Walter used Beethoven’s example of finding joy in the midst of suffering to talk about the value of celebrating joy even when times are hard. (He was going to start listing all the ways in which we’ve been feeling hardship and loss lately, but the music got him too choked up.)
Walter’s homily shares a conversation that resonated with Jesus’ promise in John 14 that the Advocate would teach us everything. He went on to leave us with the paradox that God is in us and beyond us.
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.
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.
After five months, Walter offers a “Part 2” for his talk from last June by emphasizing that the kind of “secure base” that God provides goes with us wherever we go, allowing for multiple attachments that can naturally correct the inevitable distortions we might otherwise hold about God if we were to only rely on one community.
In advance of a coming small group, Walter gets us thinking (and chatting) at our “2nd Breakfast” about the attitudes toward the Bible that we grew up with – some helpful and some not.
Using the Ephesians 6 text from the lectionary, Walter’s homily reminded us that Paul’s metaphor of God’s Armour was helping us to stay strong and to endure in our calling of “mutual submission” (non-violent, non-dominating love) as opposed to the spirit of our age that is often based on the “myth of redemptive violence”
In this Sunday’s homily, Walter suggests the odd encouragement that it has always been in the context of a very messed up world that we find our resilience with courage and love.
Walter introduced the next season’s theme for SCC, “The Roots of Resilience,” by talking about the gift of deep trust that we all need, arising from a variety of sources like a secure attachment to our parents and/or a healing encounter with God’s ever-present Love (and most assuredly not from Divine threats of eternal abandonment).
Walter uses a story to make the point of how the political methods of Jesus were not at all on the same page as others – and this remains true to this day. The church that follows Jesus has only one approach to politics: to be communities of compassion, generosity and joy.