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.
Sermons
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...
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...
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 Manuscript
Seeking shalom in a strange land | Coming of Age
Text: Jeremiah 29:1-14
Speaker: Joel Miller
Disoriented. Unsettled. Uprooted. Displaced. Exile.
These are some of the words we might use to describe what these past two years have felt like. The pandemic years. Even if we personally feel a little more settled these days, our society is still feeling the effects. In our schools. In the workforce. In the economy. In our politics. Now a war in Ukraine makes it feel all the more uneasy.
Uprooted, Displaced, Exile.
These are some of the words that describe the people on the receiving end of a letter written by the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah is writing from Jerusalem, and his letter is going all the way over to Babylon, in the East, where his fellow Judeans have been exiled. The life they...
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 manuscript:
Text: Luke 6:27-38
Speaker: Mark Rupp
Title: Life, Unscripted
A friend of mine from college recently wrote and published a book called, The Funny Thing About Forgiveness: What Every Leader Needs to Know About Improv, Culture and the World’s Least Favorite F Word. I haven’t talked to Andrea Flack-Wetherald since back when she was Andrea Flack, but I knew through semi-regular Facebook updates that in the last few years she had taken up improv comedy as a hobby. What I didn’t realize until I started seeing updates about her book was that she had taken her love of improv and combined it with her training as a social worker to create a method of conflict engagement and leadership development she calls Mindful Improv.
Andrea’s book and much of her work is geared toward leaders in corporate...