It’s our final sermon in our series on Friendships and Family. Today I’ll focus on what makes for healthy and happy relations within communities. These two qualities are necessary for friendships to truly exist, and for family relations to be life-giving, not toxic. 

Welcome! It’s great to gather in the name of the One who has loved us from the foundations of the world. You are God’s beloved child, whatever your situation, status, identity, or state of wellness. This community can be a healing presence if you’ll choose to open yourself to it, and invest.  Last week, I suggested that this can be a “chosen family” for all of us.

Resilience to life's many challenges has always involved “chosen family.” What this concept means in a popular and secular sense seems to supersede judgment. Love and support are key and core to the safety that is so often missing in family! With safety comes trust, and with trust, intimacy. It’s how the body of Christ was really meant to function. 

Prepositions don't just change sentence structures, they change relationships, locations, and spiritual standing! That’s why I’ve been using these words to build sermons that communicate just how amazing God’s relationship to us already is, and how transformative our relationship with Them might actually be.

We’re looking at God’s relationship to humanity and the world through the lens of prepositions. If you have worshipped, followed us online or otherwise been keeping up with our church, we’ve looked at the prepositions “with” and “for” as well as “above and within.” Today, I’ll move to the dark side!

We continue this week in our series using prepositions, part of our language syntax that describes the relationship of an object to subject in space, time or by virtue of influence or action. In a time of growing uncertainty, darkness, doubt and pain, it's important we allow our scriptures to speak words of inspiration, hope and comfort. They remind us that God is with us, for us, sovereign (above) and servant (within). And, of course, there are so many other prepositional modifiers! 

To Our Beloved Guests, Friends, and Members! I write "beloved" not because I wish to be flowery or flattering. This is what you are to God: beloved. That's not just a descriptor. You are, in your core, your very being, God's beloved! This is a message so counterintuitive and radical that's almost impossible to receive.

This month we begin our new sermon series, “Facing Our Fears.” We will examine some foundational and core essentials about who God is to us, who we are to God, and how we might draw from these two points of identity to meet the fears and anxieties, woes and isolation of the current age. 

This week, we'll look just a bit at more classic understandings of what the close of earth's history might look like, and examine the text for good news. My thought is, Jesus is more than sufficient. God wins!

Welcome to Hollywood! Tomorrow marks the official beginning of Summer. Schools are letting out, vacations are beginning, the warmth of longer days is inviting people to more outdoor activity. And we’re going into summer mode. 

Over the next two weeks, I'll be teaching/preaching on Adventist apocalypticism, focused on what we've said, what we're saying, and why none of this can be about fear.

Revelation is written like no other book. The words are Greek. The grammar, the syntax, the construction of the book are all Hebrew. Guest speaker Catherine Taylor, LCSW, will help us begin to understand what John thought we would take for granted.

Seasonally, we're getting into Pentecost. I have spoken of the Spirit in the context of both fire and air over the past few weeks. We need the discerning the Spirit brings now more than ever! Not to mention the fruits of the Spirit. These fruits have almost been vilified as the cult of the masculine and sovereign Lord rises to support cults of supremacy and violence. We live in interesting times.

Twenty-four years back or so, the United Church of Christ (UCC) launched a “God is Still Speaking” campaign to highlight the adopted motto, a Gracie Allen quote: “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” The idea being, of course, that God still speaks in our contemporary context, in our modern world. I don't think the brokenness of our world changes this reality. There are points of light all over despite the darkness, and I believe that our congregation is one of them.

Our local world is once again on fire. The Sandy, Foothill, Burro, Santa Rosa Island, Bain and River Fires are contributing to the destruction of tens of thousands of acres. This land includes habitat for plants and animals, insects, and myriad other forms of life now consumed by fire. Soils will be vulnerable to washout with big rains. The life under the soil and in the air will be limited as the char heals and seeds spring to new life. It’s the new normal.

As I think of our commitments vis à vis Adventist Peace Fellowship, particularly the one on “Care for Creation,” I’m humbled once again at the opportunities AND obstacles to making this meaningful in our context.

This Sabbath brings a baptism and a teaching on God's primordial waters. It's a message that grounds us in the materiality of our embodied selves, while poetically, metaphorically, and experientially teaching us lessons that fill and feed the spirit. Water is life, and Jesus is the Living Water from which we drink our lives of faith and hope, love and joy.

We find food in creation, food post-flood, and food in the life and times of Jesus. Food features heavily in the early church, affecting identities and creating divisions when unjustly distributed. And food is a permanent and wondrous feature of the life we anticipate with God. 

There's so much going on in the world that vies for our attention, focus, and energy. It's a constant battle to focus on anything for any length of time. Worry, and the tyranny of the urgent move us into actions that are reactive, not proactive. The ideals of groundedness, home, time to be - to think - to live, increasingly distant for many of us.

Religiously and spiritually speaking, we live in an extraordinary time. There are competing versions of spiritual truths, historical and biblical facts and interpretations, and—of course—morality and ethics. The religion of Jesus is endangered as the rhetoric conflates earthly allegiances with heavenly ones.

Another beautiful Sabbath day! The relative peace and quiet that's ours amidst a storm of global strife is a gift we must cultivate awareness around. It's important to find the energy and strength in this fleeting gift to continue to serve our God as we serve one another, and to advocate for peace and justice in this world.