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God Is Able!
November 15, 2009
Daniel 12:1-3; Psalms 16:5,8-11;
Hebrews 10:11-14,18;
Mark 13:24-3
"The sun will be darkened, the moon will
lose its brightness, the stars will come falling
from
Heaven
..." (Mark 13:24,25).
The late Muriel Lester
was an amazing woman. As a teen-ager she quit the
busy round of
social life
in London and rented a humble room because she
wanted to serve the poor. Out of this small beginning
came "Kingsley Hall." It is one of the
best-known rehabilitation centers of recent times
and has restored health and hope to a great many
people. Because Muriel Lester especially was concerned
about the problem of alcohol, she built Kingsley
Hall in the midst of an area containing no less
than thirty saloons. She was so effective at bringing
rehabilitation and hope to others that people came
from all over the world to study with her, and
to learn from her. As she moved into advanced years,
her concern about our world-situation deepened.
A letter she wrote to a friend in the U.S. reflects
this. She wrote, in part:
How can the world recover?
Is it moving its last time around the sun?
I know God has other worlds
and, probably, wonderful beings, managing better
than we to preserve their worlds from the absurd
super-sensitivity and pride that start us grumbling
and pitying ourselves - -and resenting others
so much that eventually it leads to the murder
and
torture of children via war. I will interrupt
this letter while I get ready for Church. I must
not
hurry at all-ever-else the pain comes. What
a lot we learn as our bodies grow older and more
stubborn!
But what a wonderful increase of joy and serenity!
This
excerpt reflects a deeply sensitive Christian
woman's concern about our world and her feeling
about the end of the world (which the Bible
talks so much about). But the really poignant
thing
about
the letter is the postscript, added by her
nurse. It reads, "Half an hour after writing
this letter, Muriel Lester died. She was writing
about
the end of the world not knowing that while
she wrote, she was making her own last turn
around
the sun."
In today's Gospel Lesson, Jesus depicts
a series of future events so fearful as to cause
us to contemplate
our own last turn around the sun.
Jesus tells us
to expect trials of every sort. He speaks of a
time when "the sun will be
darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the
stars will come falling from Heaven..." (Mk.13:24,25,26).
"As for that day or hour," Jesus says, "Nobody
knows it ...
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