• Take time to journal where you’ve felt God’s presence when you are in the wilderness.

• What ritual would you like to create in your life?

• Where do you need God to have your back?

• As God’s hands and heartbeat, how are you having this community’s back?

• What might you do beyond this community to be a Revolutionary Lover?

• What surprises you by the story of John the Baptist in the gospel of Mark?

• What lessons about the nature and behavior of oppression and power can you find in the story?

• What would happen if we always kept in mind the person coming after us? How would our lives change

FATHER’S DAY • JUNETEENTH :: Jun 17 by Middle Collegiate Church

• The Psalmist says when we come to end/when we wake up, God is with us. In your own life of faith, what does it mean for God to be ever-present in your life, waking, sleeping, good times, and challenging times. Write an affirmation about that for yourself.

• Fully-awake, or woke to the fact that God loves each of us with an up-close and personal love, how do we relate to each other. Can we see the God-ness in each of the so-called “other?” If so, what does that really mean in terms of the current political and social issues before us. Voting rights? Citizenship in territories, like Puerto Rico? The earning power of women and the way female bodies are viewed globally? LGBTQ rights, and the obvious erosion of human rights around the globe? In other words, how does our theology move all of us into the public square?

• How did the sermon and music inspire you for the week ahead?

• What do you think it means to be an “heir”? What does it mean to be an “heir of God”?

• Paul writes that we have received a “spirit of adoption,” not a “spirit of slavery.” How do the examples in the sermon illuminate what a spirit of adoption means for our lives?

• Some Christian theology demonizes “flesh” as evil and “spirit” as good. How can this line of thought be taken in the wrong direction?

• Where are you planted?

• Who or what is speaking into your life?

• Is your “good” going somewhere?

• How did the sermon and music inspire you for the week ahead?

• How does the psalmist’s prayer of thanksgiving make you think about the way God cares for you?

• How might we better care for the Earth that sustains us?

• Is there more you can tdo to be a steward of Middle Church?