January 24, 2016

About 10 minutes after worship ends, we’ll gather together for Aftertalk. We hope you’ll join us! Bring your questions, stories, insights, doubts, musings, imaginings and whatever else you need to Aftertalk. Join us for some food, fellowship, laughter and ample space for reflection and real questions to help us make the transition from worship to world.

Scripture Lessons: Third Sunday after the Epiphany (Ordinary 3)

Themes for this week:
Story, Abundance, Gifts, Difference, Beloved Community

The season that takes us from Christmas to Lent is Epiphany--a season, for us in the northern hemisphere, of light in the midst of dark days and cold days.

• What illumines our paths and makes the way bright?
• What stories bring light to​ the dark corners of our own? 

​Reflection:
Walter Brueggemann, 21st century:
"What a stunning vocation for the church, to stand free and hope-filled in a world gone fearful – and to think, imagine, dream, vision a future that God will yet enact."
   
Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, 20th century
"Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes."

James Baldwin, 20th century (about the March on Washington 1963)
"That day, for a moment, it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not forever remain that dream one dreamed in agony."

William Sloane Coffin, 20th century
"The lack of material well-being among the poor reflects a lack of spiritual well-being among the rest."

Khaled Hosseini, "The Kite Runner," 21st century
"...there is a God, there always has been. I see [God] here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find [God]...."

Alice Walker, 21st century
...when she introduced her southern relatives who had moved to the north to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind:
"They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained."

​Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "The danger of a single story"
"When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise."