“And he was speechless” (Matt 22:12). That’s what the parable says about the man who was at the banquet without the right clothes, the man who didn’t have a wedding robe like everyone else at the wedding feast. When the king’s eye catches a glimpse of the man with ordinary clothes, the king confronts him with a question. “How did you get in here without a wedding robe,” without the proper attire? (22:12). He has nothing to say for himself. Nothing to say to the king. No response. Only silence. “And he was speechless,” it says. More
Sermons
Worship is more than preaching. Each worship gathering draws from the wealth of gifts of the community. We have rotations of volunteers who share the responsibilities of preaching, song leading, and service planning. We take turns reading the assigned Scripture readings for the day. The high point of our worship is our time for response and sharing. Since we believe that anyone can offer an interpretation of the Bible, we provide time in our worship for people to offer their own reflections on the Scriptures and the sermon.
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Frivolous God
This is a story about a frivolous God who doesn’t weigh costs and benefits. God instead makes decisions based on love. In the kingdom of heaven, the only law is generous love, all people as deserving of the lavish providence of God. More
ashes
“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” That’s what we hear today, on Ash Wednesday, as our foreheads are marked with the sign of the cross, with ashes. These ashes here in this jar come from Mary Jo and Tom’s back yard, years ago, when they burned the palm branches from our Palm Sunday service. We’ve been using them every year since. More
Radiance
Jesus must also know how entangled human life is with fear, how badly we would like to not be afraid, and how paralyzed we sometimes feel in the face of fear, the kind that makes it difficult to believe it is good for us to be here. Jesus must know all this when he tells the disciples not to be afraid. These are not words spoken from a distance, detached. They are words spoken up close, words that reach into us, words that are closer to us than we are to ourselves. There is patience in Jesus’s words; they will have to be said again. More
Food
I remember reading a lot of political theology when I was in seminary—books all about the revolutionary Christian politics, very serious arguments, very important ideas. And what always struck me, what I wondered about, was what are people going to eat, who was going to make the food for the revolution? That never seemed to be a pressing concern, when the theologians theorized about the revolution, the kingdom of God. They also didn’t worry too much about childcare, which always clued me into something weird going on in how they thought about the world. Who is going to make the meals and who is going to provide childcare when planning for the revolution? Church life has taught me to think about real life, our ordinary and vital needs, whenever we plan things. More
On prayer
This prayer is about big things and little things, about good things and hard things, about human needs and desires and power, about daily food and money and borders. In other words, this prayer has to do with our lives, with all of who we are, with our struggles and hopes, with our wants and necessities. Everything is included in Jesus’ prayer—all of the messy confusion of our lives, of our society, of our daily existence. There is nothing outside the domain of prayer—all of our passing thoughts are included, our wandering hopes, our rambling longings. More
To live by love
The story of Jesus is also our story. The Scriptures invite us to see ourselves through the light of these holy texts, these stories as revelations into who we are, insights into our lives. We are baptized into this life, into this Jesus—his life becomes ours, ours becomes his. To see him is to glimpse who we are. He is our representative. That’s the language from our theology textbooks, from Christian doctrine—that Christ represents us, that he represents our humanity, that we find our story in his story because Christ is our representative. More
Epiphanies
Today is called Epiphany, a day to focus on what happens after Advent and Christmas, when this one we’ve been expecting finally arrives. The word Epiphany means revelation, appearance, made known. So today is a day to focus on how Jesus appears and to whom he is made know—to notice who sees him and who welcomes him. More
Labor of incarnation
Part of the power of these pieces of devotional art, these pious images, is that they capture the shock of Christmas—that moment of revelation, the surprise of the story: that God becomes a child, vulnerable to the violences of this world, to the violences that threaten Mary day to day, as a young woman, pregnant out of wedlock, bearing the weight of oppression at the hands of the Roman occupation of her people. Whatever threatens Mary, threatens the life of Jesus, God in Mary’s flesh. More
What then should we do?
