In honor of it being Sunday, we started reading a book called Strength for the Journey by Peter J. Gomes. Mr. Gomes is the minister of The Memorial Church at Harvard and Strength for the Journey is a collection of his sermons. Below is the cover of the book.
We’re planning to start at the beginning of the book and read through it, one sermon per Sunday. Conveniently, there are sermons for different liturgical seasons and holidays, including Advent, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving etc., so when we get to those times of year, we’ll skip to the corresponding sermons.
We enjoyed reading the first sermon, entitled “Abundance: Surplus and Substance” aloud to each other and then discussing it. The sermon is based on Luke 21:4, which in the King James Version reads “For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God; but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had.” Mr. Gomes’ sermon is thus about giving, and he encourages the reader to consider “giving not in proportion to what you have, but in proportion to what you have been given.” A quote from Churchill that Mr. Gomes includes struck me in particular. Churchill said, “we make a living by what we save, but we make a life by what we give.” These seem like very relevant ideas to our new life in Tanzania, where it is abundantly clear that we have been given so much more than so many people in the world. This is something that many people (including us) who live in developed countries often forget, and I think it is very important to try to remember and be grateful for all that we have.
Maybe we’ll find a church that we like here in Dar, but in the meantime we’re going to experiment with having our own kind of church.
**A special thank you to Becca who introduced me to Mr. Gomes’ preaching and gave me this book a number of years ago. Yet another wonderful gift from my big sister!
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