Sermons from Southpoint Church

This season of Epiphany we look for and celebrate the ways God’s light is being manifest in our midst. When will the manifestation of God come to us this year? Where will this lead us? What will we be called to hear—or to bear? What will we be invited into? Some themes in the Bible are so threaded through everything that we almost miss them. One of these fundamental, basic themes of the Old and Ne...

“We are God’s beloved”. This is our deepest identity. But this is only the beginning of the story. God takes this vast expansive love, as broad as the midday sun, and narrows it into a beam of light, shining within a human life in uniquely personal ways. Our awakening to that light is the next bit of the story. In 1 Samuel 3:1-10, Samuel is waking up slowly to the presence of God calling him, sing...

Instead of dying, Jonah is rescued. The whale isn’t God’s judgement, it’s God’s mercy (kind of an uncomfortable mercy!) The mercy of God, once again, triumphing over judgement… Now, Jonah, having been shown mercy, is feeling a lot of internal discomfort: he’d rather die than live with a God who forgives his enemies… 

Have you ever felt seen, known, and celebrated by someone? Not for what you do, but just for who you are? Have you ever felt that kind of delight for another person, not because of what they do for you, but simply for who they are? What would it feel like to know that God sees you that way? To hear God say:  “You are my beloved. I love you, not because of what you do for me. Not because of how you...

How Does a Weary World Rejoice? “We allow ourselves to be amazed.” It’s hard to describe awe. It's expansive. Something vast, yet near. Awe moves us. Softens our guard. For a moment, we forget about ourselves, lost in the moment. Dr. Keltner is a professor at Berkeley who has studied awe and found it calms our nervous system, activating our vagal nerve. Our heart beat slows, our breathing deep...

JOY "When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leapt in her womb..." In this moment of connection between Mary and Elizabeth, this deeply embodied, energetic exchange passed between them. Something moved between them, woman to woman, child to child. That thing was so palpable that John, the baby, leapt within Elizabeth. Standing together on that threshold of Elizabeth’s house, feeli...

This Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, is also the very first Sunday of a new liturgical church year. Why does the church year begin here? Because a spirituality that pretends the darkness doesn’t exist is no good to anyone.

Series Wrap up & transition to Advent... !

Seeds remind us of organic growth patterns. They are small, full of potential and can flourish when placed in the right environment. As we drink from the well and take our place at the table, the Holy Spirit works in us. The soil of our heart becomes softer, the stones are removed, bitter roots are pulled. As the soil is prepared, the seeds of the kingdom within us begin to grow.  The seed symboli...

Loving God, grant us a continually renewing experience of your love, acceptance and presence; grant us a core experience of being caught up in your net of love and mercy. Grant us humility, hope, and grace that by actions of wisdom, courage and justice we might mend and extend those connections that are healing and humanizing and reconciling. Inspire among us the prophetic vision of a deep, abidin...

It is this image of the Table that became the portal through which we became an openly welcoming and affirming church. In the early days, it was our weekly practice of communion that brought clarity to the conversation around membership. Gay and straight, we love Jesus and want to follow him. One day, we will sit around the banquet feast of heaven together. So, why would we not be that beloved com...

Our first core image is the Well. Join Anne as she expresses "why the well?" and "why the well?" in a week like these ones, in which images of devastation sear our hearts.

In the work artist Joy Banks created for us, she has given us a vision of God, a vision of what community in God looks like, and even a vision of who we are as a church community. We pray that the Spirit will use it to refresh our prophetic imagination about who we are and who God is calling us to be. The actions that we are being invited to take in our four images are very simple: coming to a wel...

The history of a church is difficult to record in a few lines. We would have to tell you about the time when our children were born, or when people joined our community, or when others left. We would have to tell the stories of challenge, frustration, breakthrough, joy and sorrow. The true history of a church is found in the collected stories of the people, and the story of a collected people. Sou...

Seeing Ourselves Freshly through Our Four Core Images Rather than crafting a doctrinal statement for Southpoint when its roots were planted almost twenty years ago, Scott Simpson, Southpoint’s founding pastor, and his leadership team chose four core images to communicate the heart of our community: a Well, a Table, a Seed and a Net. Anne Baxter Smith has leaned into these images over the past 12 y...

A brief meditation from our All In service wrapping up our Season of Creation with a discussion of God's regenerative agency in Creation.

Anne suggests that maybe groaning is having its day.  Groans are powerful. Groans keep us from making peace with things that have no peace.  In Romans 8, Creation, every microscopic part of it, is groaning. Humans are groaning. God's Spirit is groaning—an inexpressible groan, too deep for words. When we groan, our bodies and breath take over. Our bodies show us what is becoming intolerable, wh...

We’ve been poking around in our Judeo-Christian Genesis origin stories these weeks, and Anne has found herself enamoured with a character in these stories,  Adamah : earth, dirt, land, soil. In these origin stories, Adamah is often mentioned. Humans and Adamah are so interconnected—Adamah is the source of human form, abundance and provision for Adam. But Adamah is also cursed, unable to provide, n...

This Sunday Anne takes on the dominant—and toxic—interpretation of the story of Adam's creation in Genesis 2. She discusses how it, in fact, invites us to see that God’s design was for us to be part of the net of kinship, not the exercise of human dominion. Further, the humans and the trees are drawn from the ground by God  for  each other. There is an implied relational connection between the...

Breathe in: "Be"... Breathe out: "Held." Interviewed by Brent Unrau, Jess shares what she experienced during her journey with cancer, when, prompted by a rich inner vision, she reached out for help, breaking past her assumptions about what the response of others would be in her time of vulnerability.

Our pastor, Anne Baxter Smith, introduces and finds out a bit more about Madison Friesen. We are so excited to welcome Madison as our Community Life Coordinator. This is a get-to-know-you exchange between Anne and Madison so you can get to know him, too. : )

"Jesus wept.” Guest speaker Leah Kostamo imagines it felt "“achey, but good”. It was evidence of his wholeness, of his congruency — that he not only preached love but he felt love, and he felt the commensurate sadness in the face of loss. And so, he wept. (Maybe a lot.) Well worth a listen, this episode eases us into the goodness, and discomfort, of our emotions, and how they function in...

"Once you catch the scent of Joy, it's like everything else falls out from your attention." In the book of Hebrews 12 the writer says of Jesus that "for the joy set before him", Jesus endured the cross, and the shame of the cross. He was moving towards joy... maybe Joy is the very thing that leads us on the path of life — connected not only to our own refreshment but to the...

"Consider how the wildflowers grow: they do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon, in all his splendour, was dressed like one of these... " —Luke 12

This summer our theme is Refresh. We’ve talked about rest, we’ve talked about play. Today we explore turning to regard the present with openness and curiosity, even in the hard things. This one, this podcast, has it all: the sublime and the ridiculous. Imagine this: God is like a marshmallow. Or, imagine this:  there’s a burning bush—on fire, not consumed—and a voice, and an aging man alone in the...