CMC Worship Service 4/3/2022 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.

Sermon by Carolyn May

Over the course of this Lenten season our theme has been Turn/Return. Our gospel reading today begins with Jesus’ return to a town called Bethany. The last time he was in Bethany was in the chapter just prior to this one. In that chapter he went to Bethany because his dear friend Lazarus had fallen ill. By the time he actually arrived at Bethany he learned that Lazarus had been dead for four days already. Jesus is greeted by the same sisters we encounter in our story today, Mary and Martha. Martha first meets Jesus and they have an exchange in which Jesus tells Martha that he is the resurrection and the life and that surely Lazarus would rise. When Mary comes to Jesus she immediately falls to his feet and weeps. She says, Lord, if you had been here my brother would still be alive. Mary’s grief, perhaps, stirred up Jesus’ own as we are told that he loved Lazarus. He is taken to the tomb and he tells those gathered to roll away the stone. Martha, always the practical one, warns against that idea alluding to the stench that must be present after four days. Nonetheless, the stone is rolled away and Lazarus returns to life.

So we have Lazarus returning to life and Jesus returning to Bethany. The two are described as lounging around a table along with some of Jesus’ disciples. Martha, we are told, is serving those gathered. Classic Martha, right? She’s the same one described…

3-27-22 CMC service from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.

Sermon | Inheritance
Text: Luke 15:1-2;11-20
Speaker: Joel Miller

What if, you could have your inheritance now?  All of it.  What if all you had to do was ask?  “Mother, Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.”  And they do it.  Everything divided out in proportion to what would have been yours is now yours.  You can do with it as you please. 

There’s the furniture – with the end table your grandfather made from the maple in the fencerow.  The piano.  That favorite chair that survived every move, mostly.  Some quilts and rugs and paintings and books.  So many books.  Your mother’s wardrobe and the scarves that belonged to her mother.  The silverware and plates are yours to use or sell or give away.  I’m making this up, but you get the idea.  Fill in your own details. It’s all yours. 

Diaries and journals.  Boxes of pictures, from back when you put pictures in boxes.

Then there’s the house.  It has a new roof, but the furnace has been acting up and one side of the basement floods during a heavy rain.  What do you and your siblings each do with 1/4th of a house?  And the land.  The land is yours too.

For many of you this is not hypothetical.  You could lead a seminar or three about how to care for aging parents, what to expect as an executor of an estate, your own story of what you did and are doing with the inheritance. 

And there’s more.  As we come to realize…

The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.

…

CMC Worship Service 03:13:2022.mp4 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.

Lent 2 Sermon Manuscript

Speaker: Joel Miller

Cutting a covenant | Text: Genesis 15:1-18

After Abram had looked up at the stars.  After he’d tried to count them and lost track.  After the Divine promise that his descendants would number just like those innumerable stars.  After, as the text says, “he believed the Lord and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”  After this, Abram still needed more. 

Abram had no children in a time when children, specifically sons, were how one’s life and honor continued past one’s death.  Abram has access to some land, but he was still a first generation immigrant, having left the urbanized land of the East, Ur of the Chaldeans, to settle in this new place.

Abram is thinking about his legacy and the land on which that legacy will live. 

The stars he could see, sure.  The land currently under his feet he could touch.  But the future. The gap between the little pieces he could see and touch now, and the future for which he hoped…that was as vast as the gaps between those distant stars.   

Abram was looking for assurance about the future.  His future.  He wanted a promise and maybe more than a promise, whatever that might be, about where all this was headed. 

If you’re familiar with this story, that’s likely where the familiar part of this chapter ends.  Because we have hardly any cultural frame of reference for what happens next.   

Here’s what happens:

The Lord, Yahweh, Abram’s Divine conversation partner that evening, takes him up on his wish for a…

The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.

Reflections Manuscripts

First speaker: Joel Miller

Last summer I found myself reading books about people in the wilderness.  This wasn’t my intention.  I had gathered books for the Sabbatical project about adulthood transitions and how we undergo these through reflection and rituals.  And lo and behold, pretty much all the books were making references to wilderness.  From Malidoma Some recounting the initiation rites out away from village life of his native West African Dagara culture, to Bill Plotkin’s collection of stories of people’s transformative experiences in the Colorado wilderness where he leads nature-based soul-initiation programs.

Our Lent theme this year is Turn/Return, the literal meaning of the Hebrew word shuv, sometimes translated as repent.  In many ways, the season of Lent is always a return to wilderness.  Calling us back to this undomesticated place.  The unsettled wildness informs our lives in ways our carefully built environments can’t.  The wilderness holds surprise, encounters you can’t plan for on your google calendar.  It is inhabited with soul, embodied in plant, creature, and stone.  It is in one sense hostile to human life, and in another sense holds the mysteries of what makes us most deeply human.  

Lent begins, even more specifically, with a return to this particular story of Jesus in the wilderness after his baptism.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke each have their own version, and the three year lectionary cycle gives them each a turn on the first Sunday of Lent.

Jesus is on the cusp of beginning the part of his life that will have the most lasting impact.  He is, as we might say, waking…