"So, you say you love the poor? Name them."

In this message, Pastor Eric reflects on the story of Elias Chacour, a Palestinian Christian who, as a child, experienced the trauma of his family and entire village being rounded up and violently forced to flee their homes in the founding of the State of Israel--and who yet would go on to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize two times, while receiving several other international peace awards.

In this message, Pastor Eric invites us to consider the ways that we use spiritual beliefs and practices to avoid certain parts of the human experience. Sometimes, we can believe that being "spiritual" means rising above emotions (namely the ones we don't like, such as fear, anger, grief, pain or shame). Rather than seeking a spirituality that calls us to move through these "wildernesses"--that helps us embrace the fullness of what it means to be human and journey through them toward new life--we too often turn to platitudes and practices to bypass being honest with ourselves about them.

In this message, Pastor Eric invites us into a playful practice of imagining possible futures; of imagining what’s possible without getting bogged down in whether or not it’s realistic or how to do it, etc.

In this message, Pastor Eric reflects on the famous passage from Ecclesiastes—“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, a time to die…”—and the central struggle on the author’s heart and mind: that life is filled with absurdities; the cause and effect “order” that we often want, simply doesn’t exist: bad things happen to good people.

In this message, Pastor Eric follows up his two previous messages reflecting on "where is God?" in order to reflect on what our answers to that question mean for the kind of community we can imagine--and therefore the kind of world we can work to create.