Advent is a season of waiting, but is idle waiting what God wants of us? In preparation for the coming Messiah, we wonder together—what things can’t wait? What demands our immediate attention? What requires our work and preparation? During our Advent season, First United will ask together, "What is it that God can’t wait for?" Is it our praise, reconciliation, and proclamation? Is it the end of suffering, isolation, and fear? This Advent, we invite you to join us in imagining, prioritizing, and preparing.

This week in worship, we are going to talk about how God can't wait for us to participate in hope. On this, the first Sunday in Advent, we will focus on the need to hold onto hope - to continue dreaming of and reaching for God’s promised day where there will be peace and all will know love. Pastor Sarah shares from the book of Isaiah and its telling of "God’s promised day" — a day when wars end, swords are beaten into plowshares, and spears become pruning hooks. Together, we will ask — How does unrelenting hope change us? What does Hope look like in Costa Mesa today? Where are places where the kingdom is here and now even when it feels so distant?

In our final week of "For the Bible Tells Me So", and we're asking one of the biggest questions for those of us who want to take scripture seriously if not literally. How does the Bible tell us to be church? Scripture seems pretty clear that we are to gather together, but why, and in what way? For thousands of years, people have been gathering around this one book and using it to inform how they are to function as a community. Entire communities have been created and split over the translation of one word from scripture. People meet on different days of the week all dependent on how they interpret what scripture is saying about church. Clearly, there are lots of ways to understand what "church" should look like. 

Scripture both invites us into a beautiful family-like community, but it also contains some disturbing community practices (slaves obey your masters!). This week, Pastor Sarah shares about the different ways scripture guides us toward being an authentic community that follows the way of Jesus and why we don't have to disregard all of its teachings when we come across things that seem antithetical to that way. This is going to be a powerful time as we talk about church and why First United exists.

From talking shrubbery to people coming back to life, there are many stories in the scriptures that break the natural laws of how we believe the world works. These occurrences are often referred to as "miracles", which Webster's Dictionary defines as "a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.” In the very definition of the word "miracle" is the idea that God must be the explanation for the unexplainable. This Sunday, as we continue to explore the Bible, we'll talk about these miracles and wonder...does the Bible tell me so when it comes to what is possible or even probable?

For many people, the miracle stories in the Bible are a reason they can’t take the book seriously. For others, theses stories require a faith that they find hopeful. And, still for others, they feel the need to treat miracles with an "apologetic reading" - one that seeks to explain what seems irrational using rational means. Those who use this method suggest things such as, "Of course it looked like Moses created a sea of blood. That’s the time of year that a certain kind of red algae would have appeared killing fish and causing the Egyptians to tremble." These are only three different ways of looking at the stories of miraculous events in scripture, and there are so many more ways of placing miracles within our own way of looking at the world. This week, Pastor Sarah uses the story of a healed leper in Mark to explore why the idea that everything is a miracle may be the only way to take the Bible seriously if not literally.

This week, we continue our series on "For the Bible Tells Me So" as we look at the book of Amos and his warnings to the nation of Israel. Darcy Anderson helps us examine what happens when our actions are all show and no substance and God calls for bigger things than displays of grandeur.

Darcy is a member and leader at Costa Mesa First United Methodist Church. She holds a Master's degree is in American Studies, which examines the how and why of American history and culture. Darcy's research areas include death, dying, and grief in American culture, as well as gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and ideals and institutions. She currently works at Cal State Fullerton as an Academic Advisor, Program Coordinator, and Adjunct Professor.

How do we absolutely know right from wrong? Some of us grew up with the notion that the Bible would give us all the answers. We were even told that the word Bible stands for "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth." Yet, if we look at the scriptures as an instruction booklet, we're often left feeling the same way we do when staring at Ikea instructions....lost. There are so many areas of life that the Bible doesn't cover, and our culture has changed so much that there is often no equivalent to what has been included.

"How am I supposed to treat people on social media?"
is a different question than
"How do I care for my multiple wives?"

Some people say the Bible is a rule book, but clearly life looks different than when it was written. So, if the Bible isn’t a rule book, what does it have to offer us? This Sunday as we continue our series, we're going to talk about how the Bible offers us something different than instructions...it offers God's wisdom. God's wisdom may not teach us rules to live by, but through scripture, we are given helpful lenses and questions to help us engage the world around us. Join guest speaker Rev. Anthony Boger as we talk about the way scripture helps us see the world around us.

I think we can all agree the Bible is a bit weird. Merriam-Webster defines weird as "of strange or extraordinary character," and I think that definitely applies with a number of passages. As familiar as we may become with the Bible, it still contains things that remain a mystery, and some of those mysteries are quite disturbing - so disturbing that we may want to discount the entire book. As we continue our series, we're diving into one of those disturbing areas of scripture that causes people to discount the Bible altogether…the subject of war.

