Think about the way our bodies change and adapt and transform throughout this difficult and delicate life. Think about the many phases, our many different bodies. All our bodies. Think about the different people we become with each change, with each injury, with each surgery. And then imagine all our bodies with no pain, with no suffering…

But I don’t necessarily think that Paul’s vision and Baruch’s vision have to be mutually exclusive, or in any kind of competition. I think that we can be skeptical, we can change with our minds with our circumstances, we can question and wonder and ponder, but we can also have some kind of absurd faith that with God, all things truly are possible…

The resurrection, for all its glory and magic, is ultimately about the Love that God has for us, and the Love that we need to act out in the world. It’s about making sacrifices and doing without for the betterment of all. It’s about honoring and being one with those who mourn, those who weep, those who are addicts, those who struggle…

…Paul is talking about capital L Love. He’s talking about living by way of Love. He’s talking about making sure every action you do, being done with Love in mind, with your fellow humankind in mind…

So Paul came to warn them, this will fall apart if you don’t let everyone in, and let everyone be their true selves. This will all be for nothing if you try to segregate those who may be perceived as “weak” from the “strong.” The church won’t be able to function if it’s divided, if it’s made to mirror the hierarchal, unjust systems that already exist in the world, the very systems that we as Jesus-followers are trying to subvert, to overturn…

The wedding at Cana is a preview of what is possible. We can have a world with never-ending good wine. We can have a world in which we won’t have to wake up to an empty, messy house, missing our friends as the anxieties of a broken world creep back in.

…I hope we can take advantage of this time of another quiet isolation, and find different ways to pray, to meditate, to be mindful, to communicate. I hope we can take some pressure off of ourselves and know that there’s no wrong way to communicate with God. There’s no wrong way to be mindful. We can be fully in the present while discerning the past and seeing potential in the future…

…so even after tonight, we continue to wait for that star, that light, to break free from its prison of clouds. So as we wait, in the meantime, let us remember a young Karl Schwarzschild, before the horrors of war and this uncertain world brought upon despair upon him—let’s remember that brilliant, imaginative, and hopeful child looking up at the cloudy sky absolutely knowing that there was a guiding star there. Let’s remember Schwarzschild’s star…

A sermon from guest preacher, Rev. Connie Moser, for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, December 19th, 2021

…but Here can be a place challenge and growth in a place that feels tired and stagnant. Here can be a place of perseverance and strength, in the midst of what feels like failure and weakness. Here can be a place of peace and hope in a place that feels war-torn and hopeless…

Jesus not telling us to no worry period—if we didn’t worry at all, it would be clear that we weren’t paying attention. But rather, he's telling us to not let the anxieties of this world completely consume us so as not to get burnt out and break down—because there is hope on the other side, and there is hope in the perfect world to come…

When we think of apocalypse, we think of the end. By definition, it is the ultimate destruction of the world as we know it—but that’s just the thing—it’s a destruction of the world as we know it. I don’t believe it’s some ultimate end—apocalypse just means “revealing.”

So much of what’s between the lines in this passage is about deciphering what is true and what is false, and, in the midst of strife and crises, to remain as calm as we can, and also vigilant. This is Jesus saying, there will be difficult times ahead—war, disasters, destruction—but amidst all this turmoil and chaos, we have to understand that this is not the end, and we cannot give up the fight to make this earth as it is in heaven…

So I actually think it’s kind of a big and disingenuous jump to go from Jesus saying, “look how corrupt the religious authorities are, along with this temple that they control” to “look at this widow giving her whole life to this corrupt system, we should all be like her.” It just doesn’t make sense to me…

…And so if we truly love God as we claim, we must also love our neighbor as ourselves. I believe going through life with attitudes like this—being more open-minded, more open to interpretation, less rigid, less strict—allows for so much more kindness. I think it allows for so much more understanding and love…

…and it showed me how one way to be a true steward is to be the church out in the world, and make it known that congregations like ours, must always be present to ask, “What do you want me to do for you?” and mean it…

…Hawthorne writes, “…people always grow more and more foolish, unless they care to grow wiser and wiser.” It takes work, Church, and care to keep up with the strange and difficult call of Jesus. The disciples, in theory, were up for that work, but they weren’t actually quite ready to make the radical moves and changes to their own thinking that Jesus was calling for…

Church, this is what Jesus was preaching about—people so attached to their wealth, to their money, to their lifestyles of luxury, that they cannot fathom letting any of it go in order to give the people who labored to provide them with this wealth something as simple as a meal break during the day… or something as crucial as affordable medical care. Jesus makes it clear that it’s impossible for people who exploit others, for people who defraud others to make it into the Kingdom of God.

And yet…

There’s a reason this difficult passage ends with Jesus reiterating his lesson about and his love children—about his love for the least of these. And that reason is that earthly laws and rules and necessities don’t matter. They might be necessary evils, but ultimately what matters is that we keep ourselves humble and work to love and lift the least of these. What matters is that we work towards a world in which there are no least of these—we do this by refusing to judge those who have had different life paths than us…

…this isn’t just a story about the innocent being welcome into the fold; it’s a story about welcoming the leper, the sex worker, the addict, the homeless in the fold; It’s a story about welcoming all those who have been wrongly stigmatized, thought of as immoral, thought of as less-than into the fold. It’s a story about living our lives in a brand new way—of looking beyond hierarchies and who’s the most powerful, who’s the wealthiest, who’s at the top—because in the perfect world that Jesus is working towards, not only do hierarchies not matter anymore; they’re objectively bad….