Trying to be a person of faith is such a strange assignment, eh? Frederick Buechner once wrote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen.” He certainly got that right. There is beauty everywhere, but also more than enough of the terrible to keep a person awake at night. How does one believe in a world like that?

Well, friends, just like that, we have arrived at our season finale.

This Sunday we’re doing something a little different:

Well folks, the end of our season is fast approaching, and so this Sunday represents a sort of epilogue to our anthropology series. Instead of bringing another teaching or abstract idea, I simply want to tell you a story that forces us to ask one of the oldest and most uncomfortable questions there is: what are human beings, really?

n her well-known poem, “Wild Geese”, Mary Oliver says:

Well friends, this Sunday marks the final week of our anthropology series, and we’ll be wrapping it up by asking what happens when anthropology meets faith? Throughout this series, we’ve explored what it means to be human: limited, conflicted, self-centered, and deeply in need of mercy. But this final week brings that conversation into the life of faith itself. What if the goal of the Jesus Path is not to become the kind of person who needs less grace, but to become someone less afraid of needing grace in the first place?

When it comes to anthropology, the rubber hits the road in both relationships and politics. This week, we tackle what happens when anthropology enters the political arena.

This Sunday at Nexus, we continue our series on anthropology by asking what may be the most practical question of all: what do we expect from the people we love? Anthropology can sound abstract until you are married to someone, raising kids with someone, building friendships, joining a church community, or assembling a gazebo with your spouse and discovering that “marital harmony” apparently has a Rona assembly fee.

Friends, this Sunday we keep moving through our anthropology series by asking a deceptively simple question: what if the "self" is not something to be found, but something to be formed?

Where we begin makes a big difference to our journey and to our future. We don’t pick up a book and begin at Chapter 3. Why would we do that with Scripture? The Bible begins the human story in beauty and goodness, but so often, our theology and the stories we tell ourselves tend to begin with our brokenness. We overindex on the negative. (Don’t mean to brag, but I am quite skilled at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...like everything went well, but I will find something to berate myself for, just in case I get any ideas...)