Words of Welcome

Mark 6:30-44 When I think of wilderness, I think about dense forests and roadless, mountainous terrain. At least, that’s what we called wilderness when I was growing up in Oregon. In the biblical story wilderness is a desolate place where resources are scarce.  During our recent journey through Exodus we watched the people of Israel leave the “fleshpots of Egypt” for the Promised Land. To get there, however, they had to travel through the desert. All along the way they complained about their lack of resources, mainly food and water, but God always seemed to provide what they needed. What we learned is that even in the wilderness, there is an abundance – if only we stop to take a look. According to Walter Brueggemann, there are two types of thinking – scarcity and abundance. To put it a different way, we can look at life in two ways – that the glass is half full or half empty. Risk takers see the glass as half full, while more cautious people see it as half empty....

2 Timothy 1:1-14 Back in the 1970s America gathered around its TV sets, fixated by a mini-series about an African American family. Alex Haley’s Roots was one of the most important events in TV history, in part because of the size of an audience it drew, but more importantly because it brought to life the struggles of African Americans as they made their way through life in America. For the first time White America caught sight of the dark side of its history. Roots did something else; it encouraged people to explore and to own their own histories. In telling the story of his own family, from the time his ancestor Kunta Kinte was captured and brought to America on a slave ship up to his own day, he showed us the importance of passing on our stories. Owning our family history – warts and all – is key to knowing who we are as individuals. Each of us has a family history, full of stories, both bad and good. They tell of both struggles and triumphs; they will contain even a few skeletons i...