Talks

throwing flowers in passive defiance

Is This The Path Of Love?

Jess invites us to consider how the invitation to exchange the question “Is this right or is this wrong?” for “Is this the path of Love” might transform the way we see and relate to ourselves and others, and serve as a grounding guide through challenging times. She points out how Jesus embodied this principle in revolutionary ways. Then we turned our attention toward Banksy’s piece “Rage, The Flower Thrower” which led to a beautifully complex conversation about choosing the path of love in the face of violence and oppression.

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cloud in the shape of a heart

Love Across the Veil

Wendy VanderWal Martin offers a beautiful contribution to our new teaching theme by exploring the possibility that those who have come before us and those who have ‘loved us in the flesh’ are still present to us beyond death and can be significant portals of Love. She turns to the great cloud of witnesses mentioned in Hebrews 12 to help us imagine this and shares her own experiences of this kind of presence in her life. Wendy invites us all to be open to the idea that we are truly never alone.

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Love in the Wilderness

As we start to move into our new teaching theme of “The Path of Love: A Way in the Wilderness,” Rachael reviews what inspired it and brings forward Walter’s contributions about the vulnerability of love from before the theme even began! Then she explores the idea that our human experience of the path of love is always a way in the wilderness, and that the conditions that make love hard and vulnerable are exactly what cause its most beautiful expressions to emerge.

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Confessions

On this 2nd Breakfast (and last service before his sabbatical begins), Walter shares his inability to tell whether the fact that it’s taken him ten years since he admitted to himself that he was unhealthily over-stressed with work responsibilities is a confession (of rationalizations and justifications) or a celebration that he’s finally made it to a reduced workload. He then invites everyone to reflect on whether they are avoiding or facing reality as 2025 begins.

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The Path of Love: A Way in the Wilderness

This Sunday, Jess Williams introduced our new teaching theme, ‘The Path of Love: A Way in the Wilderness’ and invited us to enter the year holding the question, “is this the path of love?” as a guide through the times ahead. She explains how the leadership collective arrived at this theme, and shares some of the passages, poetry, and community insights that led them here.

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Huge Problems, Vulnerable Love

On this Fourth Sunday of Advent, with the theme of Love, Walter emphasizes how strange it is that Vulnerable Love is God’s response to all the big problems in the world and the path that God invites us to follow.

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Suffering and Power, Nostalgia and Babies

This morning Mark Groleau compares four poems dedicated to four ancient babies: two by Virgil and two by Zechariah and Mary. The contrast points to two very different visions for the world, exposes our expectations around suffering and power, and challenges our Christmastime sense of nostalgia. Which is the way of true joy?

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nativity scene in tents

Hope for Humanity?

On the first Sunday of Advent, Jess offers some reflections on the lectionary passages and what they reveal about our humanity. She shares insights from contemporary voices who point us toward a hopeful perspective on human nature and our innate goodness.

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gold crown and crown of thorns

What kind of king? (And so what?)

On Christ the King Sunday, Rachael and the gathered community wrestle together with the implications of the image of God as King, how Jesus’ life and death invite us to question and reimagine it, and what all of this means for the way we approach our own life and use of power.

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