CORE-3 // Risk // Pastor Kate Murphy

Scripture:  Matthew 21:12-17

Dear Church,

Jesus entered into Jerusalem riding a donkey, fulfilling the vision of the prophets–the Son of David, long-awaited Shepherd King who has come to set his people free.  And once he passes through the gates, he heads immediately to the temple.  His first stop is not the palace to challenge King Herod’s corrupt violent regime and confront Roman political brutality (though that comes later).  He goes to the temple.  But he doesn’t go there to pray.

His first priority is not to overthrow Herod or Caesar, but to turn over tables in the temple courts and throw hands with the money changers.  And as he riots he screams scripture, ‘my house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers.’

Once the religious entrepreneurs have fled the scene, in the empty space Jesus welcomes the blind and the lame and heals them with the power of God.  Children stream in and begin to sing praises. And the Holy Ones are…indignant.

Before he offended anyone else, Jesus enraged the ones who believed they knew his Father best.  He centered truth so holy that it appeared disruptive and profane, especially to the religious folks who thought they were sacred experts.

In this story you can’t overlook the thing that is hidden in plain sight in every Jesus story: Risk.  Jesus took risks.  He risked offending people. He risked alienating people. He risked being misunderstood.  He risked being disliked, hated, betrayed and killed. Jesus risked everything because he knew the power of the truth of God’s revolutionary, radically transformational love.

Risk is one of our core values at the Grove, and this Sunday we’re going to be talking about the holy necessary risks Jesus took in his life and the holy necessary risks Jesus calls us to take in our lives.

Warning: it’s going to be. more than just talk.

Peace,

Pastor Kate

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CORE-2 // Welcoming // Stephanie Ann Vander Lugt

Scripture:  Matthew 25:1-13, 1 Corinthians 1:26-31

Dear Church,

You are wildly welcome here. We hear these words spoken regularly at the Grove, and for good reason. Being welcoming is one of our core values and one that we share with all followers of Jesus across space and time. But welcome is one of those things that is often so much easier said than done. What about when you are faced with welcoming someone who asks a lot of you, or someone who has complex needs, or someone who offended you? On the flip side, maybe you struggle to believe that you can truly come as you are with all of your baggage and be received with welcome.

This Sunday we will look at our core value of welcome through Jesus’ parable of the ten virgins. If you are curious about what a story about ten virgins has to do with welcome and hospitality, then you will just have to come and see. My sincere hope is that through this text we will grow together in wisdom that leads to readiness to welcome each other and our neighbors radically and faithfully, which starts with being ready for the arrival of the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God in our midst.

In community,
Stephanie Ann Vander Lugt

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CORE-1 // Reconciliation // Pastor Kate Murphy

Scripture:  Luke 14:12-24

Dear Church,

Years ago, a neighbor in the Hickory Grove community told me that her kids had a special name for our church.  They called the Grove ‘the eat church,’ because they had been fed here so many times–at community meals, at vacation bible schools, at Freedom School and community festivals.  She told me they were always excited when she told them they could come to ‘the eat church.’

I love it.

Because lots of holy people would say that church is about more than eating, I don’t think Jesus would be one of them.

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus told a story at a dinner party about how the Kingdom of God was like a banquet where the invited guests didn’t show up and the host filled every empty seat with the poor, the lame, the maimed and the strangers. This Sunday, before we find our places at Jesus’ table, we’ll think about that story and what it means to believe Jesus’ words and to believe that we find salvation and union with God at the communion table.  In other words, those kids had it right.  We are, nothing more and nothing less than ‘the eat church.’

It’s the beginning of a new year of being church together, and I’ll share with you the word the Lord has laid on my heart for us as a community and how the Spirit might use it to guide and form us in 2024.

Peace,

Pastor Kate

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AWAKE-Week 5 // Epiphany // Pastor Kate Murphy

Scripture:  Matthew 2:1-12

Dear Church,

Christmas is not over.  We still have more of the nativity story to remember, celebrate and ponder in our hearts.

This Sunday we gather to tell the next part, when a strange star rises in the East and Magi see it as a sign and come seeking the new-born King of Israel.  They travel to Jerusalem, assuming this great new King would be found in the palace in the heart of the holy city.

He wasn’t.

It won’t be the last time people don’t find Jesus where they expect him to be.

Christians call this part of the nativity story Epiphany, but it holds more than one unexpected insight into the Kingdom of God: the star in the heavens reveals the birth of the savior to the whole earth; the so-called ‘pagan’ outsiders perceive the sign and travel across the known world to worship, while the wise experts in the sacred scripture are unwilling to make a six mile journey, King Herod and all of Jerusalem hear the news and respond with fear, not joy.

If you listen for it, you can hear the whole gospel in these 12 verses.

Peace,

Pastor Kate

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AWAKE-Week 4 // Overshadowed // Pastor Kate Murphy

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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AWAKE-Week 3 // John the Baptist // Pastor Kate Murphy

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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AWAKE-Week 2 // It’s About Time // Pastor Kate Murphy

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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Hope-Week 4 // A Resurrecting Hope // Pastor Kate Murphy

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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Hope-Week 3 // A Resisting Hope // Pastor Kate Murphy

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

Want to chat about what you have heard? Click here:
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