Pastor’s Column (Page 14)

Dear Friends, In thinking about the narrative of the resurrection in the gospels, did you know that Matthew, Mark, and Luke only devoted one chapter each to tell about Jesus’ rising and what happens after that? The writer of John is the only one who devotes two chapters. In total, Matthew wrote twenty-eight chapters, Mark wrote sixteen chapters, Luke twenty-four chapters, and John twenty-two. Perhaps the reason why there is much less proportionately in the resurrection narrative is that Jesus…

Dear Friends, During my trip back to Hawaii, Marlou and I joined with other members of the family and went to worship at Aldersgate UMC, just west of downtown Honolulu. It was the church I grew up in. I was pleasantly surprised to see how some things had changed, but yet how some things remained the same. The changes included a whole new audio-visual system – two projection screens mounted on the front wall of the chancel, like ours at…

Dear Friends, During Lent I’ve been reading the devotional Small Surrenders by Emilie Griffin. On one of the days Griffin quotes Carlo Carretto who says: If you cannot go into the desert, you must nonetheless “make some desert” in your life. Every now and then leaving… and looking for solitude to restore, in prolonged silence and prayer, the stuff of your soul. [Brewster, Mass: Paraclete Press, 2007, p.40] The common image of the desert is present throughout the Bible. The…