January 26, 2025
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.
January 19, 2025
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.
January 12, 2025
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.
January 5, 2025
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.
December 22, 2024
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.
December 15, 2024
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?
December 4, 2024
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.
November 24, 2024
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.
November 17, 2024
Finding Sanctuary & Becoming Safe Havens Together
“Finding Sanctuary” – Jess does some summing up of our “Roots of Resilience” theme with this talk about the ways in which we can be a “safe haven” or sanctuary for each other.
November 10, 2024
Love & Lament
At Second Breakfast this week, Jess & Janell reflected on themes of Love & Lament, particularly in response to the the recent US election and the way it will impact our community and world. A time of vulnerable sharing opened up at the end of the service as we grappled with our grief and our desire to “take love seriously” in the days and months ahead.
November 3, 2024
God Is With You Wherever You Go
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.
October 27, 2024
Rooted In Reality
Reflecting on today’s lectionary readings, Jess shares some thoughts on the importance of speaking the truth about our suffering as an essential component of our healing. She encourages us to remain rooted in reality as a form of resilience, and to acknowledge life as life is without denying the pain and injustices we face.