Happy New Year from the Prime Timers!

Prime Timers, a St. Martin's Adult Christian Education (A.C.E.) group, also known as an ABF (Adult Bible Fellowship), is for people in the Prime of Life, ages 50-64. We meet in the Parlor near the Church Offices each Sunday from 10:15am to 11:00. We are following a course of study from the United Council of Churches titled The New Testament Community. We are charging ahead with a new unit entitled "Human Commitment" with readings from Luke and you are invited!

ABF classes will resume January 11...

It's been a great year and the Christmas season brings lots of activity at St. Martin's. Prime Timers will be back in January but why don't you join all of us on Christmas Eve? The church is all decked out in it's Christmas glory, services begin with a Carol service at 2pm, followed by a family service at 3:30, and fellowship in the Parish Hall from 4-6pm with hot chocolate and candy canes! The big service is at 5:30pm. This is traditionally the best attended service on Christmas Eve, come early! Then there are Holy Eucharist's at 8 and 11. All the Eucharist's are preceded by St. Martin's full choir and the wonderful Gloria Dei organ playing traditional songs and carols thirty minutes before the service.

Prime Timers Celebrate Good News!

We celebrate our members Good News at Prime Timers with a $1 contribution to Henny Penny, our Good News chicken. Periodically Henny donates the money she collects to a worthy charity, currently the Amistad Mission in Bolivia. Marty gave thanks that his Mom's 90th birthday party was a great time for all. His Mom is one of five sisters and the surprise for her was that every one of them came for the party!

Shepherds Glorify God

Donn Fullenweider taught class today. He began with a quote from Goethe "The further one advances in experience, the closer one comes to the unfathomable; the more one learns to utilize experience, the more one recognizes that the unfathomable is of no practical value. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe"

Today's reading is the story from Luke of the shepherds in the field being told of the birth of the Messiah by an angel. (Luke 2:1-20) Donn commented on how angels appear quite often in the bible and how everyone is initially afraid, but the angels are always able to calm everyone down before delivering their message! Providing some background to the book of Luke, did you know that Luke was not a Jew? While Luke always linked Jesus to God's actions in the Old Testament, his backdrop was the larger, secular world of the Roman Empire. Augustus was emperor of the Roman Empire from 31 B.C. to A.D. 14 and he was the ultimate authority in the political, social and religious world into which Jesus was born. Many of Luke's accounts do not square with historical accounts. There is no account of people having to return to their ancestral homes to register, for instance, although there were censuses taken.

Donn is reading a book, The Bible as History, by Werner Keller, and used this to point out that Jesus birthday was not Christmas day, and was not on year one due to the miscalculation in 525 AD by the monk Dionysius Exiguus (died 556 AD) who calculated Jesus was born in 1 BC. Almost all scholars place it on a different date. First, King Herod died in 4 B.C. so if he had the first born killed it had to be before that, and if Jesus was born during a census, there was none taken in the year 1 although the Census of Quirinius occured in 6 A.D.

At any rate, it was the emperor Justinian who in 554 A.D. declared December 25 as the official birthday of Jesus. Donn remarked how many times the Christian Church simply declares things to be so, and so they are. December 25th is just a few days after the Winter Solstice, traditionally a bacchanalia celebrating various Pagan gods. By declaring this the birthday of Jesus a whole different cast is placed on the event.

Donn asked the class to recall Christmas memories and we got a great start by George who described taking his sister's new bike for a spin, hey it was easier to get on! The recent snow in Houston set off several memories, including a children's Christmas pageant that ended with the doors to the church being opened, to snow! It snows so seldom in Houston it was Marty, from New Jersey, who had to tell about the "joys" of shoveling the snow afterwards!

Donn wished everyone, and this includes you, a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday season, followed by a short benediction.

The Lesson for Sunday, January 11th,  is "Rahab Helps Israel"

Key Verse:  Joshua 2:11-12

Focus of the Lesson: Commitments may create conflicting priorities, require risks, and exact a cost. How does one balance the value of the different sides of a commitment? Rahab willingly faced great personal danger in order to save her family.

The reading is Joshua 2:1-4, 12-14; 6:22-25. This text is from the New International Version. (NIV)

Background Scripture:  Joshua 2; 6:22-25

   ¹Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. "Go, look over the land," he said, "especially Jericho." So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.

   ²The king of Jericho was told, "Look! Some of the Israelites have come here tonight to spy out the land." ³So the king of Jericho sent this message to Rahab: "Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, because they have come to spy out the whole land."

   ⁴But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. She said, "Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they had come from.

   ¹²Now then, please swear to me by the LORD that you will show kindness to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure sign ¹³that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and that you will save us from death."

   ¹⁴"Our lives for your lives!" the men assured her. "If you don't tell what we are doing, we will treat you kindly and faithfully when the LORD gives us the land."

   ²²Joshua said to the two men who had spied out the land, "Go into the prostitute's house and bring her out and all who belong to her, in accordance with your oath to her." ²³So the young men who had done the spying went in and brought out Rahab, her father and mother and brothers and all who belonged to her. They brought out her entire family and put them in a place outside the camp of Israel.

   ²⁴Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the LORD's house. ²⁵But Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, because she hid the men Joshua had sent as spies to Jericho—and she lives among the Israelites to this day.

NIV