Scripture: Isaiah 9:1-7

Believe it or not, friends, the good news of the scripture this week is that God, in all the ways we conceive of God, is seeking to be light for us in spite of everything that would drag us down.

God, the creator has created abundant light in our nearest star that feeds all life on earth.

God, the sustainer has created an inner light in each of us that we take pains to kindle and foster when it is suppressed.

God, the power beyond us who so-loves-this-world that God finds expression in the lives of human beings that we call prophets and that we call Christ.

God, the light within us that is our soul is a new dawn rising in our world. Whenever we read Isaiah, we are reminded that it is the nature of light to come to those who have lived in darkness.

Did anyone see the northern lights this week?1

In a week when the lights of the aurora borealis were vivid in the night sky even this far south in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, we can take it as a good sign that unexpected light is closer than we might think, even in the darkness.

The northern lights are caused when the sun emits an extra-large amount of energy called a solar wind. The earth’s atmosphere blocks most of the solar wind that reaches earth, but some of that solar energy gets in and transforms the molecules of the upper atmosphere, creating a dancing and glowing light display in the upper atmosphere.

Light is all about transformation. And God is seeking transformation

The words of the prophet Isaiah we just heard — namely, “that the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” — served to reassure the descendants of Abraham in the seventh century BCE that there was hope even as their nation was in danger of being conquered by a stronger force.

These words woke the descendants of Abraham up from the depths of their despair and offered an assurance that made their redemption and transformation possible.

We remember from the past twelve weeks of scripture readings that a covenant, a promise from God, has been passed down through the generations — it was first made to Abraham and Sarah, and then Rebekah and Isaac, and the twelve sons of Jacob who went down into Pharoah’s Egypt, and then Moses and Miriam and Aaron brought them all back out again. And then the people of God’s covenant set up judges, and then kings to rule over them, and the kings failed to protect the justice and peace of the people, and empires came to afflict and disperse the people of the covenant — and even after all this, they find comfort in the words of the Prophet Isaiah whose ominous message is also one of hope from God. Even though it feels like they are living in a world that is being destroyed, dormant seeds and green sprouts are finding unexpected life and light at their feet. The people in darkness find a comfort that makes their salvation possible.

In the birthing class that Grace and I have been taking over the past several weeks, the teacher talks about the benefits of practicing and preparing yourself for transformation. Her advice is broadly applicable for all parts of life. If you are afraid, and poised in your body for fight or flight, it is hard to take on postures and mindsets for transformation. So, the goal becomes how do we create the conditions of safety so that one can respond to the uncertainty of change and changing conditions with confidence. It’s no surprise that this advice works on a societal level just as well as it works for individuals.

People who are always in the conditions of fear and hopelessness and scarcity have farther to go on the way to transformation and flourishing.

The prophet Isaiah understands this — the people need food, healing, abundance, love, and protection, because without these things, transformation is impossible.

Isaiah is a prophet who is engaged in the work of naming what is wrong with the world just one or two generations after the prophet Amos, who we read last week. Amos bemoaned the behavior of the comfortable and wealthy people in the northern kingdom and said the people had abandoned the pursuit of justice. Into the darkness comes Isaiah who says that God’s light will shine from the darkness, in the form of a coming child who will bring a reign of peace, and who will keep the people of Judah in the south from meeting a disastrous fate.

This is a lot of pressure for Isaiah to put on a child who is still yet unborn.

On this point, one of our first observations in the Friday morning Bible Study this week as we read Isaiah chapter 9 was that the scripture in verse six is the lyrics for Handel’s Messiah:

“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”

Christians sing Handel’s song during Advent because we hear in its words a potential foreshadowing of the birth of Jesus — a child in whom people experience an expression of God and who opens up a new era of peace. Advent begins on November 30th this year and will go until Christmas eve — it’s a season of stargazing and anticipation, the humble beginning of a new Christian year in the church calendar in a season of darkness.

But Isaiah in this morning’s reading is not directly foretelling the coming of Jesus in seven hundred years; he is foretelling the immediate coming of a good king, Hezekiah, who will come to save his people from further harm from the Assyrian empire. Hezekiah will be responsive to the message of the prophets, and will pursue justice, and rally the people against their oppressors in a way that brings forth the best in the people.

This is my hope for all of us, that we might enter this seasons of waiting and anticipation before transformation with the hope that seeds and green sprouts now dormant are also taking root with the hope of what the people of God will do together with our covenant hope. It has been done before. Our scriptures tell us it has been done before many times.

May it be true for us too.

Amen.

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1. “Northern Lights Shine Over Boston, New England in Rare Show,” NBC Boston, November 11, 2025, https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/photos-northern-lights-visible-in-new-england/3843865/. ︎

About ten years ago, a teenager who I’ll call Ben threw a brick through a window.

One of Ben’s friends had taken a video of it, and soon the police from this suburban Boston town tracked it back to Ben and came calling to inquire and press charges against the teenager.

Even before people in town knew who had thrown the brick and destroyed the window, there was widespread outrage in the town. The broken window, it turned out, had been part of a building that memorialized dozens of people in the town who had died in an accident. It seemed like everyone in town had a strong emotional connection to this memorial, and the broken window felt to them like a personal assault on a loved one.

Vandalism charges in Massachusetts probably come with a hefty fine, perhaps some type of probation, maybe even a mark on a criminal record — but what’s perhaps even more impactful in a small town like this, an act of vandalism like this can result in a teenager being disliked and ostracized — and things like this have a way of festering into cycles of harm.

This is where an alternative consciousness comes in.

Twenty-five years ago a police chief and a restorative justice practitioner founded an restorative justice organization in Greater Boston. Restorative justice is a categories of practices and beliefs that believe that no person is expendable, and that people are capable of repair and forgiveness in instances of harm. The organizations has grown and grown such that dozens of police chiefs and district attorneys now divert criminal cases against teenagers into the organization’s restorative process.

I was a volunteer restorative justice facilitator for for several years, and my partner and I were given Ben’s case.

We met with Ben who took responsibility for what he had done. Originally, he had had no idea that the window was part of a memorial. He said that his friends had been throwing water bottles and tennis balls onto the roof as part of a game. And then he took things too far with the brick. It was a stupid thing to do.

