March 11thFive Minutes on Friday #20
FREEDOM
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
[David Foster Wallace]
JESUS
Gentle Jesus’, my elbow! The most striking thing about Our Lord is the union of great ferocity with extreme tenderness. (Remember Pascal? ‘I do not admire the extreme of one virtue unless you show me at the same time the extreme of the opposite virtue. One shows one’s greatness not by being at an extremity but by being simultaneously at two extremities and filling all the space between.’)
Add to this that He is also a supreme ironist, dialectician, and (occasionally) humourist. So go on! You are on the right track now: getting to the real Man behind all the plaster dolls that have been substituted for Him. This is the appearance in Human form of the God who made the Tiger and the Lamb, the avalanche and the rose. He’ll frighten and puzzle you: but the real Christ can be loved and admired as the doll can’t. [C.S. Lewis in a letter to a friend, 1959]
UKRAINE
Ukrainian Mennonite Brethren and Baptist churches are an important part of the response that MCC is supporting, said Linda Herr, MCC area director for Europe, in response to questions from Anabaptist World. The church networks reach well beyond Zaporizhzhia, where MCC work in the country is based.
See further at … https://anabaptistworld.org/mcc-church-partners-assist-neighbors-in-ukraine/
SUNDAY – Exodus 16; John 6.24-35,51
Some three decades ago, Bernard Glassman, a former aeronautics engineer who once worked at NASA, opened Greyston Bakery. It had a humble beginning in a rusted out old factory in a sketchy part of Yonkers, New York.
When Glassman opened the bakery he had a vision for the business: people would be as important as the product. ‘I wanted to make a great bakery, and I wanted to do it working with folks our society thinks are throwaways,’ he said. They were one of the first companies to adopt a practice known as ‘open hiring.’ There are no application forms, no check to see what diplomas you have earned. They don’t do criminal checks, drug checks, or credit checks. They don’t call your references on your resume because they don’t want your resume.
And mostly it works. Some employees, of course, disappear but the retention rate is high. Bernard Glassman loves to make bread for the world with a bunch of nobodies. The bread, he explains, is just a sign, a delivery device for something more life-giving. ‘I wanted the bakery to have concrete, spiritual value in the community.’
I invite you to reflect on how this story intersects with this week’s scripture: the OT story of manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16), and Jesus’ statement that he is ‘the bread of life.’
‘One bread, one body’