RMN Convocation Recap (Part 2)

By Leland Spencer

Today was fabulous, of course. Below are my notes (and comments) from worship and Bible study.

Sermon by the Rev. Drew Phoenix

• The path toward wholeness begins with a question: Who am I? This is a big question to live into!
• God says I am who I am! How can we possibly put I am who I am into binaries like male-female, natural-unnatural, compatible-incompatible? (Yes, Yes, Yes! Amen!)
• Many are not ready to live the questions, but for those who are, we are all about telling and hearing our stories.
• If you can become, then we can become. We will become who we can become, together the beloved community!

Bible Study by the Rev. Dr. Elaine Heath (from the East Ohio Conference!)

• John 17 is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus, so we should ask three questions about it: (1) What/who is the world?, (2) What is God's relationship with the world?, (3) How do we become the answer to Jesus' prayer? (Today's study focused on just the first question.)
• "The world" is mentioned 18 times in John 17. It comes from the Greek word "cosmos," which we sometimes take to mean everything in the created order.
• "The world" can also mean fallen humanity; think of the negative valence for the adjective "worldly," but worldly is really about religious people's crucifying God. (Amen!)
• "The world" is also the place into which Jesus was born and where Jesus sends us to be sanctified.
• In sanctification, God recreates the world in ever more powerful ways than ever before. (I wish I had her exact quotation here, but this one is worth chewing on for a while. So often, I think of sanctification as a part of an individual's faith journey, but what does it mean to think of the world as sanctified by God?)
• What if we accepted theological diversity and focused our energy on common spiritual practices?
• Jesus was willing to do everything to make things right for the cosmos, so we need to become icons, the face of love in the world.
• The world will not be convinced of the Gospel by a bunch of books but by God's transforming our lives individually and in community. The hardest part of this is laying down our hatchets and swords because a violent response is like poison.