Join us October 3 at 5pm for an outdoor Blessing of the Animals. Animals on leashes or in carriers are warmly welcome, as are stuffed animals and photos.
“It feels like this is something of our last Sunday of the school year, before we shift into summer mode next week with one 9am service. It’s also like we are at this societal moment of pivoting out of COVID-19 restrictions and more or less going back to normal – if there ever was such a thing. What’s been a bit disorienting for me was the radical abruptness of reopening. It was like the CDC and our civic leaders just got tired of the gray zone of semi-regulated communal life, and rather than slowly undimming the lights, they just decided to flick the switch on, and many of us, accustomed to the dark and coziness of quarantine, are squinting a little bit, trying to acclimate to the bright lights of normal.”
“Imagine a Portrait Gallery approached you and wanted to capture your image for posterity. How would you like to be portrayed? What picture of yourself would you like others to see? And do you think that picture ties up at all with the pictures others have of you? How would you be in this portrait? Where would you be? What emotion, position, look would just capture you?”
“Human beings take around 650,000,000 breaths in their lifetime;
About 25,000 a day. How many of those are we aware?
My Apple watch rings once an hour with a reminder to Breathe.
It’s kind of annoying:
What does it think I’ve been doing for the last hour?
It doesn’t give me a reminder to tell my heart to pump blood
Or to my intestines to digest food.
Why does it suppose I’ve neglected my breath?”
“Well, you have never seen such pathetic vegetables in your life. Tiny lettuce plants shriveled up even smaller than the seedlings we’d bought from the store. Bulbous zucchini two inches long and covered in tiny squirrel chew-marks. The only things that really grew well were the herbs, and that just meant I was trying to add mint to everything until Alice finally got sick of it sometime in mid-July. But the tomatoes were a different story.”
While we will begin offering an 8am outdoor service, our principal worship offering continues to be online at 10am through Facebook and our website. The 10am online service – as well as our other online programming – will continue to be offered throughout the summer and into the fall; whether you are at your summer home, battling a cold, or just being cautious about public safety, please feel encouraged to continue to join us online at 10am.
Our choir sings “America the Beautiful” for our service on July 5, 2020.
“St. Paul knows that we live before an unknown future, and he’s casting around for what he can trust, who he can trust to give him directions. ‘Who can save me from this dead body?’ he asks. You could say that Romans 7 is about a man struggling with the future as he finds himself doing what he doesn’t what to do. He longs for a reconciliation in himself that is half glimpsed, half heard.“
“God had promised that Abraham would be the ancestor of many nations—and indeed, in some ways he’s become the spiritual ancestor of all the Abrahamic traditions, of all Jews and Christians and Muslims, four billion of us in the world today. And yet at this point in the story, that great lineage hangs by a thread. Abraham nearly kills his own son, nearly cutting off God’s promise to create a great people, nearly ending the story of the great love affair between God and the people of God before it’s really begun.”
If I had to sum up the paradox that is Christianity, the “the joy of being wrong” is close to the heart of it. If I had to say what one of the prevailing anxieties of our moment is, it’d be “being wrong.” “Systemic racism” has gone from being a top-shelf theoretical concept to a phrase used in everyday language by 6th grader and 60 year old alike.
“I remember sitting with a woman in the transept of the church an hour or so before the service one Sunday. She was bent over a little and weary, and I could tell that she was out of breath. She was sweating a little bit too. ‘Ma’am, is everything okay?’ She went on to tell me about how her husband had decided, after twenty-seven years, that he’d had enough… ‘I took the long way here this morning to your church, through the park, and here I am. To be honest, I’m just looking for a little peace.’ … I’ll never forget her, and I thought about her this week: out of breath and looking for peace. It feels a little bit like our society right now.”
“Back in 2008, Tania Luna founded Surprise Industries as a way to tap into our culture’s yearning to be surprised. For a small fee, Luna’s company would surprise you or your family or your company. You just paid a little monthly subscription fee, and you literally have no clue what will happen. Surprise Industries might show up at your workplace and unleash a hundred puppies. Or they might tee up a flash mob, or bring a circus act to your doorstep… Surprises, Luna discovered, have a paradoxical feature. They tell us we were wrong; yet paradoxically, we still yearn for this.”
“Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, when good preachers give bad sermons and bad preachers give you a blow-by-blow of Athanasian Creed. For my part, I’m stuck this week on the words of the Second Council of Constantinople in 553: ‘One of the Trinity was crucified in the flesh.’ In other words, to believe in the Holy Trinity—to say that Jesus is God—is to say that when Jesus of Nazareth suffered and died on the Cross, God suffered and died on the cross. And so it is that ‘theologically speaking,’ as the great American theologian James Cone writes in his final work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, ‘Jesus was the “first lynchee.”’”
“Although we long to be in each other’s homes, we do find common healing in God’s home - the outdoors. That is where we can find relief right now… and it is outdoors that different people can find the different gifts of the spirit - some are awed, some find counsel in walks with friends, some study nature and build their knowledge on family hikes, some share wisdom about planning a vegetable first garden, some seek understanding of their own muddled, frustrated thoughts sitting on the front steps at midnight with their mom, some find that the holiness of our sanctuary is also any space outside where they can see other people again, strangers or family or neighbors, kept safer by open air, wind, the Holy Spirit.”
“If you were to look up depictions of the Ascension, and if you were to scroll past a lot of the pictures of Jesus levitating upwards like Buzz Lightyear, you might come across a strange image with two feet at the top of the icon, rising over the heads of the disciples, dangling down. Usually, you just see Christ’s ankles, hanging over the scene like a chandelier, and his feet are arched down like wings, splayed apart… It’s a strange scene, these disciples around their sacred object, in the midst of worship. Not beholding the Trinity, not behold Jesus reigning in power; lost in wonder, love, and praise, as they stare at a pair of wounded feet.”
“The Epicurean gods are absent and quiet, and you should be too. The Stoic God is present, but loveless, and you should be too. And then here comes Paul crashing into the Roman world with a message about a very different kind of God. For Paul and for most other Jews, God was not the petty and capricious superhuman of Greek folk religion, nor was God the indifferent-but-happy Creator of the Epicureans or the universal Mind of the Stoics. God comes to us in the world, but God is not of the world. God interacts with us, but God doesn’t act like us.“
Join us online Sunday as we welcome the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas as she leads our 9am Forum with a talk titled "Rooted & Rising: Exploring Sacred Activism." She also will preach at our 10am Live-stream service. Margaret will discuss her new anthology of interfaith essays about emotional and spiritual resilience in a time of climate emergency.
You can read her bio here: https://revivingcreation.org/bio/
Photo by Tipper Gore
“We are, all of us, ‘walking through the valley of the shadow of death’; not just now, but always, every day of our human lives. It’s a beautiful image for a grim situation. Imagine a flock of sheep wandering through the Judean countryside. These aren’t the happy green hills like the Emerald Isle or your old Windows XP background, but the dry and rocky hills east of Jerusalem, where the mountains roll down to the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Picture the flock walking down into a deep valley, a dry river-bed, in the late afternoon, as it suddenly becomes dusk.”
