We come to church with our fragile identities, often enough constructed over against each other. We come as people whose sense of self is sometimes grounded in competition, striving for superiority or struggling with a sense of inferiority. Even our loves may contain knots of rivalry or reticence. We begin by invoking the Triune God, a home in which we may flourish and find happiness, liberated from the need to fight for our identity, to justify our existence, at ease in the uncompetitive and equal love of the Father and the Son, which is the Holy Spirit. - Timothy Radcliffe, Why Go to Church?
God's Law: A Vision of Restoration - Rev. Chris Currie | 11.5.23
"Moses tells us, Jesus tells us, that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Theology should give us some beginning of an idea of what it might mean to satisfy this commandment. A first step, I propose, would be to step back from all other disciplines and categories, to invite a kind of awe at the entire phenomenon of Being that embraces disciplines and categories and error and aspiration and everything they touch, that embraces thought, and error, and the work the mind does in its sleep." - Marilynne Robinson, "Theology for This Moment," in What Are We Doing Here?
Meeting God - Rev. Chris Currie | 10.29.23
We gather because Christ gathers us. He said to the people of Jerusalem: "How often would I have gathered you in as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you would not" (Luke 13.34). Often, on a Sunday morning, we may feel a similar reluctance; even thinking of Jesus as a big warm chicken may not be enough to lure us from our nice warm bed. We gather in our local congregation because we are willing to be gathered into the community of faith, which stretches across time and space, from Abraham our father in faith, to the latest baby to be baptized. Faith is the beginning of our acceptance of friendship with God, learning to look at the world lovingly, with gratitude, delighting in its intelligibility. - Timothy Radcliffe, Why Go to Church?