Over the course of many months, Carol and I accompanied Ben as part of a restorative process as he met with family members of people who were memorialized at the building Ben harmed — he told them his story of acting foolishly and breaking the window, and he listened to the stories of their emotion and pain after hearing about the vandalism. Ben also helped with the window repair and learned landscaping skills from a community member who volunteered to make the memorial space more beautiful than ever.

The community got to appreciate Ben putting in time, making connections with community members, and apologizing to the people he had impacted. Something good and meaningful came out of something that otherwise might have divided and harm the town. Everyone got a second change to be their best self.

A different way was possible. The people, together, nourished an alternative consciousness.

This is the creative space where we meet the prophet Amos this morning. A prophet in the bible is someone who believes that a different way of living is possible and necessary.

There are many prophets in the Bible — think Jeremiah, and Isaiah. Think Ezekiel, and Micah. Think Moses. Think Jesus.

Amos just happens to be the earliest named prophet to have his words written down, and therefore is the oldest prophet in the section of the Hebrew Bible devoted to prophetic works.

To be a prophet in the biblical sense means to evoke a public consciousness that is an alternative to the accepted dominant culture.

Every prophet does this differently.

Amos has a message for the descendants of Sarah and Abraham in the eighth century BCE — a time of prosperity for this group of people between being conquered and sent into exile by more powerful empires. Amos speaks emphatically to these comfortable people.

Amos is a hearty shepherd from Judah in the south who travels to Isreal in the north to criticize the people for thinking that their worship is more important than the pursuit of justice.

Again — Amos condemns and slams and lambasts the people of God for thinking that they could substitute worship for the pursuit of justice.

Like all prophets, Amos critiques from a place of covenant and connection with the people — he is also a follower of God. Amos is one of these people. But when he sees them hiding behind their wealth while at the same time turning a blind eye to the struggles of the people around them — Amos calls out their misbehavior in the most minute detail.

The prophet channels the voice of God, saying:

“I hate and despise your festivals,
    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.”

Which is their worship.

“Take away from me the noise of your songs;
    I will not listen to the melody of your harps.”

God concludes with perhaps the most remembered words in Amos:

“But let justice roll down like water
    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

The prophet Amos doesn’t provide the alternative vision. He is the wrecking ball. He leaves the building of an alternative world to others. Perhaps he leaves the building of an alternative world to us.

In my own life, I’ve seen alternative consciousness made at Communities for Restorative Justice. I’ve seen alternative ways of living made in schools and in politics and in churches.

Friends . . . in our own world and time, I think the equivalent of our prophet Amos has already come. We are aware that another way of living is possible. We’ve woken up to the climate crisis; we’ve come to understand the nature of a mental health crisis; we’re seeing crises of hunger play out. We’ve seen the festering cycles of harm play out in our society for vulnerable people at the expense of those who could intercede.

It’s relatively easy to help one person like Ben; it’s harder to create an alternative consciousness for a whole society. But I would propose that the prophets teach us that a new world is only built one person at time, and to take heart that the process is exponential.

In our time there is a force that would have us forget our history and give up our hope. In this context, a community that is rooted in sacred memories, and stories, and radical hope is a threat to the dominant force — and thank God that it is. A church that is grounded in worship and justice has something important to offer. This is our moment.

We are on the journey of alternative consciousness.

Together we believe that another way is possible.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

© 2025 Newman Church. All Rights Reserved.

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Sxripture: 1 Kings 19:3–13

As I mentioned in today’s welcome, today is All Souls’ Day, sometimes also called in a celebratory way the Day of the Dead.

It is a day of intentional celebration, in the face of the uncomfortability of loss — this is a way we invite God into the cracks and wounds and heartaches of our lives, by setting time aside to embrace celebration and discomfort together.

In 2010, I lived in New Orleans for a few months.

Having spent my whole life up to that point in New England, New Orleans was a whole new world.

Different music, different weather, different art, different traditions.

And because it was only five years after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, a whole new world was being assembled and reconstructed in New Orleans — yet the uncomfortable signs and symbols of loss and death were everywhere. There were the spraypainted circles still on many houses that indicated that the house had been checked after the storm and what had been found there. There were hospitals and high-rise buildings that had not been part of the recovery and sat there crumbling with trees growing out of the windows.

One of the things I discovered by accident by walking around the city was the fact that the street artist Banksy — one of the most famous artists of the twenty-first century — had traveled to New Orleans only a few years after Katrina — and in the altered cityscape he had created fifteen or so pieces of graffiti art in the midst of abandoned buildings and ongoing rebuilding.

One Banksy piece depicted a young girl looking up to discover that her umbrella above her head was the source of a downpour, drawing attention to the failed effort to protect people during the hurricane.

Another showed a boy using an orange life-preserver as a swing.

Another showed looters in uniform taking televisions out of a building.

Banksy and other local artists bringing a source of creative joy and critical commentary into a places of loss was a transformative act. We know this type of story from the Gospel tradition too.

The power of Jesus was the power of his healing spectacle in a time of suffering. The more he healed and helped, the more people who followed him; the more people he revitalized to new life, the more people believed in his positive impact; the more people who were fed by him, the more people who went forth to feed others.

There is a growing sense in the Gospel story of Jesus that he is something that people increasingly want to be a part of it.

The same can be said of the prophet Elijah at the beginning of this morning’s scripture reading. He is coming off an amazing spectacle where he had triumphed over the followers of a rival God to YHWH, proving in many ways that YHWH was a God one would want to be a part of — YHWH was a source of strength and direction.

So why, we might wonder, is this reading about Elijah’s suffering and sadness?

This is a familiar story in scripture — it begins with Elijah fearing for his life — think of Moses fleeing Egypt when he finds out people know he murdered an Egyptian; think of Mary and Jospeh with Jesus fleeing Bethlehem when they find out Herod has ordered the death of newborns; think of Jacob fleeing from his enraged brother Esau. We already know this story of Elijah in some sense, from its familiarity in scripture — it embodies the fact that life can be fragile and uncertain.

Elijah experiences desolation — the dark night of the soul. In the desert, underneath the broom tree, he asks God to, quote, “take away his life.”

One commentator says, Elijah “is utterly at the end of his own courage.”

