Context is Everything
My Greek professor in seminary used to say this a lot:
Context is everything.
When you are choosing a word to convey meaning, you can’t just go to a dictionary and choose one of the possible definitions. You need to understand the depth and the nuances of what is trying to be conveyed. You need to know the context.
For a whole lot of church-goers, reading the bible is a snippet affair. We hear a portion of a biblical text read to us – and there it is, alone on the shelf, void of context.
This Sunday we going to take three of those snippets that follow each other in the lectionary (that list of readings a whole lot of Christians have agreed upon to read on Sunday mornings) and see what happens when we sit them next to each other.
I am not entirely sure they will play nicely.
And the issues here are important – things like
who is in and who is out
, and
to whom must I be kind
, and
just how patient do I need to be with those stubborn people?
Join us at
Gathering
. With hearts and minds engaged, we will listen for and hear the word of God in and through the living words of scripture. We will chew on the bones of the stories until we get the marrow out.
May it be so.
Yours on the journey,
Katie
