Words of Welcome

  Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 The Covenant-making God invited Abraham and his family to take a journey to an unknown land. God promised to bless Abraham, make his name great, and bless the nations through him and his descendants. God made this promise even though Abraham and Sarah were rather old and still didn’t have any children of their own ( Gen. 12:1-4 ).  Abraham’s story is a complicated one. It almost seems like a soap opera at times, but Abraham set out on the journey and God remained present throughout all the twists and turns of this journey. So, when Abram turned ninety-nine years old, God said to Abraham: “I am God Almighty, walk before me, and be blameless.” That is, “Live as if you were always in my presence.” [ Goldingay, Genesi s, 277 ]. When God made a covenant with Abram in Genesis 17, God promised to make his descendants “exceedingly numerous.” To symbolize this promise, God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, which means “ancestor of a multitude.” God also promi...

  Reminder, by Mike Moyers Genesis 9:8-17 We serve a covenant-making God. As we journey through Lent, we will encounter some of the covenants present in the Old Testament. We’ll reflect on what these covenants say to us as a congregation and as individuals.  We begin this morning with a unilateral covenant that God makes with all creation. It speaks of God’s faithfulness but it doesn’t impose any specific requirements on us. This one applies to God and God alone, but this covenant offers us a word of hope. That is because it guarantees God’s faithfulness to the covenant. While this covenant doesn’t require anything of us, if we take the word we hear this morning to heart, perhaps we can embody its message in our own relationships. This first covenant provides the foundation for every other covenant, including the one that binds us together as a church. When the Disciples of Christ restructured itself as a denomination in the 1960s, the denomination chose the biblical con...

Mark 9:2-9 From time immemorial people have told stories of divine encounters on mountain tops. This is true of Moses and Elijah and many others. I have a great love of mountains. While Mount Shasta is one of my favorite spots, I was strangely moved by my experience of the glory of the Swiss Alps. On the day we ascended the Stanserhorn, the mountain was shrouded in clouds. Think of the description of Mt. Sinai in Exodus. We wondered whether the clouds would block our view of the Alps, but as we ascended the mountain on the cable car we broke through the clouds into bright sunlight. When we arrived at the top of the mountain, the sight was exhilarating. While off in the distance we looked upon the higher snow-capped peaks of the Alps, it was the sight of the fog-enshrouded valley below that gave the sense that we had been caught up in the heavenly realm.      As we gather this morning on Transfiguration Sunday, we’ve heard Mark’s story of Jesus’ trip to the top of M...

Mark 1:29-39 Qoheleth wrote long ago that there is a season for everything under heaven, including a time to heal (Eccl. 3:1, 3). Is this a time when healing is needed? With all the brokenness present in our world, including the physical, mental, and emotional toll of COVID, the answer is yes. We need the “balm in Gilead” that makes “the wounded whole.” So, “Heal me, hands of Jesus, and search out all my pain; restore my hope, remove my fear, and bring me peace again” [Michael Perry, Chalice Hymnal , 404].  According to Mark, Jesus immediately left the synagogue and entered the home of Simon and Andrew. Just to catch you up on the story, Jesus went to the synagogue in Capernaum that Sabbath morning with Simon, Andrew, James, and John. Whether or not he was the scheduled preacher that day, Jesus proclaimed the good news and cast out an unclean spirit. Mark reports that everyone who heard him preach was amazed because he taught with authority. As a result, his fame spread through...

Psalm 111 “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, who rules all creation. O my soul, worship the wellspring of health and salvation. All ye who hear, now to God’s temple draw near. Join me in glad adoration.”  With this hymn, we lift up praise to God our creator who is the “wellspring of health and salvation.” We celebrate the one who “o’er all things so wondrously reigneth.” We do this in a time of pandemic when we might feel more like singing a lament than a song of praise. Nevertheless, we hear the call to sing praise to God in this word from Psalm 111 .  The psalm begins with a “Hallelujah” and concludes with a declaration that God’s “praise endures forever.” This song of praise invites us to give thanks to God with our whole heart because “great are the works of the Lord.” Scott Hoezee captures the feel of this Psalm when he writes: Psalm 111 is a shook-up bottle of champagne when the cork flies off: it is effervescent, effusive, and thus it is delightfully over th...

Psalm 62:5-12 I must confess that I don’t always place my full trust in God alone. Perhaps like me, you hedge our bets and occasionally look elsewhere. Maybe you put your trust in an institution. Or it could be a political leader or maybe a family member. Perhaps you only trust yourself and nobody else.  The Psalmist invites us to sing a different song, one that makes this assertion:  “for God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken.” We opened worship this morning with the hymn “ A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. ” Martin Luther based this hymn, which is one of my favorites, on Psalm 46. While Psalm 62 isn’t the source of the hymn, the message is the same. It also proclaims that God is our fortress and our refuge.  As we sing this majestic hymn, we declare that God is “a bulwark never failing, our present help amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.” This is a truth we need to ...

John 1:43-51 It’s been a while but you may remember our congregation-wide study of Martha Grace Reese’s book Unbinding the Gospel. She wrote the book because mainline Protestants seem uncomfortable with what she calls the “e-word.” That is, evangelism.  We talked a bit about this at a recent elders meeting in our discussion of Michael Kinnamon and Jan Linn’s book on Disciple identity. They bring up Paul’s word about being ministers of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5 ). They suggest that reconciliation isn’t a job entrusted to us, but “reconciliation is what Christians do as witnesses to God’s good news in Jesus Christ because reconciliation is who we are. Being in Christ has made us people of reconciliation, and being people of reconciliation is how we show the world we are in Christ.” [Kinnamon and Linn, Disciples , Kindle Edition].  There is great truth here. It’s important that we live out the message of reconciliation that God has implanted in us. This starts with the way w...