Happy New Year! May 2012 be filled with all good things and many opportunities for all of us to make a positive difference in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and the world. This (and every day) is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

The next deadline for articles/news items is Sunday January 29.

Best wishes to you and yours.

Linda Spurny, editor 

By Leslie Klingensmith

 

Happy 2012! I hope this proves to be a meaningful and faithful year for each one of you and for St. Matthew as a congregation. Two major events of 2011 were celebrating our 50th Anniversary and developing a five year plan for our congregation's ministry and mission. It is no accident that these two things happened in the same year - it is natural when we celebrate our first half century to do some reflection and discernment for what we want the second half century to look like, and then break that half century down into manageable increments of time. No one can know what St. Matthew will look like 50 years from now, but we can all do our part to make the years between 2012-17 a time in which we serve God and share the love of Christ energetically and faithfully.

 

My husband Ed gave me a compelling book for Christmas. It is titled The Swerve: How the World Became Modern and is written by Harvard University professor and scholar Stephen Greenblatt. There is much in The Swerve about the history of science and the discipline of philosophy, as well as the art of book hunting - finding and preserving ancient texts that many had believed lost. The centerpiece of the narrative is when Italian papal secretary and avid book hunter Poggio Bracciolini in 1417 found in the dusty stacks of some obscure monastery ( precisely which one is not known for sure even today) a copy of the ancient poet Lucretius' epic work On the Nature of Things. I cannot condense the book into a couple of paragraphs, but suffice it to say that Lucretius' labor was deliberately suppressed by the religious leaders of the first few centuries after Christ because it contained theories about science and philosophy that the Church believed to be antithetical to the doctrines of the faith. Most controversial was the theory about tiny, unbreakable particles composing all matter. Yeah, that's right. Atoms. Accepted as fact today, but initially seen as a fool's musings and crushed beneath the sheer weight of human developed religious doctrine.

 

The Swerve is an interesting read in its own right, but it also started me thinking and raising questions. How often to we dismiss or even suppress valid theories and perspectives that we need to hear? Do we do this because we are afraid? And what, exactly, are we so afraid of? The Swerve contains a fair number of chilling examples of people who were tortured, ridiculed, and/or burned at the stake for asking questions and putting forth possibilities that the religious establishment believed to be heretical. We have gotten a tad more civilized in the last five centuries in that we no longer burn people alive, but I do believe it is still human nature to want to stamp out whatever causes us to question our own world view and faith system. That's the bad news.

 

The good news...is that truth will prevail, and truth will set us free. In spite of the best efforts of the religious authorities of the Middle Ages, Lucretius' poem was brought back into the light of day, and eventually some of the ideas contained within it stood the test of time and became part of mainstream thought. The process might have been excruciatingly slow, but human thought does evolve. And even without the sun revolving around the earth, millions of people the world over continue to have faith. Some dogma that people believed were essential to a life of faith and a relationship with God 1500 years ago turned out to not be so important after all. Yet God continues to exist in all God's goodness and want to be part of our lives.

 

Of course, there will always be different opinions on what doctrine is non-negotiable when it comes to the mysteries of God. But reading The Swerve helped me to take the long view and realize all over again that the hand of God was and is and ever will be at work among us, guiding us to be a more just, merciful, and kind people. Thanks be to God.

 

 

With 100% participation from the congregation, we can meet our goal and, more importantly, expand our mission to help those in our community in desperate need and programs for our members as well.