As we continue our Easter Season focus “Trusting Together” Pastor Stephanie admits she has struggled with the focus text for this week. Was God really asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac? Hadn’t God just promised Abraham and Sarah that they would be the start of a great nation as numerous as the stars? The story isn’t that we should be willing to kill because God said so but it is about trust in God when faced with hard things in life. Abraham trusted in the promises so much that he was willing to sacrifice all he had. Isaac trusted in his father’s word that “God would provide” even as he was tied up on an altar. That kind of trust is not easy to come by, but Pastor Stephanie suggests that is easier together! Like working a puzzle without the box for reference, it is easier when we work together and can each see the pieces of the puzzle of life from a different perspective.

As we continue our Easter Season focus “Trusting Together” Pastor Chad invites us to consider what it takes to be the “Best of the Best.” For most things we can think of: athletes, actors, singers, and even investors, it takes years of experience and practice to become the Best of the Best. Our focus text features the Best of the Best in Prophets from the Old Testament: Elijah. What makes Elijah the best is not years of practice but his trust in the word of God. Elijah escapes to the wilderness where ravens provide him the food needed to survive just as God had told him. Elijah trusts God’s promise again when he asks a widow on the brink of starvation to feed him because God said the widow’s flour and oil supply would be enough and not run out until the drought in the land ended. God used the widow’s situation to open Elijah’s eyes to the suffering of his community which is ultimately made him the best of the best. Pastor Chad asks us to open our eyes to the suffering of our community so that we might become the Best of the Best in following the way God intends.

As we move into the Easter Season our focus moves to “Trusting Together.” Trust is important, when we hear a story that seems too good to be true we often demand of the storyteller “Prove it!” This week we hear the familiar story of “Doubting Thomas” who can’t believe the news that Jesus is alive and demands proof. Pastor Stephanie reminds us that Thomas was merely asking for the same proof the other disciples had experienced. The other disciples did not believe Mary’s story of her encounter with Jesus at the tomb until they saw Jesus standing among them. Without Jesus appearing before us our faith is dependent on trusting the promises of God and experiencing glimpses of those promises in the community around us.

Our exploration of our focus for Lent: “Beautiful Brokenness” wraps up with the most beautiful thing to come out of brokenness: the promise of New Life in Christ. The disciples’ expectations of a leader who would overthrow the Romans and fulfill the promise of return of the Kingdom were broken when Jesus was executed.  But, there was New Life in the grave where the women expected to find the broken body of their teacher and friend. The disciples’ shattered expectations made it nearly impossible to believe the women’s news of the beauty they experienced. Pastor Chad reminds us that we, too, find the Good News hard to believe until we have an experience where we encounter the beauty of the Risen Christ for ourselves.

As we continue our exploration of our focus for Lent: “Beautiful Brokenness” Pastor Stephanie recalls a shattered plate which no amount of glue and patience could put back together. Sometimes we feel like our lives have been shattered and no amount of our own effort can repair the damage. Our focus text for this week reminds us that like the potter reshaping a failed piece into something beautiful, God is at work reshaping us, no matter how badly shattered we are, into something more beautiful. 

As we continue our exploration of our focus for Lent: “Beautiful Brokenness” Pastor Chad talks about bones. When we are at our most broken we can feel like a pile of dry bones. How could this pile of bones ever live again? It’s the question the Prophet Ezekiel asks of God for the Israelites who have been left defeated, deported, and life-less. God’s response brings hope to the Israelites and offers us hope when we feel like dry bones. Hope does not come easy, it takes encountering others who have found hope and it takes practice! When our faith is put into practice and we believe, even just a little, in the hope of God’s promises it is like new life in breathed into us.

As we continue our exploration of our focus for Lent: “Beautiful Brokenness” Pastor Chad talks about heroes. More specifically broken heroes. When we are young we look up to the adults in our lives as infallible superheroes, as we gain more experience we recognize that our heroes are human and are inevitably broken falling short of our lofty expectations. We might turn to organizations expecting them to be too big to fail, but they do because they are run by broken humans. What can we do if the heroes and institutions in our life are all broken?! Pastor Chad encourages us to start with ourselves, admit that we too are broken and fail to live up to expectations. When we acknowledge our brokenness and own the consequences of that brokenness, we can work towards healing. But it is only by God’s grace alone that we can truly move forward.

As we continue our exploration of our focus for Lent: “Beautiful Brokenness” Pastor Stephanie helps us find beauty in the first story of brokenness, The Temptation of Adam & Eve. This origin story is also the origin of blame. When they are caught by God, having disobeyed the one simple commandment, they are quick to deflect blame, to find a scapegoat. Pastor Stephanie returns to last week’s story of the Woman caught in Adultery, to remind us how Jesus viewed scapegoating. None of us are without blame, it is in accepting responsibility for our own words, actions, or inaction that we can begin to rebuild the broken into something beautiful.

Pastor Chad begins our exploration of our focus for Lent: "Beautiful Brokenness" by asking what we do with the broken things in our life. He then reminds us of what God does time & again with what society says should be thrown out!

One of the ideas behind Momentum was exploring less familiar biblical stories to gain new insight to our faith. Throughout the year there are a number of familiar stories that when examined from a different angle offer a fresh set of insights. As we continue to explore our focus for February “Steadfast Resilience” we encounter a story that is used in the rotation of preaching texts regularly: “Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman.” Often when preaching on this text pastors will focus on Jesus reaching out across barriers of race & creed to bring healing. That’s usually Pastor Chad’s take on this text as he encountered it many times in his 16 years of preaching. But using the lens of “Steadfast Resiliency” opened a whole new perspective on the story. The steadfast persistence of the woman models spiritual resiliency that helps us recognize the need for persistence in our daily lives as we encounter challenges to the idea of faith that have been ingrained in our understanding of how God works in this world.