The Immediate Word

Object: A pointing finger. You might find one of those large, foam, finger-pointing hands you see at sporting events. For more fun, you might create a hand for each child by printing the included image, pasting it on cardboard or posterboard, and cutting around the image so only the shape of the hand remains. My version assumes you are giving each child a hand to use, so adapt it as you need if you just use one hand.

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2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19
David danced before the Lord! What joy! To bring the law to the people, the covenant was a great joy for David — indeed for all the people. I wonder if other people were encouraged to dance and to celebrate? I was recently at an anniversary worship service and the celebration began with a liturgical dance. It filled my heart with joy to see the dancer embracing God and faith in movement. I wanted to move as well, and I suppose I swayed in my seat to the music and to the movement.

“Is everything alright?” Gran asked Lily. “That’s the second time you’ve checked your phone since you came to visit me.”

Lily felt her face grow warm. “Well, I was kind of hoping for a message from Brad.”

“Brad?” Gran raised an eyebrow, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard about him.”

“Well, he is in my class at school and he kind of said that he might message me today...”

“About?”

Lily looked out the window of her grandmother’s nursing home room. “Nothing important.”

Andrew was hanging about on the age of the group, as usual. He hadn't many friends at this new school, even though he was already in his second term. The boys were playing their favourite game of "truth or dare", but nobody had invited Andrew to join in.

Psalm 24 celebrates the orderly reign of God over creation. It presupposes a world that has not been disrupted by tragedy or displacement -- in other words, the world as it was before the exile of Israel in 587 B.C.

From the vision of an ordered universe, the psalmist takes us to the holy mountain for worship. He poses the question, "Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place?" (v. 3).

In the musical, West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein's modern paraphrase of Romeo and Juliet, Tony and Maria, the two lovers, confidently sing that there will be "a time for us," a time when their day for true love will arrive, a time when all the pieces will fit together, a time when the fulfillment they dream of will be realized, a time when human life will make sense, a time when the mysteries and questions will be resolved, a time when they will have the confidence they have not lived and loved in vain.

"To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God" (William Temple). "To worship is to change. To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change. If worship does not change us, we have not truly worshipped." So begins the chapter on worship in Richard Foster's book, The Celebration of Discipline.

The whole of today's gospel seems to be about John the Baptist. His death sentence was issued by Herod. His head was taken by a soldier of the guard. It was presented to Herodias on a platter and finally reached her mother who gloated over her revenge on the Baptizer.

I have held in my hand the only known existing acheological evidence in the world, that crucifixion was actually practiced, as the Bible and other literature asserts.

At the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, Joe Zias, a nephew to one of our group and custodian of the Dead Sea Scrolls, handed to us a hand-wrought iron spike about six inches long and with the tip bent over at right angles. There were some fragments of wood on the spike, but most startling was the fact that the spoke had been driven directly through an ankle bone.