In a sense, this reading about Elijah is a story of aftermath. Like, if they made a Marvel Superhero sequel movie about everyone having to clean up and process the mess everyone made in the previous movie. This movie about Elijah would follow the superhero from the heights of his achievement into the quiet context of his recovery and doubt about what he has done.

In this superhero story, Elijah has been a superhero for God, and after his big show, his big battle, his big success — he has just lost his nerve. He has fled south seeking safety, goes as far as the last settlements, and then goes a day farther into the desert.

This is a world where YHWH’s rule is more immediate and powerful than the rule of the Kings. In a book of Kings, the monarchs look foolish and ineffective — their decisions end in absurdity and chaos, whereas God in the story is powerful even when just showing up as a small voice.

This voice of God is just enough to nourish the prophet Elijah, to resuscitate his resolve, to make him the focus of the story as opposed to the stories of the Queens and Kings.

Sometimes a spectacle is what we need to get through something difficult: Jesus’s ministry was a spectacle; Banksy’s art in New Orleans was a spectacle; I even remember when my father was in active ministry, he once preached a sermon while doing a head-stand — I don’t remember what the sermon was about or why he was standing on his head, but I will never forget the event.

But God in scripture is not a spectacle. God sometimes calls prophets like Elijah to make a splash and grab the people’s attention. But more often than not, God shows up in our quiet vulnerability.

This reading ends today: A great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart, but God was not in the wind.

An earthquake shatters the earth, but God was not in the earthquake;

Likewise God was not in the fire. But God was in the strange small whisper that Elijah heard and inspired him to keep going.

Friends, in this season of monumental happenings, in this season when we remember the losses we have experienced, help us to look beyond the spectacle to find God abiding with us in the quiet beyond the active world.

In this way we’ll take part in the dance of God’s creation from death, back into life.

May it be so.

Amen.

© 2025 Newman Church. All Rights Reserved.

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This morning we have seen the power of covenant in action.

A covenant is a promise to God and to each other to act, and think, and dream, and be ourselves in certain ways in community.

In the covenant of baptism for infants, parents and godparents make promises on behalf of the children who are too young to make promises for themselves, until a time (usually in high school, or a confirmation class) that those young people have grown into an age of decision-making and they can affirm and choose to make the Christian covenant promises for themselves.

The baptism covenant includes the promises of living a life of Christian discipleship, following in the way of Jesus, working against the powers of oppression and evil, showing love and justice in all things, and witnessing to the word and work of Jesus.

It’s a beautiful tradition to take part in.

Here in Newman Church over many years and seasons of life I have seen Christian disciples made and lives changed. I’ve seen kind people who are smoothed in the spirit like stones made soft by the sea — people who commit themselves to living lives of devotion to causes and communities who transform the world for the better inspired by the love of Jesus — people who become spiritual guides and friends to the new people who walk through these doors looking for something new, and looking to begin a spiritual journey.

The tradition of Jesus, taking part in the Holy Spirit, with the help of God and each other — I feel lucky to be a part of it.

Why do we do this? What is the purpose of making covenants, like in baptism, and marriage, and church membership?

I’m always wary when the answers to my questions seem to come from my high school chemistry classes. I love biology and chemistry and physics, but have never mastered the finer points of any of them.

But perhaps the difference between the covenants of our faith, and the everyday promises that we make to each other is like the difference between covalent and ionic bonds.

When atoms have charges that are balanced by another atom them encounter, sometimes their electrons are shared.

If I’ve lost you in that sentence, have no fear — I’m with you. I’m going to bring us all back together in just a moment.

When atoms form ionic bonds, it means that one atom transfers an electron or electrons to another atom — they are bonded through the act of giving.

But in a covalent bond, two atoms find a comfortable balance by sharing the same electron or electrons — it becomes an active part of both atoms.

I think our faith covenants are like covalent bonds. If we can give an electron to God in the form of an intention about our own lives through baptism, or church membership, or other acts of discipleship, God will take part in this intention with us because we are bonded — through the promise we find a neutral balance with which to approach the world “with the help of God.” These words — “with the help of God” — make the covenant easier to carry. Through covenant, we take part in God; through covenant, we can do things that are otherwise impossible.

Since September here at the church we have been on a journey through the Bible — week-by-week in worship.

We started with the creation story in Genesis — with God jumping into action to establish a beautiful home for life to thrive in the vast expanse of space.

God later made a covenant with Abraham and Sarah that their descendants would become a people blessed by God — that through faith they could walk together. God was active through the covenant bond.

We saw that covenant passed on through the generations, through Rebekah and Isaac, and Jacob. The covenant was strong enough to send the descendants of Abraham into Egypt to avoid dying of a famine, and it was strong enough to draw them out of Egypt when the site of their salvation because a place of oppression. God was active through the covenant bond.

We saw how the covenant found expression when God called Moses and Miriam and gave them the confidence to act courageously. God was active through the covenant bond.

We saw the covenant tested when the descendants of Abraham were facing famine again during their travels in the wilderness. But God was active through the covenant bond.

And we saw the covenant change with the prophet Samuel and the shepherd boy David who defeated the behemoth Goliath. God was active through the covenant bond.

We have learned a lot about God’s covenant with humanity. Again and again, God is faithful to the covenants of God’s people — even if it’s not in the easiest or most efficient way, or the way we might hope.

We also see the covenant active in Jesus’s baptism in the Gospels too. From the waters of baptism in the Jordan River, Jesus is baptized by his cousin and a new covenant of is established between God and humanity through Jesus.

We ask the Holy Spirit to help connect us to Jesus’s baptism when we perform baptisms today — and through this connection we take part in Jesus’s new covenant again every time a baptism happens. All we have to do to find the right balance through this covalent bond is to live a life of discipleship. This is easier said than done — and it feels like no coincidence that Jesus goes from his own baptism into the wilderness for forty days — from water to wilderness — as if to prepare himself for the wonderful things that are about to begin.

A covenant is not a promise that we know how it ends, or that all will be well all the time. It’s a promise that no matter what comes, God and the community of Christ will be with you always.

As the baptism prayer says, the promise of the gospels is made not only to us but to our children — meaning the next generation, with whom we are tied in many ways. So for all the generations past, and all the generations to come, we are united through this covenant bond.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

© 2025 Newman Church. All Rights Reserved.

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Scripture: 1 Samuel 16: 1–13

The boy Samuel of last week has become the kingmaker this week.

