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Scripture:  Luke 1:26-38

You may be experiencing the full sacred bliss of these days.  Your cup may be overflowing.  God may be exceeding your wildest expectations.  If so, I rejoice in your spiritual abundance and I encourage you to honor God by savoring and delighting in this blessing.  But if you are anything like me, you may feel like you aren’t quite getting Christmas.

We prepare for it during the weeks of Advent, lighting candles of hope, peace, joy and love.  And yet, when it arrives, after all that preparation and anticipation, I struggle to feel those things.  I believe them, I proclaim them–but I don’t feel them.  At least not purely, the way I think I should.

Hope gets overshadowed by grief. Peace gets overshadowed by exhaustion. Joy becomes overshadowed by resentment and conflict. Love is overshadowed by worry.  And this year, all of these sacred days are overshadowed by brutal war in the land we call holy, against exactly the kind of family we worship in our nativity scenes.

I don’t know how to feel in these days.  All is not calm.  All is not bright.  But when I seek wisdom in the word, the Spirit shows me that, in the message that first started it all, the angel came to Mary and announces that God’s own Spirit is going to overshadow her, and that beneath and within that shadow, God will conceive new life in her.  She will know the miracle of salvation in her own flesh, because all that she is will be encircled and embraced by the fullness of God.  She will be overshadowed. That is the revelation.  That is the promise.

So I hope you will come knowing and feeling all that is true and good and bright without denying or numbing all that is also true and hard and painful.  Because our hope isn’t in how we prepare, what we know or how we feel, but in the goodness of the God who sees us, loves us, chooses us and overshadows our whole selves and our whole real world with sacred, transforming love.

Peace,

Pastor Kate

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Scripture:  Mark 1:1-8

This time of year, as we wait for the coming of the Lord it is important to remember that God sent someone ahead of Jesus to prepare the way for him and announce his coming.  The someone was a prophet named John.

The beginning of the good news is a wild holy man calling people to a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He wore animal skins and ate bugs, and the nearness of the Kingdom of God was all the sweetness and solace he needed.

There is so much goodness in these days.  We find joy and comfort in gathering with loved ones, in preparing feasts & treats for one another, in the lights that blaze in the darkness. We should savor every blessing that comes.

And we should also remember that the Kingdom whose advent we celebrate is so good, so satisfying, so all-encompassing that it will fill us to overflowing even in adversity and hardship.

We should enjoy every blessing and tradition of this season.  But we rejoice in the coming of the Kingdom, we rejoice in the sacred knowledge that our souls have been awakened by the voice of the prophets–we rejoice because we are on the edge of the end of sin and suffering.

We know the beginning is near!

Peace,

Pastor Kate

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Scripture:  Isaiah 7:1-17

We have a beautiful art installation hanging in our sanctuary, intertwining strands of blue and purple yarn and sliver and gold wire trace out letters that spell the word ‘Awake.’  I know that might not seem like a very Christmassy word to you.  But that’s because Advent is about time.

These holy days are set apart for us to seek the Lord and wonder about how what happened before when God put on flesh and was born among us as a child shows us how to live in the present and what to expect in the future. Past, present and future come together in one brilliant kairos moment (iykyk)*

Ultimately, Advent is about time–the birth of Christ is the fulfillment of all God’s promises in ways that are beyond our understanding.  The worst thing we could do is close our minds and hearts, confident that we are holy experts with all the revelation we need.  There is always more.

This Sunday we will hear the words of the prophet Isaiah who first gave the sign of a baby born to save his people.  It was given hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus to King Ahaz of Judah while he was preparing the city of Jerusalem for a long brutal siege.  Both King and Prophet understood and expected the sign to be fulfilled in their own life-time.  And it was. And it wasn’t. The sacred prophecy held more truth, more meaning, more revelation than they ever could have comprehended. The words God gave Isaiah encompassed the past, present and the future.  The eternal words of God always do.

*Here’s your daily Greek language lesson. Kairos is a Greek word meaning the right, critical, opportune moment. It’s pregnant time, harvest time, anointed time.  The opposite of kairos is chronos time (that’s the root of the word chronological), which is ordinary specific limited time.

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Scripture:  1 Corinthians 15:12-26 & John 11:1-44

Ultimately, all our hope is in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If Jesus was not raised from the dead, then our faith is meaningless and in vain. We turn to the story of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead and discover that we can hope in the resurrection when our faith is strong and when it is weak, because Jesus is God of the Resurrection, restoring life is what God does.

We hope, not in what we can do, but in the outrageous goodness of what God has done in Jesus. Because we know that Christ is risen, we have suffering, we have trouble, we have problems, but we have nothing to fear, because the gift of eternal life can’t be taken from us.

Peace,

Pastor Kate

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Scripture:  Ephesians 6:10-18 (NIV) & Daniel 3:13-18 (NIV)

Dear Church,

 The hope we have in Jesus is a hope that resists.  

Our hope is not resigned to evil in the world.
Our hope does not compromise or collude.  
Our hope does not hide, even when it makes enemies.  
Our hope fights.
Our hope will lead us into battle.

Many people mistakenly believe that following Christ requires us to be bystanders, passively waiting for Jesus to do something about injustice, suffering and the ways the powerful crush the poor and powerless.

If your Christian hope leads you to wait quietly until Jesus rescues you from evil, you’re doing it wrong.

