'how deep?' Tagged Posts (Page 2)
Toward Sunday
We conclude our five-week worship series this Sunday with a celebration of our Deep Commitments and our Kitchen Table Leader training will follow that at 12:30! Since a few of our KT’s meet on Halloween this week, please make an intentional effort to contact your people regarding their Deep Commitment cards between now and Sunday morning. This worship series has invited reflection on the significance of our Baptismal identities. The United Methodist Book of Worship states, “Baptism is an act that looks back…
The home. The belonging. The name.
How to speak of this? There is light, resting on you, wrapping everything, creating height, slipping down and up each wall even cupping undersides in soft white hands. The bird, whose language no one understands, how does it choose just where it flies, it sings, it lands? There is heat, murmured, a glue that holds you to everything, makes you all one word. And silence, yes, bestowed, not left: tendered, its weft woven with the warp of tiny threads, little…
Giving
You often say, ‘I would give, but only to the deserving.’ The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish. ~from The Prophet, on Giving by Khalil Gibran
Reaching in love
“If the body is truly the dwelling place of God, a holy ground, then all our relationship are transformed. When we meet and touch others, we do so with even more respect as we realize their life is holy.” ~from Essential Writings by Jean Vanier Watching over each other in love requires us to learn the stories of our neighbors. In our community we do this by joining and attending a Kitchen Table. Every week people gather in homes,…
Toward Sunday
We continue our five-week worship series this Sunday called How Deep? This worship series invites reflection on the significance of our Baptismal identities. The United Methodist Book of Worship states, “Baptism is an act that looks back with gratitude on what God’s grace has already accomplished, it is here and now an act of God’s grace, and it looks forward to what God’s grace will accomplish in the future….Baptism anticipates a lifetime of…deeper experiences of God, acts of Christian commitment,…
Flooding
Along the brimming river sandbags lie in mute protection, inert, dense, impassable. For cities on rivers this is good. But how are our hearts sandbagged against the deep opaque flood that threatens us each moment, the murky, relentless waters of resurrection, the eroding force of humility and failure, the depths of wonder, the force of the unfathomable, and all that we cannot control? A world presses against your thin levees, waits to inundate you, swamp you, cover you, in the…
Sanctification
In “Beauty and the Beast,” it is only when the Beast discovers that Beauty really loves him in all his ugliness that he himself becomes beautiful. In the experience of Saint Paul, it is only when we discover that God really loves us in all our unloveliness that we ourselves start to become godlike. Paul’s word for this gradual transformation of a sow’s ear into a silk purse is sanctification, and he sees it as the second stage in the…
How Deep?
The Sanctuary, Social Hall and our entire campus are fruits of the extravagant generosity of those who have gone before us. They lived with sincere faith. We are called to “Guard the good treasure entrusted to [us], with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.” Our extravagant generosity will share this treasure with the generations to come. What difference does extravagant generosity make? Think of a time in which you witnessed extravagant generosity or were the recipient…
Toward Sunday
We begin a five-week worship series this Sunday called How Deep? This worship series will invite reflection on the significance of our Baptismal identities. The United Methodist Book of Worship states, “Baptism is an act that looks back with gratitude on what God’s grace has already accomplished, it is here and now an act of God’s grace, and it looks forward to what God’s grace will accomplish in the future….Baptism anticipates a lifetime of…deeper experiences of God, acts of Christian…
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