On a weekend here in the United States when many gathered to make a public witness against monarchy in the United States, there seems to be a resonance that our planned lectionary scripture reading today begins with the end of Saul, the first monarchical leader of the Israelites in the Biblical book of Samuel.

God asks the prophet Samuel to get ready to anoint a new leader, because Saul has acted badly. The story we read today is the narrative of Samuel finding Saul’s replacement as leader — this leader ends up being the smallest, youngest, mildest, meekest great-grandchild of Ruth and Boaz, named David.

I should say that everyone only sees David as the smallest, youngest, mildest, and meekest because that is his outward appearance. Like Cinderella who wasn’t initially invited to try on the shoe, or the boy Arthur who wasn’t invited to try to pull the sword from the stone, David wasn’t even brought before Samuel because he was just a boy who kept sheep.

But everyone will learn that David is powerful in small ways that people don’t appreciate — until they do.

In our public imagination, this boy David is the original underdog. You can tell me if I’m wrong, but I think there’s something in human nature that celebrates when a less powerful individual or group triumphs over a much stronger adversary.

I’m an East Providence Townie through and through, but I can tell you that when I saw the little Westerly High School football team outscore East Providence School back in September by almost fifty points, there was something in me that felt a deep respect.

One of the most known Bible stories in the world today is the story of David and Goliath. This small, young, mild, and meek shepherd boy David chooses to enter into single combat against the behemoth Philistine warrior Goliath. King Saul (who is on his way out) tells David that the boy should put on big bulky armor, as if to say that he needs to act according to a certain set of proscribed rules.

But David has trained in a different school of thought. He has spent years defending his sheep from large animals by perfecting the skill of projecting high-velocity rocks at the heads of wolves and bears, etc.. If we think about it this way, David is powerful in a very small and useful way, and we might even feel bad for Goliath as David approaches him. Goliath, this slow mighty warrior with a big sword and clunky armor really never had a chance against a skilled hig-velocity rock slinger like David.

This is the context of world that God enters to dethrone King Saul and bring his blessing onto a small, young, meek, mild child who is actually more prepared for what is expected of him than anyone really knows. And so God, who understands and engages the world differently from the way we do, asks Samuel to take up his horn of holy oil and anoint the boy David.

The unexpected anointing of David is a model for Jesus, and it’s a model for all of us as well.

Jesus was an unassuming person in his world — a manual laborer, who spent time in study and prayer, and who didn’t participate in the military or power struggles of his time . . . until he did, in an unexpected way. Jesus was a teacher who gathered followers by the promise of being a community of healing and love . . . his strength was not the traditional type of Goliath — it was an inner strength of David, his skill was his spirit; his skill was his ability to work with others; his skill was approaching the world with love and generosity when the world was throwing up obstruction after obstacle to love. His revolutions was a quiet people powered movement that caught the eye of empire and Rome and which led to the powerful needing to remove this itinerant Rabbi who was the center of the people’s hope.

We live in a time that feels like obstructions and obstacles to love are prevalent . . . and we’re looking and hoping for the center of our hope. The struggle to put ends together is real. The societal social net that we’ve built in order to care for our collective health, collective housing, collective nutrition, collective security, collective education, collective hope . . . it’s frayed and fraying.

One storyline in the Bible says that King Saul came to power after the people of the idealistic tribes of Israel cried out for a King to rule over them. They thought that a monarch was a status symbol, and a sign of their complexity and readiness to transition from a nomadic to an established people. The Israelites in their request for a King, changed the fundamental nature of their society, and lost the people-centered and covenantal-centered power of their identity.

Becoming a king later changed the young, small, mild, and meek David too. The nimble liberator became encumbered with power, and failed to hold himself to the high bar that God had set for him. And God had to call another prophet, Nathan, to tell David that he had lost his way and God would not abide with him any longer.

In the United States, each period that we call a time of advancement has also come with both a change of society and a change of spirit.

In our revolutionary period it was a change of spirit called a Great Awakening, when religious fervor in the colonies showed the people that a change of religion was possible, and that a change in government was probably possible as well. The struggle was that the destructive practice of engaging in human slavery was holding flourishing back. In the Industrial period of the nineteenth, a second Great Awakening came when a spiritual revolution swept the young nation, and helped lay a groundwork for a liberatory movement that ended in a civil war.

We are in a time of great change, seeking a sign for a spiritual movement of love, like the one initiated by Jesus thousands of years ago, to sweep through our world. Perhaps it needs to be initiated by meek and mild folk like us.

I feel like every week the question of whether I and we are up to the challenge of community ministry comes to the forefront, and each week I and we get to decide and choose yes again, and renew our commitments with the help of God to take part in this care-of-souls business. Like Samuel and David, to clean up the messes made by Kings. The care of souls requires a rock-slinging nimbleness, and we’re trying to get better at it every week . . . we care for others because we want others to help us with the care for the soul of others, and together we can be part of the ever-growing revolution of the soul.

Sometimes the widespread care of souls is called an awakening.

Sometimes it’s called a Jesus movement.

Sometimes it’s called the right thing to do.

And sometimes it’s the only thing left to do. And with the help of God who calls prophets to anoint unexpected leadership, I hope we will be a part of it. Amen.

© 2025 Newman Church. All Rights Reserved.

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Scripture: 1 Samuel 3:1–18

So I want to begin with another word of gratitude to Rev. Peter Lovett for worshiping with our community last week and helping us on our worshiping way through the Bible. Peter offered a beautiful reflection on the Exodus story of God’s people receiving spiritual nourishment in the wilderness — drawing on his own recent experiences in Washington DC and the search for nourishment in a time of rupture and national dislocation. He offered us space to mourn and feel the changes that the Exodus story invited us into.

Peter’s time with us also created an opportunity for Grace and I to travel to Vermont last weekend to attend a friend’s wedding, which was a joy-filled event up in the mountains of New England.

From the Exodus wilderness wandering last week, the scripture reading this week has moved us forward from the descendants of Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Rebecca and Jacob leaving their oppression in Egypt and getting stuck in the wilderness to this week a later generation of God’s people working hard to establish new ways of being a community together. The Book of Samuel works in tandem with the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Kings to speak to the messy process of God’s people working to establish a settled community and create sustainable practices, like a government, and ways of calling new leaders.

