Would you change?
Lyrics and Music by Tracy Chapman
4th Week of Lent in Scripture
Acts 8:26-40
Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Get up and go towards the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’ (This is a wilderness road.) So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go over to this chariot and join it.’ So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ He replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: ‘Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.’
The eunuch asked Philip, ‘About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?’
Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, ‘Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?’
He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the
region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.
There WILL Be Light…
…So says the LORD, so says Hancock Church…
Today, on the darkest day of the year, we reflect on the very REAL presence of God’s Light in the world.
This is a 2 part reflection:
1. Hit play on the video below, and LISTEN to this song; a song sung by a family, weary from years of living in darkness, proclaiming against all evidence that, yes, THERE WILL BE LIGHT
2. While the song plays, scroll down this page to see the Light of God revealed through these snapshots of our family, hard at work bringing Light into the world. Try to scroll to the rhythm of the music. Take your time. Soak in the words and images together.
Truly, even in the darkest, coldest night…there will be light.
…so….let it shine!
Love: Exciting and New
“Justice is what LOVE looks like in public.” –Dr. Cornel West
For some reason, our culture tends to split the world into Dichotomies, “either/or” scenarios and choices, as if everything important in human life can actually be separated into “black and white.” This causes many problems. A couple examples: Politicians make names for themselves by dividing our political arena into two, clear-cut camps; so complex issues get melted down into simple soundbites, and any voice outside those camps is scorned and mocked until it is silenced. Our 21st Century lives are divided up into tiny segments, our human experience fragmented into what and when we can fit into our schedules, always leaving us feeling scattered.
Nowhere does this either/or divide confuse and limit us more than when it comes to LOVE.
As people of faith, we believe that it was through LOVE and out of LOVE that God birthed everything in Creation. We believe that it’s God’s continuing LOVE that inspires and creates new forms of Justice in our world. We believe it is this God-LOVE that breaks into our broken world, imbuing it with worth and wonder. It’s a LOVE that is so much more earth-shattering and transformational than our common, limited use of the word “love.”
We tend to think about love as a romantic emotion being shared between two people. Many of us are on Facebook, which encourages everyone to identify as being “in a relationship,” or “single.” This is an important kind of love, but it is not the only love that God blesses us with. We are never in one, singular relationship, but rather an ever-expanding relational web, connecting us to all of Creation. When we allow one kind of love to block us from experiencing the One LOVE of God, we can find ourselves stuck in an either/or situation that betrays our faith. We get caught up in who we love and who we don’t, we feel forced to end old relationships so we can discover new love; as if love were a light switch, so easily and simply flipped off and on. The truth is much more complex, our ability to love and our need to love does not always fit into nice, tidy categories. When we limit ourselves to a singular understanding of love, we miss out on the vast, thrilling, life-altering LOVE 
of God. It’s a LOVE that transports us from our isolated, individual place in the world into the pervasive, eternal Community of God.
Mary loved her son, and it was through that love that she encountered the grand LOVE of God. She was called to be a mother to her son, and this lead her to sing, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.” She sang and rejoiced in this life-altering power.
In this time of watching and waiting for signs of God’s presence in our lives, let us take time to Reflect on the love in our life and how we Respond to that love. Do we allow the love that we give and receive to propel us to greater depths of God’s LOVE? Do our relationships lead to greater awareness of The Sacred Other, enhancing our ability to respond to the world in Just and Loving ways? Or does our love turn us inward, taking us out of the world, limiting our ability to perceive and 
respond to the full range of God’s LOVE for this world? This week we watch for signs of God’s LOVE in the world and we are challenged to respond LOVINGLY…in public.
Hope on the Horizon
Lately something has been bothering me about our media, our ways of becoming informed about the News, what is happening in the world. And I have finally been able to articulate this bothersome feeling like this: I believe that the way our media tends to highlight certain world events also has a way of hiding or covering up what God is currently doing in the world.For example, the big headline I saw all weekend long was “Black Friday 2011 sets new high records in spending!” or some such thing. That’s fine, that happened, and now we know about it. But with every media outlet highlighting this story, there are a bunch that we didn’t hear about at all. Like this one:. The 
Morehead News in Morehead, KY told their community (and the world, via the internet) about Lula and Tony Pecco who have put their life savings into opening and operating a soup kitchen for the elderly, children, and the poor. They ran out of money last week, but a church donated to keep them going. Tony Pecco is quoted as saying, “You can’t out give God.”
Similarly, I was looking at a “Year in Review” article in a magazine, and they listed all the awful tragedies you would imagine–beginning with the shootings in Tucson, Arizona in the early days of the new year, and the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, the scandals and trials that made us all gasp at the darkest parts of our society, all the various natural disasters that have taken their toll….but then they mentioned something that I had never heard of: Apparently, just two months ago, CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) discovered a “new” particle that quite possibly travels faster than the speed of light(!). What was thought to be the one constant in our 
understanding of the physics of the entire universe, the speed of light, might not be. Alvaro De Rujula, from CERN, was quoted as saying, “If it is true, then we truly haven’t understood anything about anything.”
The way we process news in America can easily make us cynical, it can allow us to imagine that we are surrounded by chaos and destruction, and good things happen only occassionaly, in small ways.
But we are Christians. We know better. We know the Good News of God’s continuing activity in our world. The words we read yesterday from Isaiah are not what you would call “uplifting,” but they speak to God’s continuing Loving Presence and Creative Works in our world. Where the rest of the world sees randomness and destruction, we are called to WATCH, we are called to LISTEN, to ANTICIPATE…because the darkest night is never the end of the story, God is hard at work calling light into being. We just have to know where to look
God is hard at work, creating, restoring, sustaining…and this work is not always covered in the media…and it could be faster than the speed of light. May we all keep a 
watchful eye in the weeks ahead, and remain ever vigilant, so we don’t miss the signs of what God is preparing to birth.
