 So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading… all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. —Nehemiah 8:8, 9b [Jesus] stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” …The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. —Luke 4:16b-19, 20b The book of Nehemiah tells about returnees from exile in Babylon. They are trying to rebuild, but that is not easy. The future is anything but certain. External enemies threaten, and social, religious, and political institutions are fractured. The people gather. Ezra begins reading the Torah (essentially the first five books of our Old Testament) early in the morning. He doesn’t finish until noon. Everyone is listening and paying attention. And collectively the people weep. We don’t really know why. Are they overwhelmed with grief? Despair? Possibility? Has the weight of the moment finally visited them? Things happen when our eyes are opened. We will see over the next two Sundays what happens when Jesus reads what is essentially his—or Luke’s—mission statement for the Christian faith, and the response of “his hometown” when he puts the story in context. But for now, they too, are together in their attention to a reading that is for all of them and us. With an astonishment we have probably lost over the years, Paul says, we are one body in this Spirit—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free (1 Corinthians 12:13). What happens to us when we truly hear and understand this good news in this current age? Enter into worship. Readings: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 † Psalm 19 † 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a † Luke 4:14-21 About the Art: Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890. Prisoners Exercising, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55362 [retrieved January 14, 2025]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_Willem_van_Gogh_037.jpg.
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 Our goal is to create a beloved community, and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives. ~Martin Luther King Jr. Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. ~John 2:11 Watch for the details in this wedding story! It happens at the party—not the ceremony—near the end, when many have already had a little too much, when most have already stopped paying attention. It is a frivolous act, this the first of Jesus’ signs of the kindom. And it means everything. Don’t look away. The servants don’t. They are in on the act from the beginning. They know. The steward, the wedding party, they have no idea what or even that anything unusual has happened, that God’s glory has been revealed. And still they are blessed! Many of us are shaped to imagine we are the ones in the know, but there is extraordinary knowledge to be gained as we learn how to listen more deeply and to voices so often silenced in our company. A variety of gifts. One Spirit. Learn to listen. Listen to learn. Be a partner to the gifts of the Spirit all around. Enter into worship. Readings: Isaiah 62:1-5 † Psalm 36:5-10 † 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 † John 2:1-11 About the Art: Swanson, John August. Wedding Feast, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58581 [retrieved January 3, 2022]. Original source: www.JohnAugustSwanson.com - copyright 1996 by John August Swanson.
 Baptism for Ellen and Kate Flanagan I came from water through the hoop of bone Into this cold pool in the womb of stone. I drowned my first mind in the font’s small well, A new world breaking on my fontanel. Again I broke the waters and again I came Wet and glistening, into my name Drowning, my life passed through me in a flash And I emerged, marked secretly, my sign the fish. Now I have known my origin and my end And swim towards myself in a new element, Marvellously single and, marvellously, a shoal Of all those washed in that water, salt and oil. Seamus Heaney 17th December 1971 There are many correct answers for what baptism is and means. But that doesn’t necessarily suggest we understand it, or, at least, that we come to understanding by way of those “correct” answers. The path for many of us is much different. More circuitous. More poetry than prose. If baptism is about anything, though, it is about belonging and becoming and it is hard to imagine how you can possibly have one without the other. It is an act of God and it has everyting to do with us. Enter into worship. Readings: Wisdom 3:13-15, 4:1-2 † Psalm 143 † 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 † Luke 3:1-6, 15-23 About the Art: The art for this Christmas season is shaped around the theme of “Many Pieces, One Story.” Each week the art will feature a quilt that holds meaning. The quilt pictured on the front cover was made and given to the Shireys by their church, The Newman Center, when they moved to Seattle from Minnesota. The quilt was presented at the end of a worship service along with a blessing of love and safety.
 Arise; shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Holy One has risen upon you. ― Isaiah 60:1 It seems to the early Christian community that the birth of the Christ is an act of God that reaches out to ridiculous lengths—farther than had been imagined before—to affirm the claim of God and the blessing of God on all people, not just a single tribal group or coalition or a few insiders of another kind. This is was an astonishing and life-changing notion for these early followers—one that changed their lives, one that deserved every corner of it and every ounce of their strength and energy. Do we understand the extent of this love, and its implications? If we are still seeking to understand this Sunday might help us. We will gather to worship and to celebrate the joining in marriage of Steven Wilson and Sandy Danielson. Come and see the heighth and width, the breadth and depth of God’s love! Enter into worship. Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6, 11 † Psalm 67 † 2 Timothy 1:5-10 † Matthew 2:1-12 About the Art: The art for this Advent season is shaped around the theme of “Many Pieces, One Story.” Each week the art will feature a quilt that holds meaning. The quilt pictured on the front cover was made for Steven Wilson when he was 17 by his foster mom. Steven Wilson and Sandy Danielson will be married today as a part of our worship!