Right away, we are introduced to Samuel, a boy who is described as a student of the old priest Eli, both of whom are living in the temple and ministering to the Lord.

The line in the whole story that stands out to me most is the next sentence after meeting these two ministers: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” This line embodies a belief that some time has passed since the people’s experience of God was more widespread — as if to say, “God had not called a prophet like Moses from a burning bush in quite some time.”

And as with all good literature, this line is a setup here to help us appreciate God’s return to the biblical story in a meaningful way. God speaks to Samuel in a quiet and unassuming way.

It is noteworthy that this important story about the call of Samuel is not about a big battle, or an epic oration, or a stirring movement of the masses . . . it’s about a quiet night, perhaps one not unlike last night, where someone was trying to sleep and they kept being disturbed by a persistent murmur that they almost don’t believe is real.

There’s something special here about God’s reentry in a time of silence.

Last weekend in Vermont, I went with a group to the visitor center of a Carthusian monastery, near the wedding we were attending. Carthusians are a very old order of Christian monks who take vows of silence and poverty. They live in solitude as hermits, separate from the world, secluded within individual cells, pursuing an “interior solitude” of the heart in which a connection with God can be cultivated — it’s not the way I would choose to cultivate my relationship with God, but it is a way, and it is a way that reminds us of the power of making space for quiet, and listening for God to get our attention.

As the Carthusians say about themselves, “our vocation is to devote ourselves to the silence and solitude of the cell. It is holy ground, the place where God and God’s servants frequently converse, as between friends.”

Like the Carthusians in their little rooms, reading and praying and listening for God, in the quiet of this scripture story, Samuel and Eli are in their own private space in resting postures, and they’re quiet. From this deep silence, Samuel hears something that would have been easily missed if there had been a thousand and one things happening around him.

It’s a spiritual practice. How can we incorporate listening and contemplation practices into our lives so that we too can come to know the calls of God who is still speaking? 

It’s important to note that Samuel needs to be taught what to do when God calls out. This is a reminder that it’s hard (and perhaps impossible) to live a life of faith on our own. We need to see the reflection of the divine in others. That’s how we learn to take part in the divine — alongside others. Even the Carthusian monks in their solitude eat meals together and take weekly walks together.

When God calls to Samuel, it is the elder Eli who tells Samuel how to act — he says, tell God that your servant is listening, and then listen. Eli shows the way.

Two weeks ago the world lost a great storyteller in our friend and church member John Burrill, who passed away and whose funeral we will have on Tuesday afternoon at the Tripp funeral home in Pawtucket.

As those who spent time with John can attest to, John was a talented storyteller. He had anecdotes about every topic under the sun, and many of them from the church communities he was a part of over the course of his life . . . like the story about one of his ministers who couldn’t sleep all night and tossed and turned trying to remember something he had forgotten or something left undone, and in the morning the it turned out that the church carillon had broken in the night and the church bells were not ringing every fifteen minutes as they were supposed to. The unnatural absence of the familiar bells marking the hours was deafening to John’s minister.

John’s sons have reflected on the fact that they didn’t always know what caused their father to tell the stories that he told, these church stories and stories about his childhood in West Newbury, Massachusetts. They wondered, was he trying to teach them lessons? Was he trying to impart some piece of essential wisdom to them?

These are the basic questions that Samuel asks too. Why is God speaking to me? What is the purpose of this calling in the night?

John’s family has reflected that, taken in their totality, their father’s stories seem to be about his love for them, for the church that was a bedrock of his life, and for the people who shaped him. His solid love and commitment came through in the stories that John told and that they listened to.

Listening is a spiritual practice — it can lead to action, it can lead to insight, and perhaps the most exciting and scary part is that we don’t know where it will lead. God does something new all the time and we will find ways to take part in it.

Speak God, for your servants are listening.

Amen.

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Scripture: Selections from Exodus 2, 3, and 4

A sermon is a unique part of our worship service; it’s a distinct form of sacred communication — not a speech, not a report, but a proclaiming of the Good News in our time.

The sermon’s purpose, as I see it, is to speak to the movement of the spirit of God as God moves in your life, and as God moves in our collective lives and times.

And when God is at work, there is Good News to be shared. Here in this church we are in the business of noticing, and paying attention, and watching for the Good News of God so that we can take part in it when we see it.

We can’t expect that God will get our attention in the method that God uses in scripture this morning — which is appearing to Moses in the form of a bush that is on fire but is not consumed by the flame.

Instead, we usually have to look for God in the everyday miracles all around us . . . the everyday gatherings and conversations that inspire us, the other driver who shows you kindness, the teacher who goes the extra mile with their students, the neighbor who makes the extra effort to get to know you, the encouragement, love, and direction that we receive from others because these moments are encoded with the love of God . . .

And when two or more people meet and collaborate, the space between them is sacred. The sacred is where you are when you encounter others with love.

The sermon is also an opportunity for a minister to make the connections of where they see life of the community connecting with the Good News. It’s helpful for us to know where we’re experiencing God, and thinking about religion, and about the sacred, so that when we meet, and when we work together to carry out the missions and values of the church in the hard times and the good times, we will know how and where God is in the midst of it.

The big event in my life in this season of life is that Grace and I are getting ready to welcome a child to the world in December. This is something new for us. The room we’ve designated as a nursery at home is filling up with the material of raising a child. We’re learning, and planning, and generally just getting ready for this unknown.

And this event on the horizon is changing the way I’m encountering the scripture about Moses this week.

I’ve been thinking about names a lot: the meaning of names, the significance of naming, what name to call a newborn . . .

One of the first things we learn about the baby Moses is that he is named Moses by someone who is not his parents. He’s named by someone he isn’t related to.

Moses was born during a time when the leader of Egypt — the Pharaoh — has decreed that the male descendants of Jacob, who we learned about last week, should be killed to avoid them becoming too plentiful and powerful.

So Moses’s mother floats her son down the river to save his life. Moses gets his name from the daughter of the powerful Pharaoh, who finds the little baby floating down a river — and she gives him a name that in her own Egyptian language means son — she makes a claim on him through this name.

