Words of Welcome

    1 Timothy 1:12-17           We’ve heard a lot of bad news this past week. Of course, for this congregation, Marilyn’s death hits us hard because she has been such a steadfast part of the life of this congregation. She will be missed. But that’s not the only bad news we’ve heard this week. That’s because once again, gun violence is in the news. The most talked-about act of violence was the murder of political activist Charlie Kirk in Utah. That same day, a student walked into a school in Colorado and wounded two classmates and then killed himself. Then I read the news of a father in Port Huron, who shot and killed his seventeen-year-old son and wounded his other two children. This kind of news, which seems increasingly more common, ends up numbing us to the ongoing violence in our world. People wonder where God is present in all of this. The word we hear this morning from 1 Timothy speaks of God’s mercy that strengthens us as we navigate this w...

Luke 13:1-9 I’m not a gardener. In fact, I have what they call a brown thumb. I wouldn’t know when to prune a bush or to fertilize the flowers. I water the lawn when I remember, but too often I forget. So, I can’t comment on Jesus’ parable of the fig tree from a gardener’s perspective. But, it’s the conversation that happens before the parable that catches my eye. It’s human nature to try to figure out why things happen to people. There’s got to be a reason, or, so we think. When Katrina hit, certain preachers, blamed the residents of the region for their moral laxity. The same thing happened on 9-11 – Our nation was reaping what it had sown. For some reason there’s a tendency to think that suffering is God’s punishment for our sins. That’s the message Job’s friends brought him when things went bad. When Jesus heard that Pilate massacred a group of Galileans worshiping peacefully in Jerusalem, he raised the question of why. Were they worse sinners any other Galileans? And, what about t...