Words of Welcome

John 14:15-21 There’s something almost instinctive about our need for companionship. It starts at birth, when we seem to know that we can’t make it on our own. It doesn’t take us very long to bond with our parents, especially our mothers. But that longing for connection that begins at birth never goes away. Although most biblical images of God are set in a masculine tone, there are a few feminine images available. While these occasions remind us that God transcends gender, they also tend to affirm a sense of bonding and connection between God and us. Consider the Deuteronomy 32:1, which pictures God as a mother eagle hovering over her children, protecting and caring for them. It’s an image picked up in the hymn "The Care the Eagle Gives Her Young." In the second stanza, the author, Deane Postlethwaite writes: As when the time to venture comes, she stirs them out to flight, so we are pressed to boldly try, to strive for daring height.1 While mothers may push us out of the nest

1 Peter 2:2-10 I knew an older gentleman who lived on the property at the Santa Barbara church. He had served as a kind of property manager, but by the time I met him, he was around 80 and had slowed down just a bit. Still, I was amazed at how he could take junk and turn it into something useful. Indeed, in Harold’s eyes, it seemed, nothing was useless. All you needed was a little imagination. The world is full of people, communities, and even nations that feel useless. We call it low self-esteem. It plays havoc on people’s lives, and in some cases even pushes people into violence. Just think about the young man who went on a killing spree just a year ago at Virginia Tech or the boys who shot up Combine High School several years back. In both cases the perpetrators believed that they were worthless and had nothing to live for. While these are extreme examples, the anger and humiliation that they felt afflict many in our world. Peter writes to people on the margins of society and tells

Psalm 23 Who do you trust? I expect we’ve all discovered that trust is easily broken and difficult to regain once it’s broken. That distrust is the foundation of all kinds of political and religious division. Nations distrust nations, neighbors distrust neighbors, spouses distrust spouses. Sometimes this distrust leads to silence and at other times it leads to violence. Distrust is often the result of broken promises. A husband tells his wife: "I love you" and then has an affair. A fellow employee, who seems like a friend, goes to your boss and accuses you of things you didn’t do. A doctor promises that a certain medicine or surgery will cure what ails you, but the treatment fails to deliver the cure. A stock broker promises good things from a company, but then the company goes bad not long after you buy the stock. It’s things like that which undermine our faith in other people. I. REALITY CHECK The idyllic statements about green pastures and still waters may seem a bit unre

Deuteronomy 34:1-9 At the end of my junior year our swing choir, of which I was a member, was singing at the senior assembly. The song we sang was The Way We Were, which goes like this: Mem'ries, Light the corners of my mind Misty water-colored memories of the way we were Scattered pictures, of the smiles we left behind Smiles we gave to one another, for the way we were Can it be that it was all so simple then? Or has time re-written every line? If we had the chance to do it all again Tell me, would we? Could we? It seemed like everyone in the choir got a bit teary-eyed as we sang. Our emotions were a bit divided, of course. The seniors amongst us looked forward with excitement to the new opportunities that graduation would bring, and yet they also knew that their journey might mean never seeing good friends again. And, as for us juniors, while we looked forward to finally being seniors, we weren’t quite ready to let go of our senior friends. And so for a moment, at least, sadness