Hospitality:
To offer welcome and life and wholeness in your space and time.
How do you offer hospitality in a crowd while in a hurry?
Awareness of a sudden need that makes you stop.
Awareness that this need takes priority, even though she is unclean and poor.
To continue on to the household that seems to be holding death, but is just waiting to be offered wholeness and life. And food.
Our gospel story interrupts journeys. And because of those interruptions, life and wholeness happen.
In many ways, our Sunday worship interrupts our lives and offers a new creation, life, and wholeness. And food.
Allow the interruption to bring you to new awareness.
Come. Let us enter into worship.

We continue to keep our financial commitments to our mission partners and staff. If you are not yet able to join us, thank you for remembering to send in your financial pledges and offerings or donating here. ​

​He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm… [they] said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
~Mark 4:39, 41
 
A storm has been brewing. If we’ve been paying attention at all through Mark’s gospel we can see it building from the beginning. That it has taken Jesus and the disciples this long to finally experience its full force may be the biggest surprise…to this point.
 
A storm has also been brewing in our own lives. More than a year into a pandemic, we see more clearly the unsettledness—the long injustices, the world’s inequity, a warming planet—and the work we have to do to face and correct what is and has long been tearing us apart.
 
A further shore is reachable from here. This Mark knows—as we look to the one who calms the wind and the waves.
 
Enter into worship this Sunday. Questions, hopes, hungers, laments welcome!

We continue to keep our financial commitments to our mission partners and staff. If you are not yet able to join us, thank you for remembering to send in your financial pledges and offerings or donating here. ​

[Jesus] also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed...
​~Mark 4:30-31a
 
Great storytellers and masterful artists know how to craft a piece of art that has the power to hold our attention while, at that same time, push us off kilter just enough to leave us questioning, wondering, and eager to think and talk more. As they do this, they open us up to parts of humanity, parts of being alive, that we did not see before. They open us to fuller, richer understandings of our own lives and others.
 
Jesus was a great storyteller and a masterful artist. With his parables, accessible stories of real people, he pulled his audience in while also deploying an image or a detail that would have thrown them off kilter.

• the kingdom of God is like a good Jewish father hitching up his robes to run towards his errant son.
• the kingdom of God is like yeast and a woman (a woman!!) preparing enough bread for a very big event.
• the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who paid the workers who came at the end of the day the same as those who came at the beginning.
• the kingdom of heaven is like an everyday weed that takes over to provide generous homes in our carefully tended fields.

 
In the context of the time, these tales would have been shocking, confusing, confounding. But they also offered his audience, and they offer us, the opportunity to notice our own assumptions—assumptions that keep us from reaching for more expansive ways of understanding the hope and the possibilities the Spirit God plants in us and amongst us.
 
We have a lot to talk about, lots to explore, together. There are so many rich stories: stories from Jesus, stories of our own time that challenge us, confuse us, confound us but that, in precisely these things, offer the opportunity to see the Spirit anew.   
 
Enter into worship this Sunday, beloved. Bring your insights, your questions, your own stories, and your God-given gifts so that together we might look for and join with the Spirit’s ever-expanding work of loving ourselves, each other, and the world.

We continue to keep our financial commitments to our mission partners and staff. If you are not yet able to join us, thank you for remembering to send in your financial pledges and offerings or donating here. ​

“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” 
~2 Corinthians 5:1

The Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers says “Institutions and cultures are durable partly because they obey the law of inertia. Even if you think you’ve exerted a strong external push and knocked a moving object or an entire institution off its set course, wait. Just wait. With barely a nudge, the object will drift right back to its original path.”

There is value, of course in institutional stability. Their predictability provides shelter and nurture and a moderating influence that keeps us steady in tumultuous times. The downside, of course, is they delay needed change, repress diverse life-giving creativity, perpetuate inequity, and exclude.

It should be no surprise that Jesus would seek to turn upside down his own religious tradition given the disruptive and chaotic scene Mark has for us in today’s gospel text. Indeed, while the institution of family continues to be one of humanity’s greatest blessings, we can see along with him the tendencies for exclusion that persist. Who are my mother and my brothers? Who is counted among our true family? What is this durable shelter we have from God, eternal in the heavens?
​
Enter into worship.