This Sunday

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding Jesus and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
–Luke 23.39-43

• Have you ever taken a trip to a different country?Did you find the adjustment to a new culture easy or difficult?
• Do you constantly think about the future?  Do you imagine good things or are you obsessed with what may go wrong?
• Is your faith in Jesus something which could be described as past tense or present tense?
• Loneliness and isolation can be understood as the chief human problems of our age; what does Jesus as Messiah have to offer us in our isolation from one another?

Success is difficult to measure; one moment’s success can easily slip from our grasp and look like a catastrophic failure, or that’s our fear.  Jesus the Messiah knows all about moments of success and failure and yet calls us to turn our attention away from such slippery concepts as we find meaning, and purpose, and value.

This Sunday at 6 pm we hope you’ll be with us at Trinity Commons and we hear Jesus invite us into this new way of seeing our lives with God and others.  And we’ll enjoy a delicious dinner after the service thanks to our friends from St. Andrew’s.

–Thomas