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 4th,  is "Midwives Serve God"

Key Verse:  Exodus 1:17

Focus of the Lesson: There are often competing demands for our commitment. How does one evaluate these competing claims and choose an appropriate course of action? The midwives knew they belonged to God's people and remained faithful to God while denying Pharaoh's edict.

The reading is Exodus 1:8-21. This text is from the New International Version. (NIV)

   ⁸Then a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt. ⁹"Look," he said to his people, "the Israelites have become much too numerous for us. ¹⁰Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country."

   ¹¹So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. ¹²But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites ¹³and worked them ruthlessly. ¹⁴They made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their hard labor the Egyptians used them ruthlessly.

   ¹⁵The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, ¹⁶"When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and observe them on the delivery stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live." ¹⁷The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. ¹⁸Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, "Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?"

   ¹⁹The midwives answered Pharaoh, "Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive."

   ²⁰So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. ²¹And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.

NIV