For the past two years, this church building has been home for Edith.  A community of support well beyond our congregation has formed around Edith and her family.  What initially began as the right thing to do has grown into friendship and shared life – including celebrating birthdays and graduations.  And events like this where we mark the passage of time.  Friendship has blossomed into solidarity – sharing together in the work to enable Edith to return home to the family apartment.     The fact that Edith Espinal has been living inside a church building, in sanctuary, for two years, is an unmistakable sign both of her persistence to stay united with her family, and the utter failure of our immigration system to treat individuals and families with human decency.  So, it is with the deepest respect, and with great sadness that I say that after two years, we are

This Sunday at retreat will be the final week of our worship series on our (Membership) Commitment statement.  Which means it’s time to start a new worship series. That theme, for the month of October, will be Healthy Sexuality.  I guess that means we could either have full or very empty pews for those four weeks.       There are any number of ways of doing this poorly.  The Church, for its part, has done a lousy job historically of guiding us into healthy sexuality.  The Church has largely seen sex as a necessary evil for pro-creation, perpetuated heterosexual male power dominance, and had little to say about the goodness of our embodied selves.  Our starting point will be linked with the Christian ideas of incarnation and creation in the image of God.  We are relational beings, which is to say that we are sexual beings, which is to say that

The headline of this morning’s Dispatch addresses executions in Ohio and the drugs needed to carry them out.  Despite drug makers warning Ohio officials not to use their products for executions, the article details multiple occasions in which state officials acquired these drugs, sending them to the state death chamber in southern Ohio to serve as the three drug cocktail for lethal injections. However, there is good news on this front.  Folks who work closely for the abolition of Ohio’s death penalty note they have good reason to believe that Governor DeWine has no wish for executions to be carried out on his watch.  The speaker of the Ohio House also recently made a public statement that he has become “less and less” supportive of the death penalty. While citing expense and legal obstacles serves as a good public argument from some officials to back off death penalty support, the

This week highlights our 5th commitment: “Love our neighbors and enemies, pursuing wholistic peace with justice.”  We didn’t plan for it to coincide with the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the US, but it does.  When Jesus says, in Matthew 5:44, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” he was talking to the crowds of people who had come to him.  They were not the powerful determining national foreign policy.  They were the poor and the sick. Julie Hart will be preaching on this topic on Sunday – nothing like outsourcing the hard ones – and I suggest that, among other things, loving our enemies is a strategy for soul survival, even in traumatic experiences.  Trauma is a very real thing.  It traps one in an experience of powerlessness and can come to define one’s life and outlook.  Enemy-love is strangely connected with self-love in the

A few months back, the Christian Education Commission and I organized a workshop that was meant to help clarify the purposes of Christian Formation and set some goals to help move us toward our vision for Christian formation with children and youth.  The congregation as a whole has been doing some visioning this past year, so we thought it might be helpful to do something similar that would focus more specifically on the work of our commission. We started the workshop by doing some brainstorming in small groups on the question, “What is the purpose and goal of Christian Formation?”  Before we could get to any specific ideas for our congregation, it was important to spend some time thinking about this question from a very foundational level.  I had each of the small groups at the workshop draft an answer to that question.  Here are their responses: The purpose and