Second Church Steps

Be a FIG and DIG This is one of those days when you think you are doing one thing, and you end up doing another.  I thought I was going to be writing about “BALANCE,” you know—“to everything there is a season.”  Instead, I have spent the morning doing some study about fig trees in the Bible.  Yes,  I said “fig trees,” those things that cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness and signs of  the Hebrew People’s abundance and plenty during King Solomon’s time (Genesis 3:7 and 1 Kings 4:25).  The stories most often retold about “figs” in the Bible are the account of Jesus cursing the tree that does not bear fruit, and the parable of the gardener bartering one more year during which he will work diligently to make a fig tree produce fruit.  I looked at 44 instances of “figs” which are medicine, food, abundance, sweet, shade giving and a long lived symbol of peace,  and  I found the parable of summer.  How did I miss this figgy morsel?  It appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke. It was right in fr

Figure 1 http://www.montreat.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Mountains-2-400x250-300x187.jpg We think of “Sabbath” as a time to NOT DO something.  We stop.  We wait.  We rest.  We sit.  However, that is a lot of work!  I think of Sabbath as “making a space.”  It is an active choosing, remembering, and prioritizing a holy space for God.  It is less about “letting go” and more about “leaning in” to the Breath of the Holy Spirit.  In this context Sabbath is a return to our making.  You see, in the beginning “the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). It is the breath of the Lord God that stirs dust into human.  It is the breath of the Lord God that makes us living and gives us a life.  Therefore, “Sabbath” – a time for rest and renewal, is an opportunity to reach for that breath of God which gives us life and through which we have our being.  Jesus tells us that the S