 He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in the house of my Abba?” ~Luke 2:49 The Majesty of the Heavens said that God would dwell in thick darkness. ~1 Kings 8:12 Where does God live? Jesus and his relatives go to the temple (Jesus is already 12?) for the Passover festival and in this familiar story, when he is not with the group on the way home, the frantic parents go searching for him. “Did you not know that I must be in the house of my Abba?” is his mystified reply to them. But Solomon understood, along with the ancients, that Araphel, thick darkness is God’s familiar home. (cf. Deuteronomy 4:11, Psalm 18:9, Job 38:9). Where does God choose to live? The writer and activist Kelley Nikondeha reminds us that Jesus’ birth occurred in occupied territory—that God engaged with “human trauma of a specific place and specific people. God experienced the excruciating reality of empires and economies from the position of the weak and powerless ones. God absorbed loss and pain in that body.” From a distinctly disadvantaged stance, “Jesus lives out God’s peace agenda as a counter-testimony to Caesar’s peace.”[i] This Christmas story of God’s incarnation, God’s advent appearing in flesh and blood in our midst is a story of concreteness and particularity. God hears and is here in the very midst of our human struggles and hopes. God’s advent is of a different kind of peace than Caesar’s. It is a peace resistant to empire and power, a peace that comes to be in the practice of hospitality and solidarity. It is an appearing in the specifics of our own world where we need it most. Enter into worship. Readings: 1 Kings 8:12-13, 27-30, 41-43 † Psalm 68:15-17, 19-20, 24-27, 31-35 † Revelation 22:10, 22-27 † Luke 2:41-51 About the Art: The art for this Christmas season is shaped around the theme of “Many Pieces, One Story.” Each week the art will feature a quilt that holds meaning within the community. The quilt pictured today comes from the Resor family, received from his grandmother and dating to the Spanish American War. Note the very fine hand quilting detail. [i] Kelley Nikondeha, The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2022), 182–183.
 Wisdom’s womb is full of love and faithfulness, slow to anger and overflowing with faithful love. ~Psalm 103:8 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among peoples whom God favors!” ~Luke 2:14 We have have been rehearsing for this night, preparing the way. And now the air is pregnant with possibility as we enter again into the promise of Good News and Great Joy. But what do you notice? What do you hear? Smell? Taste? It’s earthy, but it lacks the citrus and pine notes of frankincense. There is that woody, warm and slightly medicinal pungency, but that’s not myrrh.These gifts, with all their weight, will come soon enough. All that glitters is not gold in this labored room. And what’s that sound? Lowing? Do you imagine the animals were sensitive to her labored pains? Do you imagine they shared her relief as the Christ child entered the world? There is something about being a living being that connects us to one another. You can sense it in the breathing, the beating and bleating. Come and see. Come and remember. Come and sing. The Creator becomes a creature. Ponder, along with Mary. But above all, come! Come and adore him. Enter into worship. Readings: Isaiah 66:10-13 † Psalm 103:1-17 † 1 Peter 1:22-2:3 † Luke 2:15-20 or 2:1-20 About the Art: The art for this Advent season is shaped around the theme of “Many Pieces, One Story.” Each week the art will feature a quilt that holds meaning. The quilt pictured is of a baby quilt created by a family friend to celebrate the birth of Scott and Barbara Anderson’s son Peter.  Behold! God is my salvation; I will trust and I will not fear, for God is my strength and my might and has become my salvation.”. ~Isaiah 12:2 Now blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of those things spoken to her by the Holy One. ~Luke 1:45 We do just about everything we can not to be (or appear to be) vulnerable. The idea of being at the mercy of others can create a crisis within us. And yet, with each of the texts for this Sunday trust in God for salvation comes amidst various degrees of precarity. As much as we might prefer it otherwise, this is the territory of faith. Isaiah 12 is written in a time when the world as it had been known is gone. It simply no longer exists. The psalmist calls for intentionality in our choice to celebrate no matter the circumstances—not at the right time, but the appointed time. Revelation is written in a time of extreme danger, so it is written in code—for those with “ears to hear.” And in Luke, the promise both Elisabeth and Mary hold in their very bodies are at constant risk, as are they themselves. We are by no means the first to find our faith in the midst of hardship and uncertainty. These stories of ours are written by those who know trouble all too well, who face it constantly. And yet, they write and they sing of belief and hope and promise, of joy and love and peace from deep within those circumstances. They know God’s people have been this way before and look across the ages to remind us of the same. Enter into worship. Readings: Isaiah 12:1-6 † Psalm 118:1-9, 14-21 † Revelation 1:4-6, 8, 12-18 † Luke 1:39-45 About the Art: The art for this Advent season is shaped around the theme of “Many Pieces, One Story.” Each week the art will feature a quilt that holds meaning. The crib-sized quilt pictured on the front is probably 90 years old. It was passed down from Pat Sharpe’s mother who was not a quilter.
