!

Here we are in the beginning of April, the beginning of Spring to

celebrate the greatest event that has happened in history.  This one event has transformed more persons, strengthened families, changed cultures than any other event in history, and remember this is an event from history.  I am finishing a book about the trial and death of Jesus written by a Jewish lawyer.  Constantly through this book he is referencing other historical writers in the time of Jesus.  It is easy to almost dismiss this event in the form of a fairytale, especially if you have been raised in the church.  If you are 40 years old, then you have heard this story probably 100 times between Sunday School classes, Easter celebrations, family sharing, and yes even in some stores.  It is so familiar that we almost dismiss it as even being something that was in history, “It’s just a Bible story”.  But Jesus Christ died upon a cross and in three days rose from the dead.  Not only does the familiarity breed non committal but there are all types of theories of how this event really did not happen.  Some say the women in the emotions of death went to the wrong tomb that Sunday morning.  Another theory is that the disciples stole the body, or that the Romans stole the body.  Some say that he did not die, but that he was in a comma because of the loss of so much blood.  And finally that he did not come back to life physically but that it was a spirit that the persons saw, again in their emotional state it was more of a dream.  Stop right now and ask yourself, what do you believe?  How has the familiar story of Easter developed over the years in your thought process.