Peace

Four years and eight months ago we began dealing with the difficulty of a president who preferred cynicism, marginalization, othering, and violence as means to leading our country. Eighteen months ago we began dealing with Covid 19 and the havoc it’s wreaked on our world and individual lives. And fifteen months ago we began newly waking to white supremacy and systemic racism in our country. In the midst of it all, we’ve marched, screamed, voted, scoured for toilet paper, sown masks, choked on smoke, experienced power outages, and felt, perhaps more than ever before, at the end of ourselves. In light of all that we’ve been facing, many of us are feeling untethered and are wondering, “What is this?” and “Where am I?” and even “Who am I?” When life feels like a ship riding out a wild storm, we risk being tossed to and fro, without any sight of the end. However, below the surface, at the soul level of who we want to be is the clear and steady guidance of our values, which reflect the life of Jesus who invites us into his way of being in the world. It’s our sincere hope that this sermon series on our community’s values can cast an elevated vision for the kind of life that we desire to embody, no matter what we face in life.

Divine Non-Violence

This sermon series intends to ponder divinity. To be clear, the point of this series isn’t to boil divinity down to fifteen points, or one hundred points, or one thousand points – as if we can exhaust definition for the ineffable. Nor is this series an attempt at explaining God in systematic theology categories such as communicable and incommunicable attributes. That’s been done before and it’s often onerous, which ironically, doesn’t feel very divine. Instead, this series seeks to delight in pondering crazy, confusing, beautiful, and textured attempts at understanding and appreciating ultimate reality, by considering ancient stories and thoughts about God in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament.

Carrying Peace: Luke 14:31-32

Five times, Jesus is quoted as telling his followers to take up their cross. But what exactly does that mean? Is cross carrying a metaphor for suffering? If so, how does one carry suffering? Is cross carrying a path that leads to crucifixion? If so, what does that look like today, when people aren’t being crucified? Throughout Lent we are encouraged to participate in Jesus’ passion, which includes suffering, cross carrying, and death on a cross, but what does it mean for us to carry a cross, today? What does it look like for us to be the kind of Jesus followers who do what Jesus exhorts, which is to pick up their cross and follow him? 

This sermon series seeks to explore the meaning of cross carrying. Then, in the midst of this exploration, it intends to offer practical ways of carrying crosses that align our lives with Jesus’ way of being in the world. Finally, this series hopes to cast a vision for cross carrying that extends beyond just suffering and death, to the glory and new life that Jesus says is the result of following him.