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Happy Easter!  Throughout the season of resurrection we’re invited to remember the angel’s words from Mark’s gospel:  Jesus was crucified. He has risen!  He is not here.  Go and see. We begin a new worship series this Sunday in which we will explore faith and finances.  The series will be rooted in Acts and in a sermon called “The Use of Money” by John Wesley.  Wesley writes, Having, first, gained all you can, and, secondly saved all you can, then…

” ‘My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’  As Christ speaks those words, he too is in the wilderness.  He speaks them when all is lost.  He speaks them when there is nothing even he can hear except for the croak of his own voice and when as far as even he can see there is no God to hear him.  And in a way his words are a love song, the greatest love song of them all.…

Tonight at The Table we will share 2 meals – a simple supper , and then communion. ” ‘To eat this particular meal together is to meet at the level of our most basic humanness, which involves our need not just for food but for each other.  I need you to help fill my emptiness just as you need me to help fill yours.  As for the emptiness that’s still left over, well, we’re in it together, or it in…

We enter Holy Week together, having spent the last 6 weeks standing in the tragic gap with Jesus where he was Broken Open in so many different ways. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote, “this world is a great sculptor’s shop.  We are the statues, and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.”  It is in meeting singular individuals like Mother Teresa, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bayard Rustin, Oscar…

Palm Sunday at The Table will be a bit different for some folks this year.  Some may feel that the parade has passed them by because – well, frankly because we won’t have a parade.  We won’t wave palms ourselves.  We won’t “re-enact the story”.  Instead we will listen to our own story.  The early story of our community.  This might shed some light on where we are headed.  Then again, maybe not.  Frederick Buechner writes that  “True history has…

This Sunday is known in the church as Palm Sunday.  Churches around the world will gather this Sunday to remember Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem in which palms were waved in celebration of what people assumed would be a triumphant liberation.  The New Testament stories of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem draw heavily on the images found in Psalm 118.  We’ll root our worship this Sunday in Psalm 118 as we gather for Palm Sunday to mark the beginning of an entire week in…

  How do you come to trust? How has the ability to trust grown in you over time? How is it with your soul?

I have always carried an image of trust that involves floating on water.  I think this is because I am not a good swimmer and every swimming lesson I recall began with the instructor wanting me to float on my back.  I would comply and they would hold me, ever so lightly, in the middle of my back.  Inevitably when they let go I would begin to sink.  I was never successful at floating.  But I wanted to be.  When…

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies          it remains a single grain.          But if it dies, it bears much fruit.  Those who love their life lose it,          and those who hate their life in this world          will keep it for eternal life.                   —John 12. 24-25 Seeds of light, we aren’t afraid to go down into the darkness of the despairing world, for in the dark is where the light breaks forth and rolls whole stones away.…

Our worship this Sunday will be rooted in John 12.20-33 and the ministry of Lorenza Andrade Smith Lorenza Andrade Smith is a United Methodist Pastor  who asked her Bishop to appoint her to a ministry on the streets.  She chose to take a leave of absence from her church and conference and to renounce all of her possessions, including her home, her car and her salary.  In her own words:  “I am taking a vow of poverty, and I am…

Archbishop Oscar Romero shared the following message in February of 1980, just one month before he was killed for his faithful solidarity with the poor of El Salvador: [W]e become incarnate among the poor. We want a church that is really side by side with the poor, with the people of El Salvador. As we draw near to the poor, we find we are gradually uncovering the genuine face of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh. We are getting to know…

Worship this Sunday will be rooted in this passage from Jeremiah 31.31-34 and in the life of Archbishop Oscar Romero.  Walter Brueggeman (in ON Scripture) writes, “But now in the book of Jeremiah, in the wake of brokenness and its resultant shame, defeat, and anxiety, Jeremiah asserts God’s resolve to renew the covenant that has been broken by ancient Israel.  It will be a renewed covenant, but one that stands in continuity with that of Sinai…This will be for Israel…