But do not be deceived. We fight, but not as the world fights.  No violence. No destruction. No dehumanization. We may be called to lay down our lives, but we are never called by God to take a life. We have weapons, but not the ones chosen by our enemies.

Our hope equips and compels us to confront sin and evil in the way of Christ.

This Sunday, we turn to Paul’s words in Ephesians and the witness of our brothers Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego for inspiration about when and how to resist.

Peace,
Pastor Kate

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Scripture:  Luke 17:1-5, Acts 9:10-19

Dear Church,

There’s a beautiful verse of psalm 85 that reads

     Mercy and Truth have met together,

     Righteousness and Peace. have kissed each other.

In our world, in our individual lives, in our church, so often it seems like we have to choose between mercy and truth.  It seems like we can’t have both righteousness and peace. We feel that we have to pick one or the other.

There is pressure to ‘let it go’ when someone we love hurts us, to rationalize evil that seems like it can’t be forgiven or healed, to swallow truths that spoken cause shame, discomfort, and remorse.

But there is a hope that allows us to hold mercy and truth together, to seek righteousness knowing it will make peace, even and especially for the unrighteous. That hope is reconciliation–our belief that our Lord can both forgive and redeem sin.

Through the righteousness of Jesus, we are reconciled to God and to one another.

In the body of Christ, we discover that we all are more than our worst moments and deepest brokenness.  In him, we receive new life and second birth and the grace to change and grow. We can face our unrighteousness, because the mercy and grace of Jesus can restore us to wholeness as individuals and as a community.

God’s glory is revealed when enemies are reconciled to one another, made righteous and find new life making peace together.  That’s what abundant life in Jesus is–and we can have it starting now, with one another. 

Jesus can and will reconcile us if we ask him to.

Peace,

Pastor Kate

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Scripture:  Romans 5:1-5 & John 2:1-11

Dear Church,

Do you have hope in these days?

Notice I didn’t ask you if you were feeling hopeful.  I asked you if you have hope. That’s important because hope isn’t an emotion we feel (or don’t feel).  Hope is something concrete we possess if we believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Maybe you think it doesn’t matter if you have hope, as long as you live a faithful loving, generous and compassionate life. But beloved, it does. In fact, I would argue that we can’t live a faithful life without hope.

Our hope in Christ is the source of our vision and our wisdom and our strength.  Our hope shapes our lives.

If we do not have hope in Christ, our fears, cynicism and weaknesses make our choices. 

As the year winds down, we will dedicate these November Sundays to recovering–or maybe discovering–our living hope in Jesus.

Friends–it’s even better than you think. We are always surprised by the beauty and goodness and power of our hope.

Our hope is more than enough. Our hope does not just to sustain us in these days, our hope leads to free, flourishing and abundant life, even and especially in seasons of suffering.

Peace,

Pastor Kate

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Scripture:  Revelation 21:1-8

Dear Church,

This Sunday will be a soulful and joyful celebration.

We will gather to remember and give thanks for the lives of our loved ones who have gone ahead of us into eternity.

And we will grieve as we remember. It isn’t only fresh losses that hurt.  The grief we’ve long carried still sears.  The separation from those we love is tender. Death was not part of God’s design for creation. We do not have to make our peace with it.  We remember and give thanks.  We remember and grieve.

But we do not grieve as a people without hope.

We have a savior who is a shepherd, a healer, and a friend. Jesus has defeated the powers of sin and death. 

And our scripture ends with a revelation of the end of history, a vision of how all things–all things–will come together in the power of Christ in a triumphant peace that is so wonder-filled–so good–that we can scarcely believe it.

We must learn to believe it, friends.  Because knowing the end of the story of our faith is how we find the courage to walk in the way of Christ.  It is what makes us salt and light for this world. 

I hope you will join me for worship. You’ll see how all of us are caught up and woven into the beautiful story of God’s saving love in Christ.

Peace,

Pastor Kate

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Scripture:  Philippians 4:10-20

Dear Church,

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13)

While he was imprisoned, the apostle Paul wrote these words to his beloved church in Philippi and believers have found strength and encouragement in them ever since.

It has become one of the most familiar and heavily marketed verses in all of scripture.

Beloved, it doesn’t mean what we’ve heard it means, but it IS good news.

Very, very good news.

I hope you’ll join me as we learn and rejoice in the deeper, truer life-giving revelation of these familiar words.

Peace,

Pastor Kate

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Scripture:  Exodus 20:7, Exodus 3:13-17

Dear Church,

Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain

That’s how I learned it when I was a child and this is what they told me it meant:

Don’t swear.

Don’t say, ‘Oh God!’ when you are annoyed or angry. Don’t say the word God unless you are consciously talking to or about God.  Speak with reverence and care when you are speaking about God.

But what if there are many other ways we take God’s name in vain?

I’m still an advocate for using the word God with care.  But now I believe that the holy limit we receive here demands more than care about when and how we say God’s name.  Here the Holy One requires us to consider, not only all the ways we say God’s name, but also all the ways we use God’s name to justify and pseudo-sanctify our own sinful choices. 
 
The hard truth is, we can break this command without ever opening our mouths. 

I hope you can join us as we seek God for truth about what it means to take God’s name in vain–and also for a vision and grace to do the opposite and fulfill the prayer that Jesus gave us and hallow God’s name, not just in our speaking but in the fullness of our living.

Peace,
Pastor Kate

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