Does the Bible tell us who we are to war with? 

If we're going to take the Bible seriously, if not literally, we have to address that God seems to encourage and demand violence in the Hebrew scriptures. No matter how you translate it, God is given the credit for violent genocide, women being assaulted, entire cities being wiped off the face of the earth, and numerous other negative events as Israel is establishing itself as a people group. We can’t just dismiss this image of God as an ancient understanding of how God operates. Even today, whether it's on the football field or the battlefield, God is often given the credit for very violent victories. How can we reconcile that with the God who teaches us, through Jesus, to turn the other cheek and to love our enemy? Is Jesus the hippie son of an angry God? Or, is the Bible offering us more than an either / or approach? In this message, Pastor Sarah shares about the idea of war in scripture and why people recorded God as the violent victor, and she will offer some ideas about how we can engage these stories in ways that make space for a different reading. 

Some of us have fond memories growing up and learning Bible stories that made us curious or confused or interested or even angry. Others were taught that we must believe every word of the Bible literally...or we really don’t believe the Bible at all. Some were taught in college that the Bible is merely a book of literature full of contradictions and historical inaccuracies. And, still others were led to believe the Bible is an instruction manual that if read carefully, will have the answers to everything from climate change to whether to be vegan.

There are huge problems with these approaches. In fact, many humans have turned their backs on the wisdom in this great book because of hanging on to a misguided perspective.

This week, Michael Bischof continues our series called “For the Bible Tells Me So” by considering our own journeys with the Bible and asking the question, “How are we taken care of?” The Bible is a book with many stories of deliverance and freedom, and the best news is that it still offers each of us deliverance in more than one way today.

As a child, you probably sang the song, "Jesus Loves Me." My guess is the lyrics are probably burned in your mind. "Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so." For many of us, the Bible has been a central component of our faith practice, and each week when we gather as a community, we read from the ancient text as most Christian communities do. The Bible is quoted in many different settings from pulpit, poetry, and political spheres. Clearly, this text is important, not just within the faith community. And, yet, people use the Bible and view it quite differently. Opposing sides will even say, "The bible clearly says..." when arguing two different sides of an issue. "For the Bible tells me so" isn't as clear of a statement as we may have thought. This week, we begin a new series to talk through some of the things we may have been told the Bible clearly says.

We begin at...the beginning or origin. People use scripture to suggest we were created as part of a seven day process by the divine. Creationism, as it is known, takes scripture to be a literal account of how we got here...the product of two people. For creationists, the miracle of creation is that from dirt our relatives were formed. This week, we're going to talk about some different ways to look at our origin story and why the story holds mystery even for those who assert that the creation narrative is nothing more than an analogy. There is deep mystery to be found in this ancient text, and together we will figure out why it’s a gift to read it together.

As we close up our series on "Re-Formation: Building a Faith After Deconstruction," we're also finishing up our object lesson of repurposing the church's original front doors. Last week, we talked about how even after being with Jesus for years, the disciples were still asked, “Who do you say that I am?” They needed to re-evaluate and rename who they thought Jesus was. Those of us who have experienced a faith-shift or a community-shift have also been invited into re-imagining who Jesus is. Once that happens, there's a shift in how we see ourselves and our faith. The result - something new is being revealed. In the midst of this reconstruction, the most important question, not just for individuals, but for our community, is to ask "Why?" Why have we gone through this shift? Why are we repurposing these doors? What now? In this message, Pastor Sarah helps us look at why Jesus’ words found in Matthew 7:21-29 are Good News, and we learn how they can help us build something new. This new thing will never be just for us, but it will make space for others as well.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines reformation as the act of “putting or changing something into an improved form or condition.” When it comes to re-forming our beliefs, it requires an imaginative vision, and it demands that we're willing to ask tough questions. This week in our series on building a faith after deconstruction, we move toward reconstruction or re-formation, which can be a disorienting experience, but also a time of great freedom and creativity.

Re-forming our faith begins by asking the same question we asked at the beginning of our faith journey - “Who is Jesus?” There are as many answers to this question as there are people, but our answer creates the framework upon which our faith is built. For some, Jesus is a model for the way we live our life. For others, Jesus is the Savior who rescued them from a certain demise. This question has created denominations, invited people into a life of benevolence, caused a number of wars, and made people leave behind everything they have known to start a new life.

Sometimes, churches have told us that this question should only be asked once, and the answer should lead us to a particular prayer that seals our answer to the question. Scripture seems to give us a different example. Even after walking with Jesus in the flesh, his own disciples are asked, “Who do you say that I am?” This question and their answers will define the next steps in their faith. In reality, it serves us well to ask this question often as we create a healthy framework to build our faith upon. Listen in as Pastor Sarah shares why we have to answer "Who do you say that I am?" more than once, and why that is good news.