Tidbits from Toni:

    April is a month in the lectionary that takes us from the depths of despair during Holy Week to the heights of joy on Easter.

    We, as Christians, need the full range of emotions and the full range of understanding the life of our savior, Jesus, to appreciate how much love is sacrificed to win our salvation. I most sincerely encourage you to attend Holy Week services, both Thursday and Friday. Keep those dark and painful thoughts in your soul. Then on Easter, when we open the worship service with the traditional phrase, “Christ is risen,” you can give a wholehearted answer, “He is risen, indeed!”

    If you care to examine the range of the life of Jesus you might take a moment now to think that without the cradle at Jesus’ birth; there would not have been a cross. To die, Jesus first had to be born. To offer his life for us he first needed a life as a human. To shed the blood he needed a body with blood. In January, I mentioned that an easy way to define the word incarnate, is to think “God with a body”. For us to have everlasting life, many people think that we need a blood sacrifice. Jesus, the son of the living God, is the only one sinless and pure to have the sacrifice sufficient to cover the sins of the whole world. The bloodline, important in the Hebrew traditions of Jesus, were sinful people just like us.

    The resurrection is a link for each of us to be able to praise God for God’s mercy. We have hope and that hope helps us to sing all the alleluias in the songs of Easter.

    God’s peace, Rev. Toni

Tidbits from Toni, Jun 2008

Tidbits from Toni, Apr 2009
Tidbits from Toni, May 2009