Pub Theology 10/1/24 -- Hurricanes, floods, and suffering

This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.

Exercising patience.

How do we talk about our Jewish neighbors? 

We turned our clocks ahead this past weekend, bringing with it the unwelcome loss of an hour's sleep, time we won't get back again until the fall when we'll reset our clocks all over again. I don't know about you, but for me the extra daylight after the dinner hour doesn't compensate for the misery of waking up in pitch blackness as if we were still in the deepest depths of winter. The twice-yearly ritual of resetting our clocks from standard time to daylight savings time and back again is a reminder that time is fleeting, or as the Roman poet and author Virgil put it, Tempus Fugit , literally time flies. Virgil's original version of this now common phrase emphasized the idea that time irretrievably escapes us. When it's gone, it's gone. This is very different than the line uttered by Matthew McConaughey's character Rust Cohle in the first season of HBO's series True Detective: "Tine is a flat circle." If you're like me, you may have wondered where that phrase came from, and what it means. But thanks to the miracle of modern Internet sleuthing , we've got an answer. It's a reference to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of "eternal recurrence," In short, the idea that because time is endless, everything will eventually repeat itself. That includes your own life, which you will relive in exactly the same way, an infinite number of times, for all eternity. This may sound like a nightmare to you, but Nietzsche saw it as a cause for celebration, assuming you made your life into something you'd want to repeat an infinitely. What this is all getting at is the topic we're going to talk about in our conversation this week -- our perception of and relationship with time. And we'll start simply, with daylight savings time, and dig deeper from there. Which do you subscribe to more, Virgil's idea of time as irretrievably escaping, or Rust Cohle's short-hand Nietzsche of time as eternally recurring? If you had one more hour in your day, 25 rather than 24, how would you use that extra time? What if you knew you could have one more day, or week, or month, or year of life than what you were expecting? What would you do with that? Would you live that bonus time any differently than your everyday? Come spend some quality time with us this Tuesday, March 10, and join the conversation. Discussion starts tomorrow evening at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.

This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.

What do we do when we don't know what to do?

This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.

Reflecting on Seven Years

We're building our conversation this week around the above quote, that has widely been attributed to English modernist writer and feminist pioneer Virginia Woolf. Before you ask, yes, we are aware that some of Woolf's views, especially on race and class, would make her persona non grata in certain circles today. But that said, the quote is worth thinking about. In some ways it is reminiscent of a quote from C.S. Lewis that was the focus of one of our conversations some eight years ago. Lewis said: "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." What both writers seem to be pointing to is the obvious truth that as we age we grow and change. Including our views, our ideas of how the world works, our preconceived notions of ourselves and others. And sometimes that change will feel like loss. What takes the place of those things we've lost? For Woolf, it's other illusions. This brings us back to Woolf's quote. What do you think she is getting at here? Are there illusions that you've had to lose as you've grown older and (hopefully) wiser? What might those be for you? And what about the other half of the quote? What kind of new illusions have we acquired as we've shed others? Finally, are there "comforting illusions" that you still cling to? And to make it a little provocative, is your faith one of them? Come help us sort it all out tomorrow evening. Join us for the discussion Tuesday, Feb. 24 starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.