But Pharaoh’s daughter also seems to know that in Hebrew, the name Moses means “the one who is drawn out,” because she found him and took him out of the water. Her naming seems to be an act of kindness — she gives him a great name. Because the name Moses can also take on an active sense and indicate “the one who draws out,” a name which foreshadows Moses’s God-given task in this story, of drawing his people out of their suffering in Egypt.

Moses is a perfect name for this child.

The story about Moses this week makes a jump of about 400 years from Jacob stealing the covenant promise from his brother Esau. We skip over the story of all of Jacob’s seventy descendants taking refuge with the help of Joseph in Egypt during a famine that otherwise would have destroyed them all. God follows them down into Egypt. And when Pharaoh turns violent, God is with them in their suffering and takes steps to get them out.

Perhaps a good name like Moses appears when the time is right.

Because everyone in the early Exodus story seems to have a perfect name that embodies their role in the story. In fact, the Hebrew name for Exodus — Shemot — means “names.”

Moses’s sister is Miriam, which means bitter — bitter like the suffering of her people in Egypt.

Moses’s wife is Zipporah, which means little bird — a name which signifies freedom, and the wonders and flight because Zipporah lives is a place of freedom.

Their child is Gershom, which means alien or refugee — because Moses is hiding in Midian, away from Pharaoh when Gershom is born.

In Midian, in his hiding, Moses is visited by God in the form of a burning bush, and God asks him to go back to Egypt to help bring his suffering people out to the Promised Land.

Which is all very well. God will work through countless prophets in similar ways.

Really, the thing that seems to raise the most questions is when Moses asks God what God’s name is. And God says, “when the people in Egypt ask what my name is, tell them ‘I am who I am.'” God said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”

“I Am” is a name that seems to break a lot of conventions.

But it makes good sense, too. Because God is beyond our knowing and our comprehension. In the Bible, aspects of God are personified in order for us to make a connection and appreciate God in our own way — God is described as having a voice, or walking through Eden, or leading the way as a cloud — but God is that in creation which is more — both removed and immediately present, active in the world and active in maintaining the conditions whereby we are free to act and make mistakes and find our way with the help of each other.

God doesn’t call Moses and then leave him alone.

God will be with Moses directly for the next four decades.

As we heard in the reading, God equips Moses with speech, and confidence, and a staff that will help him navigate his challenges.

Through our own discipleship practices here in the church, we are seeking to be spiritually equipped to face the challenges of our time — to face Pharaoh anew. To navigate the roiling Red Sea keeping us from our best selves.

Because in our own time is can feel like we are experiencing a fissure, a breaking up of the familiar, a hollowing out of our capacities to care for each other.

The descendants of Jacob stuck in Egypt had a choice. They could have rejected Moses and stayed in Egypt. The Pharaoh that you know could be better than the Pharaoh that you don’t know.

But they trusted that God was something better, beyond and ahead of them.

We too can trust that something better is ahead for us, if we can be part of making it so through the social fabric that we are building … the social fabric that we are weaving . . . the social fabric that we are sharing

Our worship has practices and roots that are thousands of years old, but we are making things new every day, in all that we do.

Amen.

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You may not believe it, but on this two-hundred-and-fifteen year old building, we have three gutter downspouts that are completely clogged!

And all this week, people have been coming with ladders to go onto the old roof to look around and bring back messages of what’s happening up there on high.

I can report from them that it’s dangerous work. When the gutters are a little loose, the ladder is a precarious thing, but it’s a symbol full of possibility, for it connects us with the places where we otherwise are not able to go.

And so we put a ladder up to the book of Genesis this morning to go walk around in another kind of mystical, wonderful, ancient landscape.

It’s a snippet of a story that we read this morning . . . a fragment of a masterpiece . . . a passage of scripture from a part of the Bible many of us don’t spend as much time. Here we meet parents Isaac and Rebekah and children Esau and Jacob, and are reminded of the power of our foundational stories of faith.

Isaac is this week an old man and a father at the end of his life, who just last week in our scripture reading we saw as a young boy being led to a mountain for a sacrifice that, thankfully, didn’t happen. A whole lifetime has passed between that story and this one.

Now the patriarch Isaac is looking to pass the covenant that he received from his father Abraham on to his oldest son Esau, as the conventions of the time dictated — until a slight-of-hand changes the course of this story (and God lets it happen; offering reassurance to Jacob in his darkest moment)

As travelers in the tradition of Christ here in the 21st Century — we are all trying to live generous lives in the mode of the Gospel, we’re trying to find life-giving community, we’re trying to treat each other well — and with our modern ears we may interpret this Genesis story where Jacob lies and tricks and steals from his family members (and then is rewarded by God) as a story that doesn’t inspire us with a vision for own futures. Even so, there is much to learn and appreciate about “humans merely being” as an e.e. cummings poem says — humans merely being.1

In the book of Genesis we are treated to the delights of tactile life that we all share with Isaac and Rebekah and their family, the “tasting touching hearing seeing breathing” parts of humanity.

In this story, Isaac asks for his favorite meal, a soup made of game meat gathered and made by his oldest son Esau.

When Jacob sneaks into his father’s room, pretending to be his older brother, Isaac wears a wool cloth to simulate his hairy brothers arms. There is some humor in this.

Isaac speaks his blessing into being to the wrong son — a human voice creating something new and channeling God into humanity. It’s a story of humans merely being humans, alongside God.

Once Esau finds out what has happened, he vows to kill his younger brother, and Jacob runs away to save his own life. Picking up your life and fleeing is a terrible thing to have to do. Our heart can go out to Jacob even as we question the behavior that led to his escape.

Perhaps in many ways this story reflects a reality rather than a moral imperative. Perhaps we are supposed to just sit and appreciate it instead of standing and responding to it or shaping our lives around it.

We can appreciate the poetry of the wilderness toward the end of the reading.

Jacob has left home in a hurry, and the first night out under the stars, totally vulnerable, he goes to sleep with his head upon a rock for his pillow.

It must have been a terrible night sleep.

But we know that he at least slept a little because he dreamed.

And in the dream the terrifying country in which he wandered became the site of God and the activity of angels conducting some holy business of climbing and descending.

Something sinister was turned into something amazing.

A dream of Hope is built onto a landscape of despair.

God promises to go with Jacob and his descendants forever.

Jacob’s mistake is to think that he has wandered onto holy ground.

The reality is that everywhere he goes is holy ground, and God goes with him where he goes.

