Jesus' inheritance to his disciples and to us is love.  Love is a gift and a commandment so that God's love might be experienced and passed down through the ages. 

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Is there room in God's character and love for all of our embodied human experiences?  In proverbs 9, Lady Wisdom, invites us to widen our understanding of God and our embrace of one another.  

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What do you do to get rid of hiccups?  Does it work?  Does anything work?  Our home remedies can all feel so foolish.   In 2 Kings 5 a brave warrior is looking for a cure, but the home remedy that he gets from a prophet seems so foolish.  But it's the foolishness that reveals the deeper wound and our need for healing.    

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The resurrection of Jesus affirms the value and goodness of our physical world, but our world is in danger.  On this Earth Sunday, the Easter story invites us to open our eyes to the reality of the climate crisis and the hope that collectively we can make a difference.   

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Happy Easter!  We come to the last chapter of the book of Ruth wondering if redemption is possible.  

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Like basically every season of any reality tv show, this next chapter is the craziest and most dramatic yet.   Out of desperation, Naomi and Ruth set a wildly provocative scene.  In a similar way, Jesus sets his own wildly provocative scene as he rides toward Jerusalem on a donkey.  

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Ruth goes out into the dangerous fields looking for leftover grain and wondering if there is any room for her in this world of fear and exclusion.  As it happens she comes to a  field with a few people who have intentionally left room as a reflection of God's inclusive generosity.  

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If we're not careful we will read the story of Ruth as if it were one of our common sense formulas.  So when Ruth gets up to work, we might assume that this is a perfect illustration of hard work = success.  But it's not that simple for Ruth who is a single woman in a male-dominated world.  It's not that simple for Ruth who is an immigrant in a xenophobic world.  Life is just not that simple for so many people.

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The story of Ruth is written as a response to the anti-immigrant prejudice of the day.  In the time of Nehemiah, she is the illegal immigrant, who challenges the stereotypes placed upon her.  She is the voice of the most vulnerable and she is the voice of God.  How can the story of Ruth help us to see those who are different than us with more openness, more compassion and more kindness.  

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What does it mean to belong?  Ruth was an immigrant.  Like many people, Ruth encountered judgment, prejudice, and exclusion because she was seen as a cultural and spiritual outsider.  But without her, history and maybe even our own stories would look very different. Join us as we begin our new sermon series looking at the revolutionary story of exclusion and belonging in the book of Ruth. 

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