We remember that first advent so that we can learn what to do now—to ask that same question running throughout the Gospel of Luke, “What then should we do?” To wonder what this gospel, this story, this advent of the Messiah, means for us today, as we live out our lives as a form of waiting, waiting for another kind of Advent, the coming of Christ’s peace: the renewal of creation, the restoration of God’s goodness. More
To overthrow, to build
Our faith is a way of life. Worship is a way of life. To amend our ways, Jeremiah says, has everything to do with how we welcome God into our lives. “Let me dwell with you in this place,” God says. It’s a request, a plea from God—because God wants to be with us. But the thing with God is that when God shows up, God brings friends, people, neighbors and foreigners, all God’s loved ones. If we don’t welcome the foreigner and orphan, then we’ve communicated very clearly that we don’t really want God. More
garden
Isaiah has a vision. A vision of the world renewed. A vision for the redemption of all things. A vision for the salvation of all life. “The nations shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:4). At the beginning of this book, the book of Isaiah, in chapter two,… More
all saints remembrance
For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought about the dead. Lodged in my memory, from early childhood, is something my dad told me. He told me that I was named after his father, my middle name: Samuel. That was my grandfather’s name, Samuel. I never met him because he died five years before… More
Beyond the river, beyond the border
There’s a cemetery in the desert, in a clearing next to the border wall, on the U.S. side, in Douglas, Arizona. Among the gravestones, when one section ends and other begins, in between the orderly rows, there are clusters of cement blocks lodged in the sand, all of them the same, with the same word… More
No gods but God
This week, in the narrative lectionary, we journey into Exodus. In the early chapters of the book, through Moses, God liberates Israel from slavery in Egypt, leading them out of captivity and on to Mount Sinai in a pillar of fire. In today’s scripture passage, from Exodus 19 and 20, God establishes a covenant with… More
Relentless love
The story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, this week of all weeks, lends itself to a bewildering variety of readings, most of them bereft of good news. Here’s the Sunday school version of the story—call it Joseph’s Righteous Prosperity. Joseph does what is right and so God blesses him, increases his power, his possessions, his… More
Our feathered refuge
“They say of the Lord…” For all the strange formality of Scripture, all the Thees and Thous, all the mystifying stories, all the water-into-wine miracles and genocides and talk about the Son of God, there are times when the Bible makes me laugh with its plainspoken, downright folksiness, and this is what caught my eye… More
flood
There’s a lot I don’t understand about this story—about Noah and the ark and the flood. I don’t understand the flood part—all the devastation, people and animals, trees and grass, swept away in a torrent of water: rivers turned into seas, lakes into oceans. This is a story about judgment, about human corruption of the… More
Holy betrayal
Rahab betrays her people. She betrays the security of her nation. She helps two foreigners cross the walls into Jericho. She welcomes two immigrants, even though her people call them enemies, even though her country considers them as threats to society. She extends hospitality to strangers who sneak through the night, who climb a wall… More
Tangled beauty
Ruth is part of the royal line, the genealogy of king David. This is an important fact for Matthew’s Gospel—in the very first chapter of the story of Jesus, there’s Ruth, the mother of Obed, who is the father of Jesse, the father of David, the king of Israel. There is no David without Ruth,… More
Your people, my people
Women trying to survive, trying to survive in a man’s world—where men had the power, where women had nothing on their own. That’s the story of the book of Ruth—a story that, as we move through the chapters, narrows our focus onto two people, Naomi and Ruth, their commitment to each other, their love as… More
Embarrassing generosity
Last week, Isaac preached about the dangers of coveting—of wanting to dominate the earth and its people, of craving mastery, and of being drawn in to a competition for possessions. He argued that such covetous competition objectified people and rendered them thoughtless and voiceless. The antidote to coveting, he said, was love. Love necessarily involves… More
Coveting
I covet. I covet another world. Not this one. I covet. I covet another life. Not mine. We desire, we want, and we dream—we covet worlds not ours and lives different from our own. Yet the last commandment, the tenth, the culmination of all the others, says, “Thou shall not covet.” I break that commandment… More
Me too
Masculinity and violence are so closely tied we barely pause to question it. And if I am reading Jesus right here, the commandment “You shall not murder” is about this entire spectrum of violence. More