God says, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham and Sarah, and the God of Isaac and Rebekah; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring, and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

It is a second blessing for Jacob in as many chapters.

God goes with us all where we go, which is why we gather here every Sunday morning, to remember this promise in our own way — and in that spirit I’d like to make a theological jump from Jacob to Jesus —

Because when Christians gather, our gathering aspires to be countercultural in the ways that help us take part in the Good News of the gospel of Jesus Christ, even when the Good News is hard to find.

At the heart of our tradition here in the United Church of Christ is a first-century rabbi, messiah, teacher, prophet, wanderer, friend . . . Jesus, who we understand as an expression of God, whose death is not the end of his life, who lives on through those who take hope from him; he is known throughout his whole life as the man from Galilee, a place that other people seemed to look down at, or ask questions about what good could come out of Nazareth?

He is a person of Good News, and a person of place. But the reality is that wherever he goes, God is with him: in Jerusalem, on the mountain, at the seashore, and at the cross, transcending all the barriers that have been put in place to keep God’s love from us.

Jesus preached the Good News. Preaching is the proclamation of the gospel to the people of God in a particular time and place — transcending all time and space.

In all of our preaching in this place, the Good News is always about the new thing that God is doing in service to the redemption of our world. For this morning, let the ladder be our bridge from despair into hope.

May it be so,

Amen.

1. e.e. cummings, “i thank You God for most this amazing,” The Reader, https://www.thereader.org.uk/featured-poem-i-thank-you-god-for-most-this-amazing-by-e-e-cummings/ ︎

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Scripture: Genesis 21: 1–3; Genesis 22: 1–4

I remember as a kid in church on Sunday mornings, when we became old enough to stay in worship instead of going to church school, there was this revelation that the children’s message didn’t always tell the whole story.

Once the youngest among us had gone to church school, I realized that sometimes adults were really grappling with a whole different set of difficult topics in a different way from a children’s message or a Sunday school classroom.

The children’s message was only just the beginning, and the adults could go a little further later in the service.

That’s how I feel today — that the scripture is inviting us to grapple with some difficult themes around sacrifice, family, and what lengths we will go to for God. Isaac indeed means laughter, but there is not much humor to be found in this story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his child. It’s one of the more difficult texts in the Bible.

Add to that it has not been a humorous week in American civic life, or in many of the international settings where armed conflict, genocide, and starvation are ongoing. As a Boston Globe headline read on Friday, “Charlie Kirk’s death shines a spotlight on worsening climate for political discourse on college campuses.”1 This assassination is a terrible event in a series of violent moments that reveal each time what we already know in so many ways, that we live in a chaotic and volatile time.

It is perhaps no comfort that the book of Genesis that we are reading this month in worship contains a series of volatile and chaotic events, one following the other.

Here’s a quick summary of what follows after last week’s creation narrative in Genesis chapter one: Eve and Adam are expelled by God from paradise. The story of the first siblings, Cain and Able, includes one brother killing the other. God then floods the earth with the idea of restarting creation a second time, only to think better of it and allow a single boat of creatures to continue. The tower of Babel is destroyed and then the two cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed by fire and brimstone.

And despite these difficult moments, the Genesis narrative is one of the most powerful and meaningful stories ever written, because somehow in the bleak struggle, there is a messy and beautiful process going on — God is adapting to humanity, and humanity is adapting to God. It’s a divine love story, deeply flawed but somehow moving on through the generations.

This Genesis scripture is part of Jesus’s scripture — the stories of God and humanity that he heard that shaped him as a child.

The book of Genesis doesn’t get any easier after the binding of Isaac in chapter 22. It doesn’t get more peaceful. It offers no easy answers. Trauma is passed on from generation to generation. But everywhere you look there is hope in the wreckage of humanity that through knowledge and faith in God, some other way of living might be possible.

The name that Abraham gives for this possibility of a new way of living is the covenant — covenant is the name of a promise made to God and to other people. In the United Church of Christ denomination, church membership is a kind of covenant made to God and to each other to walk in faith seeking to live lives inspired by the model of Jesus.2 Abraham believes that if he and Sarah can live within the rules of the covenant that God has made with them, that they will be the start of a great and numerous family, extending thousands of generations, living in relationship with a great God.

It’s a hopeful and powerful message of promise that feels like it comes crashing down when God unexpectedly asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac who is the most precious thing to him in the whole world and whose own existence is a miracle after the unlikeliness of Sarah and Abraham even having Isaac in the first place.

Abraham hears a voice that says, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

Why? Why? Why would God ask Abraham to sacrifice his child?

It doesn’t ring true to our understanding of God, and it doesn’t make sense for the fact that Isaac is the promised child who is necessary to making possible God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah.

What is equally hard is that Abraham seems to go through with God’s request, right up the very final moment of sacrifice.

We would like to believe that Abraham’s true act of faith in God was knowing — knowing even into the final seconds — that God would never actually make him go through with this impossible act and that he could go through the motions of gathering wood and hiking several days to Moriah . . . knowing that the sacrifice was all a farce.

We might even consider that Abraham has been so beaten down by, and desensitized by, past struggles that he can no longer exercise his own free will. In the past, he pleaded with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah, and then had to watch as the cities were destroyed anyways. God made Abraham send his first son Ishmael and his beloved Hagar into the wilderness, knowing he would never see either of them again.

We are left to wonder if Abraham has been so oppressed, so discouraged, that he has no resistance left when God comes to ask the impossible of him, and he goes along with the request?

Is God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son because this is something that is absolutely impossible for him to do?

Is God helping Abraham find his agency again? Is God trying to make Abraham resist and change God?

Friends, the twenty-fourth anniversary of September 11th this week was a reminder that we too are wounded people, even if the passage of time is making the wounds hurt in a different way.

After Sandy Hook, we’re all wounded.

After the killing of Michael Brown, we’re all wounded.

After the loss of many people in our beloved community we are wounded.

After the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re going about our lives every day, still wounded, having gained knowledge about ourselves and our humanity, but having lost much, too.

Is God trying to wake Abraham up from his woundedness by asking him to do something Abraham will and cannot do?

This is a generous reading of this scripture, but perhaps we live in a time that requires generous readings — and requires generous people.

How will God wake us up from our woundedness? How will God help us heal?

