Does anyone know what the early Christians were known as before they split from their Jewish cousins? They were known as followers of the way, those who followed Jesus. I am not claiming that all religions are the same or that there is a one-to-one correlation between them, although when I was a spiritual counselor in South Dakota, when I did fifth steps for our First Nation brother and sisters, they would often talk about the red road, which meant they were trying to get their life back on track and renew their relationships with all their living relatives, two-legged and four-legged alike. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told us that being a disciple is a hard thing to accomplish and the road, "straight is the path and narrow the way." Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his book, "The Cost of Discipleship" about this young man who went away grieving because although he wanted to follow Jesus, he couldn't because Jesus asked him first to give away all of his poss
In the book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, wanted to go into botany to answer the question, "Why do asters and golden rod look so beautiful together?" She was quickly set straight by her professors and advisors that botanists do not worry about beauty, that is not science. With science, the goal is to isolate the thing being studied and take it apart to see how it works and what are its basic components. This is part of the wisdom from below. Science has given us a great many things and science has given us the illusion of control and of separation. The wisdom from below argues who is the greatest as shown in the gospel story this morning. We have the Fortune 500 companies which in a decade or two, it will be the Fortune 10, controlling all aspects of business. In the 1990's, there were 40 major banks, now there are 4 and they are too big to fail. We have our food system controlled by 4 major companies, but thank God Cargill is here in Minnesota so we can re