Will Vaus

The Gospel lectionary reading for today is from Luke 9:43-45.... And all were astounded at the greatness of God. While everyone was amazed at all that he was doing, Jesus said to his disciples, "Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands." But they did not understand this saying; its meaning was concealed from them, so that they could not perceive it. And they were afraid to ask him about this saying. It is astonishing, is it not, that at the height of his powers, at the peak of his fame, Jesus begins to talk about his death? We, like the first disciples, are afraid to talk about death. And yet, it is at the center of our faith. My reading for today, from Henri Nouwen's Bread for the Journey , happens to coincide thematically with the Gospel lectionary reading for today.... Baptism is a rite of passage. The Jewish people passed through the Red Sea to the Promised Land in the great exodus. Jesus himself wanted to

A second thing we learn from Jesus' words in John 14:16-18 is that the Holy Spirit is a person. Many people have difficulty fully believing this. There is the story of a woman who came up to a speaker at a Bible conference. The man had just finished delivering a series of messages on the Holy Spirit. The woman said to him, "Before your messages I never thought of it as a person." Obviously, that woman was still thinking of the Holy Spirit as impersonal, an "it". Now, to be completely honest, I must admit that this passage we are looking at actually uses the neuter pronoun to refer to the Spirit. In the Greek, Jesus calls the Spirit "it". But what we English readers have to understand is that the Greek language has the gender of the pronoun agree with the gender of the noun as in French and some other languages. We do not have anything quite like it in English. Furthermore, even though this passage refers to the Holy Spirit as "it" th

We are up to chapter 3 in our discussion of Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis . Here are some discussion questions to get us started on this chapter on the Trinity: Do you think Norman Pittenger's criticism of Lewis's teaching on the Trinity was fair or not? Does Lewis's explanation of how the doctrine of the Trinity developed seem reasonable? Which one of Lewis's Trinitarian analogies best helps you to understand and embrace the Christian doctrine of the Trinity: the cube? the prayer closet? the books? the relationship between imagination, image and will? love? or the Great Dance? Why? What do you think of the Trinitarian images in Lewis's fiction? Do these images make the Trinity more attractive or understandable to you? Feel free to chip in your thoughts apart from these questions, or raise a question of your own.