Author: David Ellis

Hello everyone, This is Fay D’Anna, Alice Rihani’s daughter. I just read this, as I read all your beautiful thoughts and words that have been such a blessing to me in these past months since my beloved mother has been sharing these wonderful emails with me. Even though I don’t see you all or know…

Before the meeting proper got under way, Don shared with us the very sad news that Alice and her family have suffered another tragedy, in the discovery of brain tumors in Alice’s daughter Fay. Don noted that this kind of evil —  a natural evil, not one caused by an evil human being —  always…

Jay conducted the meeting. Jay: Last week we were looking at parables dealing in some way with judgment – the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the tares, and the Good Samaritan. If the latter two are both about judgment, we ought to be able to discern some similarities among them. The parables are:…

Don recapped that we are in the final stages of our consideration of the metaphor of the sheep and the shepherd – of our relationships with God and each other (via Matthew 25.) It is a puzzling metaphor. Ostensibly, it is a simple judgment scene where good people end up in the Kingdom while bad…

Evil Don: One of the questions that has arisen out of our discussion is that we see God primarily as being in the business of uniting, and the devil as being in the business of dividing. Is Matthew 25 referring not to individual judgment, but to a judgment of Evil itself, at the end of…

The Parable of the Lost Sheep contd.   Don: This may be the final session in our study of the Lost Sheep parable, based on Matthew 18. Who are the goats? How do goats differ from sheep? Can goats become sheep and vice versa? How much can we gain from the metaphor? What does it…

Don: The description of Jesus as being The Way is not just about Jesus but about his methods, teaching, humility, love, sacrifice, etc., and is more descriptive than prescriptive. The Way (the door to the Kingdom) is through the message and the medium of Jesus, but if you don’t know that, it does not deprive…

[somewhat rough notes this week.]   Alice introduced her friend Hosia (sp?) visiting from Egypt.  Don: We have been looking for many weeks at the metaphor in Matthew18 … The parable of the sheep and the shepherd, especially the 99 sheep that stay vs. the 1 that strays. John 10 espouses the same metaphor. We’ve…

The Parable of the Lost Sheep: The Others John 10:14-16: “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me — just as the Father knows me and I know the Father — and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I…