Worship Services

Outside the lines. This God that we like to say we so love and serve is huge and everywhere, waaaay beyond just the small & parochially approving thing we like to worship on our terms.

Our reading describes an interaction of Peter with a much loved, local woman, who had died.

God’s love for us and Christ’s working through us is – thankfully – not stopped by our willingness to deny him!

He comes to reassure, to breathe new life into us, to give us a future that we could never give ourselves.

Don’t you just love all the newness of life at Eastertime?

What has your faith reaction tended to be when what we have hoped for hasn’t happened just as we have prayed?

anointing is always given to us as a physical device to re-establish our awareness of the spiritual reality of God’s deeper purposes and plan.

Our initial faith response to Christ’s prompting may be for us to want to ‘clean up’ our acts: to become better people, to do better things…

we are to remember that we are God’s covenanted people. The point is not just to enjoy its fruit, but to produce that awareness in other covenanted people.

A wrestling Jesus in this passage, represents a wrestling us. And a temptation-resisting Jesus represents us – perfected.

Thank God for ‘Transfiguration’ moments like this one, glimpses we are given that, despite whatever is going on, do blow open our awareness to expose what is almost most real, all the time.

The point is that Jesus’ teachings aren’t so much about some impossible ideal as about describing God’s only true way for us in the world, and in this text we find Jesus teaching something of  what our living in this God-created reality actually looks like.

We listen to Psalm 1

Love it! Live it! ‘Be-lieve’ ‘Be-live!’ it!

leaving me with a renewed sense of hope! Hope. It reminds me of how Christ’s presence is never limited just to my very small and self-serving agendas.

By declaring his mission Jesus is giving us our commissioning!!!

Notice how instead of talking about Jesus turning water into wine, I guess what I’m suggesting here is that this miracle should be seen as Jesus drawing that wine out from the water.

How do we get to be filled with this empowering Holy Spirit of God?

Epiphany.

The First Sunday after Christmas.

Sing carols to welcome the new baby Jesus.

we believe that birthing the LOVE of God within us and for others through us is still very real.

Biblical JOY which is so very much more than any transient or superficial experience of mere ‘happiness!’

We embrace Peace.

Our hope is not just that ‘Christ comes one day’ so much as that we get to see/ own/ realize Christ’s presence as having come now, wherever we are!