Words of Welcome

Psalm 29 Have you heard the voice of God lately? Did you hear it in the “still, small voice” that spoke to Elijah? ( 1 Kings 19 ). Did you hear it coming out from a burning bush? Did you hear it in the thunder and lightening of the recent storms? Do you hear God speaking through Scripture or maybe through conversations with people of wisdom and grace?  Last Sunday we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit, who empowers and inspires the church for mission. We listened to the words of Romans 8, hoping to hear a word from God. In that passage, Paul writes that when we don’t have words to speak, the Spirit interprets our groans and sighs to the Father ( Rom. 8:22-27 ). That must mean God hears our voices. That is good news, but what about us? How do we hear God’s voice?  As we gather this morning on what the liturgical calendar calls Trinity Sunday, we are invited to contemplate the very nature of God. We are invited to ask the question: Who is God? As we ask that questi

Romans 8:22-27 Welcome to Pentecost Sunday! It’s time to celebrate the birth of the church and our mission of proclamation and service in the world. Before Jesus ascended from this plane of existence, he promised to send the Spirit to empower the church’s witness to the good news that God’s kingdom is at hand. Just a few days later, Jesus’ followers were hanging out in an upper room in Jerusalem, when a mighty wind of the Spirit blew through the room, inspiring the people to break forth in praise. This small group of disciples began to preach the gospel in languages they had never learned. The crowd that gathered in the square below was amazed. They wanted to know more about Jesus, and so Peter got up and preached. By the end of the sermon, some three thousand people asked to be baptized. This is the story of Pentecost in a nutshell!  Yesterday morning many of you may have watched the royal wedding. If you did, you got to hear the gospel of Jesus preached. I only caugh

1 John 5:1-6 We recently sang the hymn “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That is the hope, isn’t it? We want to be “one in the Spirit,” and “one in the Lord.” We hope that “unity may one day be restored.”   After all, we are Disciples of Christ, “a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world.”  Last Sunday we heard a word from 1 John that invites us to “love one another, because love is from God.” He also tells us that “everyone who loves is born of God” ( I Jn. 4:7 ). John wrote these words to a congregation that was in the middle of a big fight that threatened to tear their community apart. So, when he told them to love one another he was reminding them that they were born to love.     This Sunday we hear another word about loving one another. In our reading for today, John talks about love, and he continually uses forms of the Greek word agapē. Tom Oord defines agapē as “acting intentionally, in response to God and others, to promote overall well-being,