Luke 6: 17-36

Our intern Emily Alexander preaches from the Gospel of Luke on the final week of Advent, as we ready ourselves to celebrate the good news of Christ's kingdom arriving. In this passage, Jesus is trying to get his followers accustomed to a radically new kind of kingdom philosophy. He inverts the natural order by exalting the poor, hungry, and grieving people over the privileged few, and goes even further by exhorting his followers to love their biggest enemies. With peace as a fundamental principal of Anabaptist theology, it is easy to become complacent in the rightness of our beliefs. In this holiday season earmarked by material consumption and in a world full of fighting and heated politics, we too can easily slip into comfort seeking, judgmental words, and repaying others with the righteous anger we feel they deserve. Emily invites us to take a moment from our busyness to examine how are feet are being guided. We must remember that Jesus's kingdom is guided by principles that bewilder, confound, and upend the world's order and may make us feel uncomfortable. Let Jesus guide your feet to a kingdom filled with the infinite goodness and mercy of God.

Luke 1:46b-55

Melissa preaches in the third week of Advent on Mary's leap of faith to obey God, immaculately conceive and eventually give birth to our savior. As an unmarried, pregnant, Jewish woman, Mary had to put her reputation, future, and life at risk given the societal and medical conditions of Israel in antiquity. Likewise, we too will eventually reach a point in our lives where we must choose to trust God beyond reason or logic and take a leap of faith, or not. However, we do not jump alone. We are tethered to a long line of believers that went before us. Moreover, with each person and each choice, God is also taking a leap of faith towards us with open arms. This act of blind faith in God is a fundamental part of his plan to build a community of true believers instead of automatons without free will. This Christmas season, as we make time to remember Mary's great leap of faith, let us remember her example and ready our hearts for when God calls us and prepare to support our brothers and sisters in their calling.

Luke 3: 7-18

The second week of advent Melissa preaches on John the Baptist from the Gospel of Luke, who is paving the way for the coming of Christ. His message is fiery, convicting, and demands dramatic change of those who would desire to answer God's call. However, Melissa reminds us that John's call is an invitation to a new life. An opportunity to start over with a clean slate that is purged of the chaff that weighs down our spirits and a chance for repentance that aligns with the spirit of the Christmas season - Christ the Redeemer has come.

Luke 21: 25-36

What do you do when the stress, cares, and bad headlines of this world weigh you down and threaten to choke out the life-giving good news of the Gospel? As Advent begins, Melissa Florer-Bixler looks to this week's passage in the Gospel of Luke for inspiration. Jesus had just finished informing his followers that imprisonment and persecution would come to them. He instructed, however, that the way out of this looming fear was not through mental and physical distractions, but (rather paradoxically) from paying more attention...to the right things. Look beyond all the catastrophes and drama and focus on the fact that the Kingdom of God is at hand. Relentless, renewing, and fruit-bearing, you will know that this verdant Kingdom is God is coming the same as the leaves appearing on the fig tree foretell to us that summer is coming. Join Melissa as she shares her thoughts on this topic.

Scripture: John 18:33-37 and Ruth 3

Ruth forged a future where there wasn't one. Her mother-in-law Naomi only sees a life of constriction, defined and closed. She sees no options, no future.

Ruth, on the other hand, is a future-oriented person. She consistently speaks in the future tense. While she might have told Naomi, "I accept everything that you say," she still sees a possibility.

To use the future tense is to create possibility, to counter the facts. And that is where God is at work.

The reign of God is a woman directing her future when no future seems possible.

Scripture: Ruth 2

In the book of Ruth two of the thousands of nameless poor people of those times take center stage. The story is not about powerful men carrying out great works. Ruth and Naomi live in the time of political chaos. Sound a little familiar? This short story--just four chapters--traces God's intricate work in small movements towards hope through ordinary people.

It's not just through the powerful or through "mountain top" experiences that God works. Rather, God works with ordinary faithfulness. In the process of doing the work put before us, we realize that much of what we need is here, in front of us. In showing up, together in community, moving with tenacious love towards discomfort and danger, God works through us to bring about healing and hope.

Scripture: Ruth 1:15-18

What do we do when we are shocked, overwhelmed and devastated? When our hands feel empty and the troubles to come feel so massive? What do we do now?

The petty dictators of this world, however severe their terrors, they do not change who God is and how God's word in Jesus comes to us. What do we do now is the question we will ask for many years to come. But what we do will be grounded in another question, a deeper question. Who are we? We are the church of Jesus Christ.

In other words, we're followers of Jesus in the same way we were last week and the week before, who we were on Tuesday, who we will be next week, in January, in the years to come.

Isaiah 43:1-7, Hebrews 11:32-12:3

In just two days we have a national election. It's something that has many of us anxious and concerned. The two texts for today are both addressed to people in anxious circumstances.

Even with all of the anxiety of the situation in the first passage, the summation of the Isaiah's prophecy to these people is, "Do not be afraid, for I, God, am with you." Some variation on that simple sentence appears more than 300 times in the Bible. So it seems like God realizes this is a problem for us. Do not be afraid, for God is with you.

Knowing that doesn't make passing through the floodwaters or walking through the fire or going through chemotherapy or surviving a divorce or being forced from your country or living under a crazy person's rule actually easy. It's really hard to hang on to in difficult circumstances.

God will still be God on Wednesday. God will ultimately get the final word. Lord, help us to become people who work toward justice and proclaim your beauty until the day every sorrowful story ends in joy. Until the day when you get the final word.

Isaiah 40: 1-8

This Sunday Melissa Florer-Bixler continued to move further into the words of the prophet Isaiah, when the Persian king Cyrus allowed God's people to return to Israel, ushering in a time of comfort and hope. The prophet spoke of a highway being built from through hostile land between Babylon and Jerusalem, and Melissa reminded us of the tradition of the aesthetics, the desert mothers and fathers, who also lived in hostile places and prayed for all people and ministered to those who came to grief on remote highways. Much like the aesthetics, there have been faithful people in our own lives who have gone before us, sacrificing much, and helping us to see a living model of the path to redemption that Jesus paved for all with his suffering. In this time of political tension and extreme anxiety approaching the election, we may wonder who is speaking the truth, and who might be leading falsely in the name of Christ. Ultimately, we must look at the shape of the way they are trying to pave, and decide if that way has a hope big enough everyone to find the path home to safety and redemption.

Isaiah 46: 1-13

Melissa Florer-Bixler invites us to consider the question, "why do we come to church every Sunday?" as she preaches on Isaiah's message about idols. Isaiah mocks the idols of Israel's former conquerors, now laid low and unable to even help themselves from falling over. In last week's sermon, Melissa stated that we become what we choose to love, and now she adds that when we put our hope into idols that cannot help, we in turn become helpless. Tech giants, political figures, possessions, and all the other trappings of the world offer no more hope than the worthless idols that Isaiah decried. We come to church to kindle the hope we so greatly need by remembering together the stories of how God has loved and nurtured us from the beginning of creation.