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Remember

Remember and Do Not Forget
Communion, September 7, 2014
Exodus 12:21-28

In our Old Testament scripture for today, Moses is telling the Israelites how to remember something that hasn’t even happened yet. God is going to do something terrible and something wonderful. God is going to kill the firstborn of the Egyptians, the people who have enslaved the Israelites and whose King will not let them go. That’s terrible. It’s awful. It’s hard to understand.  Even though the Israelites have suffered terribly—even though Pharaoh had murdered the firstborn of the Israelites himself—somehow it’s different when it’s God who instigating it.Read More »Remember

God on Trial

Din Torah

The phoenix, the Invictus cross, and the butterfly–all symbolizing different meanings of the resurrection of Jesus Christ to Christians.

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch

October 7, 2012

World Communion Sunday

Job 1:1, 2: 1-12

Yaffa Eliach, a highly respected Jewish historian who is herself a survivor of the Holocaust, tells the story that in 1979, she was a member of President Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust.  The commission, who would ultimately lay the groundwork for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, had visited sites of countless atrocities and collected stories from Holocaust survivors. After visiting Auschwitz, the commission held evening services at the ancient Rema Synagogue in Cracow, Poland.  In the middle of the worship service, “Miles Lerman, a former partisan and sole survivor of a large Jewish family,” stepped forward, banged his fist on the bema, the pulpit, “and declared that he was calling God to Din Torah—summoning God to court!” Read More »God on Trial

“Tell Us, When Will This Be?”–Everyday Apocalypses


Mark 13: 24-37

November 27, 2011

Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher

 

I’m sure we all remember the big billboards a few months ago announcing that The Judgment was coming on May 23, 2011, so we all better be ready. And of course, it didn’t, and then the purveyor of this idea, evangelist and radio host Harold Camping, said he’d made a slight math mistake—don’t we all make math mistakes?–and actually the day of the Lord was to arrive on October 21, and of course, it didn’t again, but I don’t think people were paying as much attention, so I suppose it could have come and nobody noticed it.Read More »“Tell Us, When Will This Be?”–Everyday Apocalypses