Those worshipping in person should bring and wear a mask during the service. Masks will be available if you do not have one when you arrive. Windows and doors will also remain open during the services for additional air circulation, and ice water will be available.
Sunday, May 29 at 11 am | Bulletin
They invited Paul to accompany them to the Council of the Areopagus and said, ‘Let us learn of this new teaching you describe. You bring some strange notions to our ears, and we would like to know the meaning of all this.’ – Acts 17:19-20
This week has been another week of heartbreak, where the only appropriate responses are to feel anger and despair at the unrelenting scourge of gun violence that engulfs our country and takes more lives. There was no time to process the horror of Buffalo before the mass shooting at Uvalde happened, multiplying the horror. Nineteen children and two teachers mercilessly gunned down in their classroom, a haunting reminder of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting that took the lives of twenty children and six adults. And we collectively realized that nothing since then had changed.
It feels increasingly difficult to believe there is any way forward that is different. We feel dangerously close to becoming completely resigned to the situation as it is. I’ve had more than one person confide in me, lamenting, “I want to believe this is the moment when things will change, that this will finally be the wakeup call, but if we did nothing after Sandy Hook, why will now be any different?
We have reached a moment, I think, when we believe we can’t get beyond the status quo, beyond how things are. This is it.
But friends, how much room have we left for mystery? For God to move and make new what is dead and dying? We sure have managed to put God in a tight box with that way of thinking.
I keep returning to these words from Krister Stendahl, “Our vision is often more obstructed by what we think we know than by our lack of knowledge.”
Maybe in this moment, there is solace to be found in all that we don’t know?
We’ll explore this together later this morning, in the sanctuary and on the livestream at 11am.
Sending peace and love until then,
Andrea