Kati Beasley is speaking from Luke 2:22-40, Jesus’ presentation in the temple and Simeon and Anna’s prophetic words.

Kati Beasley, Special Guest Speaker | www.thedoor.org

Teaching Pastor: David Johnson, Lead Teaching Pastor | www.thedoor.org

The third Sunday of Advent, brings us to the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), Mary’s words in response to the angel’s message to her. Anne-Marie Finsaas, calls this a subversive, revolutionary song, “not Mary in her little blue gown, singing gently”! She shared Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s description of Mary’s Magnificat –

…the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung… a hard, strong, inexorable song about collapsing thrones and humbled lords of this world, about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind.

Mary echoes the Old-Testament prophets’ fierce longings for God’s ways to mend the world, confronting and undoing the evil set loose through our human fallenness.

Teaching Pastor: Anne-Marie Finsaas, Pastor of Formational Life | Advent 2017 | www.thedoor.org

The schedule of Scripture passages for the second week of Advent brings us to John the Baptist who, like Mary and many of the other great characters of the Bible, was a nondescript, on-the-margins-type person whom God chose instead of the big-shots of the world. John came with an Old-Testament mandate to make “crooked places straight and rough places plain,” which speaks of addressing the crookedness, corruption, and brokenness of the world. His whole being was a confrontation of the system he was addressing.

John came to help people see what they couldn’t see, and to understand what they didn’t understand. We need those same awakenings and healings. In Tom’s words, “John brought a huge confrontation on not seeing. Things are at stake here: people I don’t see, sin I don’t see, injustices I don’t see.” As you pray for Tom, would you pray for all of us?

The passages for this week,* so you can “read into” this Sunday are Isaiah 40:1-11, Malachi 3, and Mark 1:1-8.

Teaching Pastor: Tom Johnson, Missional Life Pastor | Advent 2017 | www.thedoor.org

Oh, give ear, Shepherd of Israel! Stir up Your power and come to save us!

Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at Your presence. (Psalm 80; Isaiah 64)

Advent starts this Sunday, the beginning of the traditional Church year. But as David shared last Sunday, this isn’t the beginning of the Story – we’re entering in the middle, where the human race is at the end of its rope; and the cry that rises from the nation of Israel is, “O God, come quickly!! Do something BIG!! How long are You going to wait?!”

God’s Answer, as David will lay out this Sunday, doesn’t seem very big. It looks like a 13-year-old girl who says yes. It looks like a baby. No obvious rending or quaking here!

The texts for Sunday are the cries of Israel in Psalm 80:1-7,17-19 and Isaiah 64:1-9.

Teaching Pastor: David Johnson Lead Teaching Pastor | Advent 2017 | www.thedoor.org

Teaching Pastor: David Johnson, Lead Teaching Pastor | Acts | www.thedoor.org

Doug Glynn is back and he's speaking on Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27. Doug has some questions that have come up – for himself, and for us:

• Where is Jesus in the storm?

• What if the boat does sink (because sometimes it does)?

• For Paul, and for us, what does it mean to trust Jesus in the storms of life?

There are so many “storms” out there – relationships, finances, health, the state of the world in general. Our prayer is that we will pay attention both to the storms, and to the answers with which our souls respond to these questions.

Teaching Pastor: Doug Glynn,, Guest Speaker | www.thedoor.org

David begins to take us through Paul’s last lap, the final phase not only of Acts but also of Paul’s ministry. Through five trials, ending with house arrest in Rome, Paul is unable to be out “doing” his ministry. Yet he’s experiencing a different kind of freedom as he writes his last letter to Timothy: “I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.”

We most likely won’t go through what Paul went through – but the perspective he had, and the internal life that compelled him to do what he did, need to be true about us. In words that Paul wrote to the Philippian church from his prison in Rome,

I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him. (Ph 3:8-9, NASB)

This Sunday is our Novembering service when, as a community, we gather to remember those who are no longer among us and, together, invite God into our places of loss and grief. The context for our remembering is the Communion Table: the flesh-and-blood God – who struggled, just like we do, as He faced into death and separation – who surrendered His will to the Father, became obedient unto death, and died in order to bring us back to the Father and make all things new.

In our culture, we don’t always know how to deal with what we’ve lost. So we’re intentionally making space to remember and, again like Jesus, enter into these gardens of struggle in the company of others.

Teaching Pastor: Al Schuck, Community Life Pastor | www.thedoor.org

We’re continuing in Acts 17 this Sunday; David will dive more deeply into the response Paul and Silas got in Thessalonica, looking at what got folks so riled. What was the message of the kingdom they preached that could so threaten Caesar? And what, then, is the message to us, about how we are to live in this present world?

Teaching Pastor: David Johnson, Lead Teaching Pastor | Acts | www.thedoor.org