For God So Loves the World
May we so love the world, so that everyone we meet may believe and love and join us in this eternal life, that the world might be saved through love.
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Living for Something Bigger than Ourselves
May we all work and dream and love as passionately as she did, and may we all live for something bigger than ourselves. Amen.
Defeating the Devil, Living as Beloved
All temptation comes from a refusal or inability to believe in your identity as beloved children of God, about choosing something less than God.
To Die, Rise, and Fully Love
We pray that God will make in *all of us* new and contrite hearts, to help us see our own sin and lead us toward a life marked by the love of God.
Letting the Love of Christ Shine
We need only put God’s unending love for us and our love for God and for our neighbors on a lampstand, and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
The Answer to the World’s Problems
We, as followers of Jesus, land here in these texts, in the Beatitudes, in 1 Corinthians, and in Micah: Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God.
Follow this Foolishness, Proclaim this Power
Love can feel like foolishness to anyone who sees those with power, money, and weapons dominating those without, but this love is the power of God.
Finding our Identity in God’s Love
As people of the Epiphany, we follow the one who was named Beloved from heaven, because we too find our identity in that love which calls us to love.
Trading Power for Love, Joy, and Peace
When we let go of power and control, when we love our neighbor as ourselves, we end up like the wise men, overwhelmed with unspeakable joy.
Dwelling in the Transcendent and Immanent
We get to worship God, the transcendent, and we get to build God’s kingdom on earth, the immanent, because God came to this world on Christmas.
The Most Important Word this Christmas
God, at Christmas, tells us that there will never again be a “for” that is not based on a fundamental, unalterable, everlasting, unswerving “with.”
Childlike Joy and Peace on Earth
This is the season of joy because of an act of love so radical and unbelievable, a love that can and will transform everything.
Epiphany
Unbelievable Love that Changes the World
In a moment of love so radical we cannot fully comprehend it, we now have “God with us.” The creator God is coming into the world to save the world.
Epiphany
Peace in a World Without Peace
Peace comes through choosing to rest fully in the arms of the Great Physician, the one who will transform us with the Spirit and with refining fire.
Epiphany
Light and Hope Until the Very End
We know how to live in light of all that is to come, both personally, with our own endings, and cosmically, with the end of the world as we know it. We live in love.
Epiphany
Fluency in both Grief and Hope
Hardship, as Jesus says, is inevitable, and it will come. But that hardship is also our opportunity as Christians to testify to goodness and to love.
Epiphany
A Wee, Little, Wealthy, Unlikely Saint
St. Zacchaeus saw Jesus coming, ran toward him, climbed a tree to see him, and then gave what he could give so that he could walk in the way of love.
Epiphany
Persistence in Protest, Prayer, and Patience
A life of prayer will ground us in a faith and in a relationship with God that will form us into a people best equipped to change the world around us.
Epiphany
The Foreigner as Teacher, Never Threat
“Jesus, Master, have mercy on us,” for not knowing enough modern-day lepers. Lead us into those relationships, that we may learn from them and love.
Epiphany
Baptismal Community as an Alternative to Hate
It is our privilege here to be a different example... to lead each other toward life, toward the practice of love, toward connection, toward our God.
Epiphany
The Life that Really is Life
We are invited to the life that really is life, the life of service, of giving up our love of money, of finding security and happiness in God alone.
Epiphany
Prioritizing Relationship, Serving a Loving God
We can serve money, security, our own priorities... or we can serve God, we can love, we can follow Christ and be led by the Holy Spirit. Choose.
Epiphany
The Good Shepherd Needs No Fences
We are all worthy of that sort of love, of a shepherd who leaves everything to save us; we are all worthy of a community who celebrates our return.
Epiphany
Setting Everything Down to Follow Jesus
“We must not foolishly cling to things,” Ajahn Chah writes. We hold them, for a time, but we “let them go. Good or bad, we let them all go.”