General Conference Postview

Just under the wire,  here is what I haven’t posted about yet from the last General Conference.

One

Brother Uceda made a parable clearer to me. The parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son.

When Luke, the Gospel writer, is introducing the three stories, he uses the word parable in the singular, not in the plural. It appears that the Lord is teaching one unique lesson with three stories—stories that present different numbers: 100 sheep, 10 coins, and 2 sons. The key number in each of these stories, however, is the number one.

This can be a hard parable if you read it as a justification for local leaders to ignore your family in favor of those who are more performatively lost. But from a divine perspective we are all lost sheep. The actual  point is that the only level of success love can be satisfied with is 100%. Whether personally or as a people 0.5 or 0.9 or 0.99 is not enough.

Coincidentally (?), Elder Christofferson spoke next on being one in Christ as the body of Christ.   What an interesting juxtaposition!  We can imagine a parable as follows

What man of you,  having injured his hand,  would not bind the wound? Would he say I will not bind it, because the rest of my body is well? No, but he will bind it and treat it until his hand is also well.

Patriarchal Blessings

Two different men talked about patriarchal blessings.  I got the distinct impression to read mine. Which I promptly did… in July.  I got some guidance on a problem in grappling with.  It would have been nice to get it a couple of months earlier.

Liturgical Calendar

There were a couple of talks about celebrating Easter and even Palm Sunday and Holy Week.

The first thing that needs to be said is that no one needs to feel guilty if they dont have as much hoopla for Easter as they do for Christmas.  You shouldn’t force holidays.

Second, let’s talk about liturgical calendars. A liturgical calendar is just a calendar of holidays and observances. We have one ourselves. Christmas. Easter.  Fast sundays. Annual general conference. Semiannual general conference. Summer youth stuff.  Pioneer Day and tithing settlement used to be iSundays.  It’s interesting that we are now emphasizing Christian liturgy like Easter at the same time we are deemphasizing the unique LDS parts of the calendar.

It’s interesting to look at a liturgical calendar and see what’s “missing.” In other words,  what would you want to celebrate that your people currently don’t have a distinct well-marked observance for.