A Deeper Dive for Authentic, Hopeful, Worshipful Faith

“There was nothing exalted about Christ’s life and death…unless you had faith to see through them. To stand up in front of people twirling your tongue about them was to parade a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel.” Barbara Brown Taylor Scripture Readings  Karen Bart Old Testament: Psalm 50:1-6   (Link to text:   https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=572961664 ) New Testament: 2 Corinthians 4:3-6   ...

“Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and has given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter.” --C.S. Lewis

“We become free as we let go of our three primary energy centers: our need for power and control, our need for safety and security, and our need for affection and esteem.” –Richard Rohr

“There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Being a Christian means we are lifelong learners to love God and all our neighbors.

The baptism of Jesus invites us into a life of loving relationships.

Christmas begins by receiving the light of Christ and holding it in our hearts.

Christmas begins by holding it in our hearts, before it lives forth through us.

For God’s Christmas to hold seed and bloom, we need to allow our hearts and souls to be plowed through humble repentance and joyous expectation.

Christmas is not something “magical” to divert us from dreary lives, but the joyous consummation of God’s complex relational work with all peoples.

Each Present Christmas Presents the Future Christmas and Culmination in our Lord Jesus Christ.

with guest pastor John Owen

This movement from self-possession to a more complex, inspired, and receptive vision of things is, I would suggest, relevant to the process that brings Jacob from a discrete, “mind of winter” view of his children to one that allows him to see them as flowing, feeding one another, growing, passionate, and capable of transformations. – Aviva Gotlieb Zornberg

Characteristically, then, Jacob leads from behind: he is the thinker, the one who projects in images and words, the director behind the scenes. This is, properly speaking, the position of the hunter, tracking his prey from the rear. Jacob comes into the world behind: “After that (aharei khen), his brother emerged, holding on to the heel of Esau; so they named him Jacob” (25:26).

Leaving all support systems behind him, Jacob moves into the world of the night. Here, nothing is clear, all is shifting, phantasm, illusion. And here, paradoxically, Jacob finds his ground of truth.

Jacob searches for his authenticity among all the “lendings” of the theatrical wardrobe. What Isaac senses is the “smell of my son,” which transforms the costumes of insincerity. It is ultimately the essence of his son—permeating clothes and skins—that registers as blessing. -- Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

Abraham’s laughter, through which he communed with others, was a “pseudo-language,” in which “silence is the essence.” Now this essence is explored to its full, almost intolerable, extent. To live in a world in which the essential is experienced implicitly, wordlessly, is to return to the base out of which laughter, feeding, and ultimately speech emerged. -Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning o...

"Abraham bears the whole world with him in his personal anguished search. To roam, implies full exposure to the hazards of experience. The resonance of —“fool”—lingers on: the radical “folly” of those who abandon safe structures and fare forth on unmapped roads." -Avivah Gottlieb Zornber, The Beginning of Desire (p. 130)

All the pathologies of openness and closedness relate to imaginative obtuseness. According to the midrash in Bereshit Rabbah (36:1), the Flood people see God as blind, indifferent, callous to the world. What follows is that human beings feel themselves free to be likewise blind, indifferent, and callous. --Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire, p. 56

The powerful implication here is that God’s original intention can be consummated only by Adam’s free perception and desire. Only when Adam comes to feel the solitude of the angelic, unitary existence is he split into two separate beings. He must, in a sense, diminish himself, come to know the rightness of a more complex form of unity.  -Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg,  The Beginning of Desire , p. 37

Throughout our worship series focused on a single psalm each week that becomes part of the New Testament playlist, our regular order of worship has been changed from a linear progression to a kaleidoscopic experience centering on the psalm. Key changes and new elements include: Embodiment:  the Psalm becomes a spoken Word through deeper congruence with the emotional self. Meditation:  a five-minut...

Throughout our worship series focused on a single psalm each week that becomes part of the New Testament playlist, our regular order of worship has been changed from a linear progression to a kaleidoscopic experience centering on the psalm. Key changes and new elements include: Embodiment:  the Psalm becomes a spoken Word through deeper congruence with the emotional self. Meditation:  a five-minut...

Throughout our worship series focused on a single psalm each week that becomes part of the New Testament playlist, our regular order of worship has been changed from a linear progression to a kaleidoscopic experience centering on the psalm. Key changes and new elements include: Embodiment:  the Psalm becomes a spoken Word through deeper congruence with the emotional self. Meditation:  a five-minut...

“To recognize that the Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersections of the times--of our time and God's time, of the then, and the now, and the not yet--is to understand how those emotions are to be held within the rhythm of a life lived in God's presence.”   ― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential

Throughout our worship series focused on a single psalm each week that becomes part of the New Testament playlist, our regular order of worship has been changed from a linear progression to a kaleidoscopic experience centering on the psalm. Key changes and new elements include: Embodiment:  the Psalm becomes a spoken Word through deeper congruence with the emotional self. Meditation:  a five-minut...