Home | St Peter's UMC

“You thrill to God’s word, you chew on Scripture day and night”

Psalm 1:2

I was with my 9th grader, Sydney, in the grocery store and we were looking at cereal. I saw a box of Honey Smacks (the one with the Frog) and I told my kid that when I was a kid they were called Sugar Smacks. At some point, when health food fads started happening, the cereal companies realized parents were averse to buying food that was explicitly labeled as sugar. The solution was to change the recipe… NOO! They just changed the name of the cereals.

We love the idea of eating healthier, but we do not like the practice, so we readily buy into eating empty promises and lies. How often are we disappointed when we are told the best way to lose weight is to eat less and move more! Much like the rich young ruler whom Jesus told to sell his stuff, we walk away sad.

What threw me, though, was when I started paying attention to what I was eating. 4 Oreos are equal to 1 Cheeseburger! That cookie may give you instant satisfaction, but provides no nutrients, is not filling, and is stored away in our body as fat. I look at food in relationship to my goals now. This doesn’t mean I neglect taste, but I am more judicious as it relates to the full picture of my life.

Our life is bombarded with the idea that consumption is what brings us joy. Our commercials are full of people using mundane products as if they’ve solved world hunger. A mop will not improve your dating status, Sunny Delight won’t suddenly make your teenager want to talk to you or even out loud. TV shows, Sports, etc, are simply distractions from problems, not solutions. Yet we spend so much time feeding on these empty calories.

But God has given us a different food. The Psalmist sings, “Taste and see that the Lord is good”. Jesus proclaims himself as a living water in which we will never thirst again. He says he is the bread of life. We long for substance, but rarely put the effort into trying it. Yet, it is there for the taking!

To feed on God’s word is to nourish the soul to experience, the ears to hear, and the eyes to see that we may live into our calling as humans to, as Thomas Merton writes, “know what God knows, will what God wills, and love what God loves”. We can only do this if we spend time listening to God through the many means of grace offered to us. One of those is through scripture.

The next few weeks we are looking at the practice of Lectio Divina and then we will follow this up with a deep dive into the Lord’s Prayer. Lectio Divina is a way of praying the scripture. There are four parts, Lectio, we read the text, Mediatio, we meditate on the text, Oratio, we pray the text, Contemplatio, we live the text.

Guiro the 2nd, a 12 century monk, said of Lectio Divina, “reading, puts the solid food into our mouths, mediation chews it and breaks it down, prayer obtains the flavor of it and contemplation is the very sweetness which makes us glad and refreshes us”

If we want to understand God’s call in our life, get to know God better, feed on the substance of life and not cheap high caloric imitations with no nutritional value, then we will put effort into listening to the word of God and embracing his work of transformation. I invite you to join us over the next few weeks to learn more as well as visit the link provided for your edification. Let us walk together and learn of his love and work that we may be a part of his love and work in this world.

Peace,

Pastor Cory

GET TO KNOW US

A welcome from Cory