Text: Luke 1:5-25Speaker: Mark Rupp

Welcome to the season of Advent. This Sunday marks the beginning, or more aptly, the return to the beginning of a cycle that moves through expectation, arrival, growth and learning, loss and gain, death and resurrection, and the new life we find all along the way. The name Advent comes from the Latin, adventus meaning arrival. It is a season of anticipation and waiting, of watching and preparing. 

And this year we have chosen the theme “Visitations” as a container for these four Sundays leading up to Christmas day. Throughout these weeks, we will be hearing stories of different visitations from Luke’s gospel. Meetings between human and divine, encounters between people both familiar and strange, songs and visions of how we are called to greet the world around us. Advent prepares us for Christmas, a day we celebrate God visiting us in a new way through the baby Jesus, but the many other encounters we have along the way are also opportunities for Divine visitations. In the office this week, we were discussing the theme and someone shared that for them “visitations” brought to mind the practice of offering condolences before a funeral or memorial service. And for someone else, they said “visitations” brought to mind the idea of otherworldly, perhaps strange, visions. 

Visitations come in all shapes and sizes: welcome and unwelcome, comforting and discomforting, surprising and mundane, reorienting and disruptive; some brimming with hope and joy while others filled with sorrow and pain. In all of these, the enduring question for us is where and how we find the presence of God, even in those encounters that feel removed from the sacred, when God feels hidden or when the blessings of the dark have yet to reveal themselves. 

So what comes to mind when you hear the…

Gratitude Reflection by Kevin Steiner

Good morning.

I am Kevin Steiner and I along with my spouse, Laura and child, Addy, have been a part of this community since the summer of 2020. I have been asked to share a reflection on gratitude, but there are some to know about me before I get going.

I am (like each one of us) many things (spouse, father, friend, someone planning to run a 5K on Thanksgiving morning) — and also an infectious diseases physician. This occupation can be challenging at the best of times, but the past few years have been particularly tough. In my job, I meet patients for things ranging from minor infections to life-threatening ones and my patients often express a mix of uncertainty, fear, and hope. The nature of being an infectious disease physician is that there is a never-ceasing stream of people for whom we are asked our opinion — like many others in the medical professions including some of you listening today, I have spoken with and touched thousands of people who had previously been complete strangers.

Yet somewhere along the way, I seem to have lost any reflecting skills I may once have had — probably during medical training in which there simply did not seem to be time to reflect…there was (and continues to be) a need to keep moving forward. So, few people would describe me as being a reflective sort …perhaps at my best I can be thoughtful.

Also, our family travels to Virginia over the winter holidays. Laura often uses these drives to draft a list of meaningful experiences for our family from the year. Since this trip has yet to happen, I am a bit adrift about the events of the past year!

So I feel rather ill-equipped to offer a very public reflection about…

Texts: Isaiah 6:1-10; Luke 6:12-16

By Reverend Joel Miller

Two weekends ago I was up at Camp Friedenswald.  For those of unfamiliar, Friedenswald is in southern Michigan.  It’s the camp of our church conference, Central District, where we send our youth – and sometimes adults.  Pastor Mark, Bethany Davey, and Anita Gastaldo are there right now for a training with Our Whole Lives, which is a Sunday school curriculum addressing healthy sexuality across the lifespan. 

I was there for only slightly less exciting reasons – Central District board meetings.  These board but never boring meetings coincided with another event hosted at Friedenswald – the Restoration Retreat.  It featured speaker Sarah Augustine.  She is a Pueblo Mennonite, and Director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery.  Board members were able to sit in for her opening talk.

It was the third time I’ve heard Sarah speak.  One of them was a sermon with us over Zoom back in January.  Each of these times, Sarah has opened with the same proposal.  I don’t know about you, but when I hear something twice it catches my attention in a new way, and when I hear it three times, months apart, I think, OK, how long before this actually sinks in?

The way Sarah begins her presentations is by talking about the difference between faith and reverence.  Faith, she says, has to do with what we can’t see.  We might have faith in God, faith in reason, faith in zodiac signs, faith in an afterlife, faith in the arc of the moral universe being long but bending toward justice, faith in Jesus, faith in democracy.  Or any combination of these.  Faith, as we have come to use the word, is a particular orientation to the world of the big unseen.

Without discounting faith, Sarah points to reverence as…

The Earthy Divine

Sermon by Bethany E.M. Davey

Sunday, November 10, 2024

During class a few weeks ago, a seminary professor reminded us that those who are preaching the Sunday after the U.S. election ought to be prepared for quite an experience. I looked around the Zoom room, feeling a bit sorry for those jokers who’d have to navigate the layers of this particular Sunday, only to realize that I, too, am one such joker. I am CMC’s pastoral intern this year, and as it has been set on the schedule since August, it is me who preaches today, the Sunday after the U.S. re-election of former president Donald Trump.

There are many emotions present in this moment. There are many emotions present in our individual bodies and the body that is our community. There are many emotions present in this physical space, even, I am confident, in the soil itself. These complex and even seemingly contradictory emotions, these multiple realities, can exist at once. We can feel gratitude in the midst of despair, can belly laugh in the midst of profound grief, can feel tender in the midst of fury.

So much is present in this room.

Deep breath.

Deep breath.

Deep breath.

May we be comforted by our shared anabaptist, Mennonite, Christian rituals across space and time. May we deeply know our interconnection with one another, and with all human and Earth siblings.

Our congregation is following the narrative lectionary, and Jonah isn’t such a bad spot to land the Sunday after an incredibly divisive election. This story tells of the prophet Jonah, a person in the throes of his own contradictory emotions. A person deeply unsettled by the task at hand. A person distraught by the restored fate of his perceived enemies. A person who feels complex things and makes complex choices. A person a lot like…

Texts: 1 Kings 17:1-16; Luke 4:24-26

Speaker: Joel Miller

“Anabaptist meeting on a boat. Pieter Pieters, ferryman, burned in Amsterdam, 1569.” Engraving by Jan Luiken in Martyrs Mirror, v. 2, p. 385 of Dutch edition. Source: Rijksmuseum

At first glance, this appears to be a fairly chill scene of folks out for a boat ride.  The waters are calm.  The rower’s relaxed position and the fact that somebody is standing up indicates the boat isn’t moving very fast, if at all. 

There are nine people in the boat, maybe a little crowded for its size.  At least two are women.  A closer look reveals that one of the men, on the right side, is holding a large open book.  Others seem to be listening, like he’s reading to them.

Looking in the background, one notices two large windmills.  From this and the outfits, one would be correct to guess that this is the Netherlands.  There’s a steeple towering above a city, back when churches were the tallest structures rather than office buildings, and the power of religion held more sway than the power of capitalism.  Which isn’t necessarily a great thing.

Maybe the style of the artist looks familiar.  If so, perhaps you’ve worshiped here in past years on the first Sunday of November when we’ve considered similar images.  Part of our All Saints/All Souls remembrance.  Or maybe you own a copy of the very large book in which these images appear, the Martyr’s Mirror.  This is one of 104 copper etchings by the artist Jan Luyken that first appeared in the 1685 edition of that collection.  Many of Luyken’s works show brutal scenes of torture endured by the Anabaptists who resisted the state-sponsored churches of the 1500s.  Some Anabaptists actively called for a reshaping of society around the needs of the poor.  Others focused on a…