QuakerQuaker This Week, 3/4/2012

The most talked-about Quaker blog post this week is Mark Wutka's "Quit pushing your belief system on me!" He writes "You…

I've added a new blog post:  "Quaker Plain I" 

It is on the testimony for plainness. Not meant to be definitive. 

As always,  if you have comments, please post them on the blog rather than here; a much wider audience can benefit from your thoughts that way. Thanks.

There is a question boiling to the top of my consciousness.  Is the presence of God in my life measured by my senses or my perception?  Is God more present in my life in those moments when I sense His presence or in those moments when I understand that He is in me and with me 24/7?  This question grew from a blog of a fellow friend on communion and is being watered by life's daily needs for his help.  When Philip approached Jesus at the request of the Greeks He knew that it was only by His…

Jeremiah 22 - In 588 BC, Jeremiah goes to the King of Judah and says, “Practice honesty and integrity – rescue the man who’s been wronged from oppressor.”  If you do, the monarchy will prosper; but if not, the palace shall become a ruin. Again, as in Jeremiah 7, God’s promise is seen as conditional. Nothing God establishes can continue in power unless the inward spirit continues.  There are no eternally sacred outward things (!!!)  “You were like a Gilead to me, like a peak…

Introduction and Context: The next chapters of Jeremiah can be confusing because they make continual references to historical events and people that the earlier chapters seem to ignore. I may have already said something about the historical context, but here it is again:

Josiah, the reformer-king, died on the battlefield of Megiddo in 609, trying to stop the northward march of Pharaoh Neco, who was at that time allied with the Assyrians.  After Josiah’s death, his son…

Jeremiah 20 – Jeremiah enters the court of the Temple to prophesy his message of disaster, and he is taken into custody, scourged and chained near the northernmost gate, the Benjamin Gate.  On his release the next morning, he prophesies against the chief officer responsible for his sufferings. Jeremiah is anxious about the hate closing in on him—as perhaps Jesus was too. “Whenever I speak, I have to cry out and shout, ‘Violence! Destruction!’ Lord, I am ridicules and scorned all…