We had a lot of wonderful art situations happening at common art last Wednesday. The knitting table is still going strong. We had a member’s work get veryyyyy tangled. Spreading out across the room with our sections of the yarn, about 5 of us helped untangle the ball of yarn. This funny moment was also a good moment of teamwork! Continue reading
Tag Archives: meaning
If not for love, what are you for?
Lent 2B, 25 February 2024. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16. Then Abram fell on his face.
- Romans 4:13-25. Hoping against hope.
- Mark 8:31-38. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?
O God all sufficient, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Last week, on the first Sunday in Lent, we learned that the spirit of holiness can drive a very hard bargain. Jesus, perhaps, in order to understand his mission, was pushed hard into the wild for a quarantine. Then, upon hearing of John the Baptist’s imprisonment and picking up where John had left off, Jesus proclaimed the good news of the realm of the Holy One and taught that the time is now to turn around (or, to change your channel to see and understand that love is the only way). This week we get a glimpse of why the good news was so dangerous. Continue reading
And the story isn’t finished.
First Sunday after Christmas, Proper 1B, December 31, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz.
Isaiah 61:10-62:3. For the sake of Zion I will not be silent. For the sake of Jerusalem I will not rest.
Galatians 3:23-25, 4:4-7. So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.
John 1:1-18. And the Word became flesh and lived among us.
O God of our story, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
First, a poem by Padraig O Tuama, called “Narrative Theology”. [1]
And I said to him
Are there questions to all of this?
And he said
The answer is in a story
and the story is being told.
And I said
But there is so much pain
And she answered, plainly,
Pain will happen.
Then I said
Will I ever find meaning?
And they said
You will find meaning
Where you give meaning.
The answer is in the story
And the story isn’t finished.
Mystery, Meaning, Risk & Relationship
Third Sunday of Easter, Year B, April 19, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Acts 3:12-19. You Israelites
1 John 3:1-7. We should be called children of God and that is what we are.
Luke 24:36b-48. And the psalms must be fulfilled.
1 John 3:1-7. We should be called children of God and that is what we are.
Luke 24:36b-48. And the psalms must be fulfilled.
O God of Hope, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
You probably know that the Gospel of John, for all of its beautiful love poetry and prose, is notoriously anti-Jewish or anti-Judean in its rhetoric about the death and resurrection of Jesus, written as if it were Jews and not Romans who were the threat to Jesus. In the Gospel of John is codified one side of a late first century argument about ways to move forward socially, politically and theologically in the precarious time after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The writer of John places anti-Jewish words anachronistically in the mouths of Jesus and his friends who were, of course, all Jewish. Continue reading