Our church-wide reading plans leading up to the Easter Weekend, hanve proven to be some of the most meaningful experiences for our church. We realize that schedules are crowded and everyone is busy, but we believe this is an important investment that you can make for yourself and for your family. This is an investment that will pay-off in the years to come for both you and your family.
While it’s easy to say we are going to read, it’s harder to make sure that we follow through. We believe it’s important for everyone to have someone they are partnering with through this reading journey. Your table group is a great starting place, but may not be enough for everyone. Grab someone else in your group and commit to 6 weeks of meeting together weekly to discuss your readings. This may be on-on-one or it could be the guys in your group or the women in your group. There could be some great conversations over coffee or dinner tables during the next six weeks.
LUKE::
Most of us, most of the time, feel left out - misfits. We don’t belong. Others seem to be so confident, so sure of themselves, “insiders” who know the ropes, old hands in a club from which we are excluded.
One of the ways we have of responding to this is to form our own club or join one that will have us. Here is at least on place where we are “in” and the others “out.” The clubs range from informal to formal in gatherings that are variously political, social, cultural and economic. But the one thing they have in common is the principle of exclusion. Identity or worth is achieved by excluding all but the chosen. The terrible price we pay for keeping all those other people out so that we can savor the sweetness of being insiders is a reduction of reality, a shrinkage of life.
Nowhere is this price more terrible than when it is paid in the cause of religion. But religion has a long history of doing just that, of reducing the huge mysteries of God to the respectability of club rules, of shrinking the vast human community to a “membership.” But with God there are no outsiders.
Luke is a most vigorous champion of the outsider. An outsider himself, the only Gentile in an all-Jewish cast of New Testament writers, he shows how Jesus includes those who typically were treated as outsiders by the religious establishment of the day: women, common laborers (sheepherders), the racially different (Samaritans), the poor. He will not countenance religion as a club. As Luke tells the story, all of us who have found ourselves on the outside looking in on life with no hope of gaining entrance (and who of us hasn’t felt it?) now find the doors wide open, found and welcomed by God in Jesus.
Eugene Peterson
Introduction to Luke, The Message