I would say that Abraham comes out of this story changed for the better. He lives out his days as a generous, thoughtful, considerate man — interconnected positively with everyone he meets.

The collateral damage of this story seems to be Isaac. Though Isaac’s life is spared, it is noted in scripture that Isaac very rarely speaks again. Imagine Isaac’s version of this story . . . he is brought right to the brink by his father and God. Trust is broken. While Abraham seems lighter, Isaac seems to be the new bearer his family’s trauma, and passes it on to his sons who steal from and fight and trick each other. And yet somehow they too end up okay in the end.

Every generation responds to its own challenges in its own way.

God will have to work differently to divert the trauma of Isaac.

God is working differently with us too.

We are living through a movement into hurt — it is left to us to bring hope, love, justice, and possibility with us into the hurt, knowing that healing will be needed on the other side — as Sarah and Abraham know too well.

         May we be awoken to new possibilities.

Amen.

1. Boston Globe, 13 September 2025, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/13/metro/charlie-kirk-college-campuses-free-speech-political-intolerance/ ︎
2. Jane Fissler Hoffman, Covenant: A Study for the United Church of Christ (United Church Press, 2008). ︎

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Scripture: Genesis 1:1 – 2:3

Last night in Pawtucket, a group of nine brave Newmanites ventured out into God’s good creation to see the hometown soccer [slash football] club play their match against a team from Louisville, Kentucky.1 As lightning flashed in the distance and the heavens opened upon us and the rain came down to drench us from the sky, I thought about how rain was the second thing that God created in the Genesis creation story. Before land and vegetation and the sun and the moon, God created the great dome of water in the sky.

As the Rhode Island team struggled to score a goal, the rain helped me think about something I had been thinking about all this week — there seems to be a certain arbitrariness or randomness to the order of God’s creation in Genesis. At the end of each phase of creation, it feels like God takes stock of creation, like an artist standing back for a moment to look at their canvas from a distance to see what color or feature it needs next. I like to think that God didn’t know what the finished product of creation would look like when it was done — God, the creator just needed to get started with something and trusted that the pieces would fall into place. Anything could happen in creation. But every choice of God’s was good.

Friends, we are sending our minds back to the origins of the world in scripture today as we say goodbye to summer and begin to embrace the fullness of September. Many Christian churches treat the month of September and early October as the Season of Creation in the same was that we recognize the season of Epiphany, or Advent, or Pentecost. This season of Creation is about remembering the promising beginnings of our world and embracing the sense of possibility at the heart of caring for the environment, and our planet home.

By setting aside time to remember creation, we get to know and appreciate God in a different and important way — this is not God’s expression in Jesus, or God the burning bush, or God the caller of prophets, but God the creator and center of all things. At the core of God is this act of creation, this origin, this beginning, this outpouring of creative love . . . God is an ancient creator who is creating still.

Change and transformation are at the heart of our faith, which is both a scary and a comforting fact. It’s also a time to productively create space to lament and mourn the degrading impact humans have caused to parts of God’s creation — through the suite of problems humans have wrought by unlocking the power of certain elements.

Less than three hundred years ago, the fastest a human could travel was upon the back of a horse, and the strongest a human could be was by harnessing the muscle of an ox. Then we harnessed the power of carbon in the industrial revolution and humans sent trains and planes around the world. In the 1940s, humans unlocked the power of uranium, and then plutonium, and unleashed a nuclear age. And now we harness silicon in our super-small superconducting. In less than three hundred years we have transformed God’s creation, making incredible discoveries and strides forward in human flourishing, as we have also opened Pandora’s Box of pollution and volatility to the environmental detriment of us all.2

It’s important to have a season to think seriously in a sacred and thoughtful way about what our species has wrought and how we will live into an uncertain future. The simplicity and elegance of the Genesis creation story is an important thought partner for us as we begin the season of creation.

So let’s talk about what we’re missing in this creation story this morning. What’s not in the creation story we just read?

It’s an interesting fact of scripture that there are two creation stories that have been sewn together at the beginning of the book of Genesis. Adam and Eve and serpent and garden and the apple are all part of the second story. The fact that we have two creation stories embodies what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called the danger of a single story.3 One story about seven days of God’s creative act is not enough to capture the fullness of creation. There is complexity, and multiple perspectives, and so the compiler of our sacred scripture had God create once, and then immediately start creating again.

The first story that we read shows creation from God’s perspective. This story is about the creation of space so that life can flourish and the chaos of the windy void will not have the last word.

The second story shows creation from the perspective of humans, and shows that there will be a time when God feels far away from us and we’ll have to make creative choices on our own — in this case, whether to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or not.

Hard as we try, we humans cannot always understand God’s ways. The first creation story reminds us that we are created in God’s image — the imago dei — we are inherently connected to God, God’s essence, and God’s substance.

The second story reminds us that we are independent from God, endowed by our creator with the responsibility of free will to make our own decisions, to make mistakes, to seek forgiveness, and to make repair.

Perhaps the search for repair and healing is what the whole Bible is about in different ways.

We are complex beings who come from chaos and we are asked by God to help keep the chaos at bay. On the sixth day, God asks us to be responsible for creation. And on the seventh day, God models the need for sabbath and rest after the effort of creating.

As the scripture says, “God rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.”

The need for Sabbath is essential to creation. Creation cannot go on forever without interruption. We must stop and pause and cease our productivity.

The sabbath is not a fortress of power but a fortress of time. Each of us has the power to make a sabbath space for ourselves where we can be with God set apart from the everyday.

God wills life and will it to continue, and makes sure that the sabbath is at the center of everything. Friends, anything is possible in creation. We have been tasked with helping to keep the chaos at bay. We are free, and we are responsible. We are imperfect, and we live in relationship with the divine. What a wonder we are, and what a wonder we can be.

We are creatures of the sabbath; where will we go from here?

I can’t wait to find out.

Amen.

1. “Rhode Island FC Falls 1-0 to Louisville City FC in Physical Eastern Conference Battle,” RIFC, https://www.rhodeislandfc.com/news/rhode-island-fc-falls-1-0-to-louisville-city-fc-in-physical-eastern-conference-battle/ ︎
2. Robert Marks, “The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century,” (World Social Change, 2019). ︎
3. Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TedX, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg ︎

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