The Practice of Pronouncing Blessings: Benediction

Kenilworth Union Church

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The Practice of Pronouncing Blessings: Benediction

Eastertide

April 28, 2024 • Katie Lancaster • Numbers 6:22–26

In 1979, archaeologist Gabriel Barkay was excavating the funeral site of Ketef Hinnom in West Jerusalem, and came across a small piece of silver amid the debris pottery and other artifacts. He describes them as about the size of a filter on a cigarette, it being the tobacco heyday of the 1970s and all. Two pieces of silver about the size of a pencil eraser, the size of a tic tac, the size of a ladybug. It wasn’t solid silver, but instead, a silver scroll. Unroll it and in tiny script are the words of the blessing I read to you today. It is from 600 BCE.

Think of the artistry. Who pounded the silver? Who chose which blessing to include? Who took a small carving tool to write the text? Who rolled the silver into a small amulet? Who wore the amulet with its holy blessing?

The blessing of the wilderness was held dear, embraced, honored, retained, remembered, condensed, and passed on. The blessing of the wilderness, or rather the blessing in the wilderness, was transmitted, entrusted, bestowed generation to generation, so that we might hear it. “May YHWH bless you and keep you.”

God After... VI: God After Einstein

June 30, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • John 1:1–4

When Einstein toured the United States, he was always surrounded by adoring hordes. He was always signing autographs and posing for the paparazzi before the paparazzi was a thing; it was the greatest mob of groupies until Elvis and the Beatles came along later. All because he changed the world just by thinking about it. When he was 16 years old, he asked himself, “What would a beam of light look like if I were running alongside it? Would it stand still? Could you see little bits and pieces and particles of light?” Ten years later, he wrote down his answer as the theory of special relativity, which is simple to state but almost impossible to understand. Simple to state: The speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of their motion relative to the light source.

God After... V: God After Darwin

June 23, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Genesis 1:20–25

While island-hopping in the Galapagos, he noticed that the finches on each island had beaks of different shape and size, longer or broader, depending on the type of indigenous seeds available to them on their respective islands. The tortoises had shells of different shape and configuration; their necks were longer or shorter, and Charles Darwin surmised that this was so because of the type of foliage and calories available to them in their respective environments. And so he starts coming up with this odd theory called “natural selection.” It may be the hugest and most cataclysmic scientific idea of all time, but it is ridiculously simple. Darwin surmised that all forms of life on earth descended from a common ancestor, and the stunning variety of living things as we know them results from five simple facts that are represented by the mnemonic acronym VISTA.

God After... IV: God After Smith and Hutton

June 16, 2024 • Katie Lancaster • Psalm 121, Isaiah 40

What happens when you see the earth, not as a univocal creation, created all at once but instead as forming over a timescale we can hardly comprehend? For one it opens up the timescale so that Darwin can begin to imagine the possibilities of species developing over an infinitely broad timescale. But there’s something more about this geological breaking open of time—toward what is called Deep Time—that makes Hutton and then Smith lifelong though often unnoticed partners in our understanding of the very foundations of the world. And it makes me wonder if in part, the ancient prophet Isaiah saw a kind of Deep Time, a geologic process unfolding such that, “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground level, the rugged places a plain.”#_ftn1 Geologists too like Isaiah, see valleys raised up to mountains by earthquake and tectonic plate, and rough ground made plain by the weathering of wind and water. There is they say, “a sermon in stone.” Or as Jesus says “even the stones cry out.”#_ftn2 #_ftnref1 Isaiah 40 #_ftnref2 Luke 19:40