We’re still widening our vision of who God is. Parts 3 & 4 took place in experience-based intergenerational community times. You can read the blog posts on our website to catch up. Back with a meditation this week, Pastor Anne examines how God shows up for those who are oppressed, cast out, hungry, thirsty, poor, on the margins … over and over again.

Why?

What does that mean to you?

Where are the places in which you've had that hint of something beyond yourself—places that made you wake up and whisper, “Maybe God really is here, and I just didn’t know it?”

Makom in Hebrew = place = God as Makom = God in a particular place, and also: God homing and holding all places so that everywhere we are, we are within God.

In our moments of greatest moral failure, greatest grief, we are "sheltered in place”.

All those exiled parts of us, all those abandoned parts of us, all those longing parts of us—all those are re-homed with God. We are within God just as the whole universe is homed within God. God envelopes all, and every place we are may be God’s chosen place of revelation.

This season, from Epiphany all the way until Lent, our theme is "Under the Sweet Stars, Expanding our Vision of God".  And that expansion begins with longing—that same longing that compelled the magi to set out under the stars and set out into the desert...  

NB: "Under the sweet stars" is from Thomas Merton's work Hagia Sophia published in Emblems of a Season of Fury  (1963).

New Year's day, 2023. Join us as Pastor Anne unpacks Psalm 34, with special emphasis on verse 8.

It’s right there, in the very beginning of the gospel: Kinship. The kingdom is kinship...

Perhaps we can subtitle this one Joseph's "Yes".  

"The offering of your life is a beautiful gift to your family tree. You are enough.

"I celebrate the ways you that choose to show up with resolve, with courage, compassion, with love and kindness in the midst of circumstances that are not maybe what you had chosen. I celebrate the way provide refuge. In these moments in your life the holy is getting worked into the world." — Pastor Anne

We have a high and holy invitation to make safe spaces where people can know God's radical, unconditional love. That can become incarnate in our midst and we can be that safe space for each other. We have that same calling to be safe space for our youth, this next generation who are going to be carrying a really heavy load as they inherit a world that has a lot of challenges... 

We could think of this meditation as an exploration of Mary's "Yes".  

There was the safe, cautious middle way—turning away from the angel and towards the life allotted her by her society as Joseph's wife—or, this strange new way: the heights and depths of saying “yes" to something as absurdly beautiful as bearing the Christ child. It was a “yes" to joy and sorrow: the sweetness of Jesus’ little hand curled around her thumb as a baby, and the outright terror of watching those same hands stretched taut and bloody, pinned to wood.

Like Mary's "yes", what if our personal and intimate "yes" to God has cosmic implications that we may never see, things that will ripple through generations?

Once a month we have an intergenerational worship service in which all the folk at Southpoint stay together for the meditation and activities. We call it being "All In" together. The meditation is often shorter, and is crafted so younger ears understand the context of the talk. This week Advent 2022 begins and Pastor Anne introduces the theme of Advent's four Sundays this year: From Generation to Generation. We're drawing this year on liturgical and art offerings from "A Sanctified Art". This week reflects on the people whose stories—of endurance, of adaptability, of mistakes, of "showing up", of being human—we know now as the lineage of Jesus. There's room for all of our stories in God's story.

What if we held up mirrors of mercy and not of judgement for each other?

Yes, there were animals in the building!