Knowing Our Neighbors: Beginning the Interfaith Journey

Because of what happened in a movie theater in Aurora Colorado, the world changed today. Once again we have that numb feeling of utter shock and disbelief. For me, what is just as devastating is the premeditation and even delight a shooter seemed to take in executing such violence. I shall leave it to wiser minds than I to reflect more deeply on tragic suffering. My heart and prayers go out first to the victims and their families, including those in that theater who escaped unharmed physically - yet forever changed. My thoughts are also with every rescue worker, health care provider, and police officer who must continue to live the tragedy, along with a community who will still be grieving and coping and struggling long after the world turns its attention elsewhere.

Yet there is another reason this tragedy is important to me.

Because of what happened today, what we will do at Seneca Presbyterian Church beginning on Sunday is even more important than it was 24 hours ago. We will try to bridge gaps of ignorance and perhaps fear as we undertake the first steps in a journey of interfaith understanding among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities. We will try to short-circuit divisions in our world that have for centuries been the source of far too much violence and suffering and death. And because of what we will do, I wonder how we will be different a week from today.

• Will we increase our understanding and ease our discomfort with traditions and beliefs that are new to us? 
• Will we be able to ask questions openly, with trust and respect? 
• Will we go beyond learning about in order to learn of and with, putting the face of a brother and a sister in the place of what would have been a stranger? 
• Will we deepen our own faith as we hear of another's journey of faith? 
• Will we end the week better able to short circuit the stereotype or inflammatory remark, thereby somehow diminishing the risk of future violence in a divided world, if only by a whisper? 

If you can, join us beginning Sunday morning and continuing Sunday through Thursday evenings. We will gather at 6:30 p.m.

I pray the world will be different because we do.

Deliver Us

"The devil made me do it." If that expression reminds you of Flip Wilson and the Ed Sullivan show, then you are either dating yourself or you've been on YouTube recently. It is a fun way to justify the mysteries of human behavior. Or it can be a statement about the power of a "not yet" world to turn us away from faith and over to the power of sin in our own lives and in our world.

As we reach the climax of the Lord's Prayer this week, we will be struggling with how we define temptation and testing in our own lives, what it means to confront it, and how we understand the forces behind it. We will look carefully at the amazing story of the temptation of Jesus that we find at the very beginning of the Gospel, and asking some of these questions:

•  What is evil and how is it alive and well in God's good world?   
• Why was it necessary for Jesus to be tempted and tested? How did it strengthen him for his ministry? 
• How are we tempted and tested? 
• What are the forces at work in our own lives that pull us away from the will of God and the peace of God? 
• How do we find strength for the journey of faithfulness?  

And so I invite you to consider:

• When has your faith been tested? 
• When have you seen evidence of the power of evil in your life? 
• How did you find your way home?

Our quest is to find a way to affirm and live that God alone is Lord of our lives and Lord of our world. That ultimately it is not about ourselves, but about the reign of God made real, even now.