Children’s Sunday 6/18/17 On Father’s Day each year, we celebrate our children in an intentionally intergenerational and fun-filled service. This year some of the adults in the congregation put on the play “The Good Shepherd” by Bob Snook. We heard from the children about some of their favorite lessons, and also gave them gifts to […]
To celebrate Trinity Sunday, we had a service of word and song. Click here to get an idea of what we heard and sang in worship!
Fired Up Texts: Acts 2:1-21; 1 Corinthians 12:3-13 Rev. Heather M. Hinton June 4, 2017 ~ Pentecost ~ Sacrament of Holy Communion Jews from all over the region had gathered in Jerusalem for the holiday Pentecost. Also called Shavuot, or the Feast of Weeks, this holiday eventually became associated with the giving of the Law […]
It’s a troubling story. This desperate woman – mother, Gentile, outsider – approaches Jesus for help and, as someone once said, he “gets caught with his compassion down.”
And here, in our sacred text, we hear of violence against a woman. (Indeed, we hear of all manner of violence in the Bible; it is a bloody book.) We need this story. Those one in four women in the US who are victims of serious physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner need this story, but not just them: we all do. And on some level, the men who wrote and compiled the Bible knew that we need her story, and so they preserved her name. This voice of the victim of incestuous rape is one of only 93 women’s voices we hear in the Bible, and Tamar is one of the mere 49 women who are named! We need her. And she needs us.
Maybe, if we can imagine what Sarah and I might say to each other if we could let go of jealousy and anger and fear, if we could learn to love and forgive and cherish one another – maybe then our sons and their sons and their son’s sons could learn to love and forgive and cherish one another. Maybe mercy will flow from God to the women to the children – children like the ones you baptized here this morning.
Stories are one of the ways we understand ourselves and the world, and that’s why they’re central to every religion and every culture around the world. Hopefully the stories we hear speak to the stories we live. This month we will hear the stories of some of the women in the Bible, women whose names may be known to us but whose stories may be but vague memories in our minds. Today we begin with Ruth, a woman whose story is full of defining moments that may resonate with us, if we but take the time to let her speak to us.
And then we can all come to the Table, and then we invite Jesus to be among us and to do what he did so often with his disciples: we ask him to take the bread, bless it, break it, and give it to us, reminding us that he is always with us, walking with us on whatever road we find ourselves. And we pray that at this time, at the Table or just gathered together in his name, our eyes too will be opened: open to recognize his presence with us in all the ordinary things of life.
No more being locked away, my friends. It’s time to unbolt the doors and go back out into that world. Much of it may be hostile, but there are those who need to hear the Good News. They need to be given the opportunity to believe, that they, as John says, “may have life in his name.” (v. 31)
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Which is to say, Easter is the day we declare: We believe in impossible things.