 For suffering for doing good is better, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. ~1 Peter 3:17 “I don’t go looking for trouble,” said Harry, nettled. “Trouble usually finds me.” ~Harry Potter in Prisoner of Azkaban The old adage about not seeking out trouble has been passed through generations in many societies. Harry Potter wasn’t the first to say it, by any means—nor the first to then pursue his troubles through the remainder of his adventures! The thing is life has its troubles—no matter how hard we work to insulate ourselves from them. This seems to be the point of Peter’s letter to the church: You’re going to have trouble; it is a feature of life, so you might as well be doing something worthy of them. To receive a message from God or an angel, for example, rarely seems to offer blessing in any straightforward way. For Mary it will spell profound trouble—a double-edged sword of loss and her own soul pierced as well—but oh, what is gained! The promise of Advent seems to be that if we have something worth troubling about, we just may find ourselves with more abundant stores of resilence, open to the possibility not of despair, but of joy. If there is a difference that faith and its purposefullness offers it may be that we find in our trouble the promise of meaning that sustains us and helps us (all) to thrive. Doesn’t it seem then, that we might as well double-down on the good? Enter into worship. Readings: Isaiah 41:4-5, 8-10, 17-20 † Psalm 27:4-5, 7-10, 13-14 † 1 Peter 3:13-17 † Luke 1:26-38 About the Art: The art for this Advent season is shaped around the theme of “Many Pieces, One Story.” Each week the art will feature a quilt that holds meaning. Today’s image is of a baby quilt for Barbara and Scott Anderson’s first child Claire. They were living in Missouri at the time, away from family and long-time friends. A group of college friends sewed the quilt to welcome Claire into the world.
 “I am the Alpha and the Omega”, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. ~Revelation 1:8 Christ the King Sunday can have a problematic ring for some people. Even the less magesterial Reign of Christ doesn’t entirely get away from the problematic imagery of kings and coronations and unfettered power. This is something of the point, though, of this particular Sunday festival. The ways in which God “reigns” or acts as “king” is so profoundly different from human ways. And the ways in which God shows God’s unimaginable power and sublime presence—especially through the story of Jesus is precisely an invitation to reimagine our own approach to power and goodness. Indeed, Christ’s “coronation” is on a cross. And the story of his death, alongside his life and resurrection expose the truth of the ways in which power is abused and destructive of the most perfect of things, and how it could be so different if we were to follow in Jesus’ way. We are pleased this Sunday to welcome Kevin Glackin-Coley. Kevin is the new director of REACH and brings important understandings of the kin-dom of God through his experience beside our Renton neighbors. Kevin will preach for us and then offer some of his time during an Aftertalk conversation to allow for our questions, to reconnect ourselves to the story and work of REACH which has been an important one for us historically, and to imagine new paths of partnership going forward. Enter into worship. Readings: 2 Samuel 23:1-7 † Psalm 132:1-12 or Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 † Psalm 93 † Revelation 1:4b-8 † John 18:33-37 About the Art: Hansen, Eugenio. Alpha and Omega, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57533 [retrieved November 11, 2024]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alpha_omega_uncial.svg.
 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs. ~Mark 13:8 In the beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Whis is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf. ~T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker I We hear a lot in the political sphere about “burning it all down.” And no wonder! When the system doesn’t work for you, it certainly doesn’t incline you to support it. We could imagine this has truth within the religious sphere as well—especially where religion is expressed in deeply imperfect institutional norms. We should be clear. Chaos is unfortunate at best. The unsettling of principalities and powers and their institutions creates harm that is distributed in unequal shares, harming those Jesus called “the least of these” most. But there is hope buried in this rubble. Jesus sees the signs of unrest, of relationships and governance so broken that they are already crumbling. It is not an end, though, as much as a beginning when God is in the mix. Or, as the preacher to the Hebrew congregation said it (Hebrews 10:23-25): “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.” Indeed there is more good, practical advice for us today as well in this ancient wisdom: “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” Enter into worship. Readings: 1 Samuel 1:4-20 † 1 Samuel 2:1-10 † Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25 † Mark 13:1-8 About the Art: Old growth tree in rainforest on Meares Island near Tofino, British Columbia. From Visual Communications, vcmedia.org, [retrieved October 21, 2021].
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