Claude King's blog

We are in the season of renewal. We can see that in more than just the natural world, we too are very much aware of the personal need for renewal that we are eagerly waiting for as we pause, gather to rest, take time away, end a time of study, or enter a less busy period and look to be infused with positive energy after an intense time of learning, working, and growing. We also want and need to experience genuine joy as a normal part of our cycle of learning, working, productivity, and renewal, especially as servants of God.

I am grateful and look forward to witnessing another Mother's Day this Sunday. I think of the many things that my mother, Carolyn F. King, meant to me. I remember being warmed by her loving spirit, enhanced by her knowledge and viewpoint about a wide range of topics, world events, and life lessons and the belly laughs given by her humorous perspectives on people and situations that she shared with me.

The time comes when we feel the need to make joyful sounds because we are bursting with love, we recognize God's faithfulness, and we cannot hold those feelings inside anymore. That is the time when most of us will either shout out with gladness in our hearts, burst out singing, or want to listen to people singing songs that express the same joy that was caught up in our bones but now must be released.

Does the ancient Palm Sunday scene sound familiar? If we take out Jesus' riding through the streets of Jerusalem, on a donkey and a colt (the foal of a donkey), we will see similar kinds of public gatherings that have happened recently, especially because it is election season.

The streets, squares, halls, and stadiums of our communities have been populated with people of various kinds, including the well off, political elite, middle class, and many who are disenfranchised, losing faith in the government, or who suffer needlessly due to societal indifference.

What comes to your mind when you hear the phrase, "coming out of darkness into the light?" Most of us create images in our mind's eye about what darkness means and its negative imagery like danger, insignificance, shady people, vagueness, and doubt that we were taught to associate with it. How entering the light is imagined also, and what light means as a metaphor for clarity, positivity, goodness, happiness, peacefulness, and calmness.

Our flesh, our earthly bodies, are the most common way that we experience this world. We do so specifically through our sensory perceptions. Human DNA made from the physical union of two people, over a nine-month gestation period will produce a baby made of extremely cute and cuddly baby skin and baby bones. But, it only happens once in a lifetime. Our spiritual self is the most common way that we experience the extraordinary connections that we all know, or can possibly know, and depend on to inform us about who we are intuitively in God's love.

This week we prepare for Ash Wednesday and the end of Epiphany season. However, we first must stop to consider what the transfiguration of Jesus, in front of his disciples, on the high mountain does and consider the words that came from God in Matthew 17:5 that reads, "from the cloud a voice said, 'This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!'"

We all know that salt and light are essential to our daily life. We cannot live very long without either salt or light. What are the first images that come to your mind when you have heard or read that we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world? Do you see images that show food, healing, warmth, and illumination, amongst other positive benefits, all of which give or sustain life?

God loves us and wants us to realize we are all a precious creation, God's children, and partners with Jesus in the caring, healing, teaching, and saving of this world. Identifying us as partners with Jesus is not how most of us see ourselves when we think about the work Jesus is doing to love and save humanity.

"O God, you made of one blood all nations, and, by a star in the East, revealed to all peoples him whose name is Emmanuel. Enable us to know your presence with us so to proclaim his unsearchable riches that all may come to his light and bow before the brightness of his rising, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen." - Laurence Hull Stookey (#255 UMH).