Many of us feel ruled by our to-do list. Our lives are full of errands, activities, college application padding, and oftentimes church commitments. It’s hard to be present with friends or focused at work, and silence is impossible to come by. Why do feel like our schedule can’t afford to lose an appointment?

Today we tend to idolize our work as a fulfilling, life calling, exploit work for wealth and status, or curse it because it doesn’t provide any of that. Sometimes we do all three. Too often we forget that work is a gift from God; a gift that has been broken by our sin. We also often forget that it is a theater for the expansion of God’s Kingdom and the display of his glory that will stretch into eternity. What is the good news about work? Join us Sunday.

Over the past 100 years our country has undergone enormous changes in how we understand marriage.  We live in a culture that enthrones sexuality and romance, and yet marriage is on a steep decline.  Few of us even know why anyone would pursue marriage, especially as many of the marriages that do take place end in divorce and acrimony.  In today’s passage, Jesus clarifies what makes marriage important, and what we will find is a vision of marriage that has the power to communicate something amazing to the watching world.  It is a calling that is both sobering and exhilarating, a calling that is matched only by the calling by which Jesus lived his own life: the counter-cultural life of celibacy.

This Sunday Jesus continues to shape how his people will address the reality of sin in their midst.  This is a contentious issue for many of us because we have such negative associations with legalistic churches.  It’s hard to imagine a way to take sin seriously while remaining humble, welcoming and self-reflective.  But in this passage Jesus lays out two practices for his people to follow, and what we learn is that by these practices God’s people will address sin, not through judgmentalism and legalism, but by embodying the heart of God for the sinner.

In our time, the lead up to Christmas is associated with stimulation, consumerism, excitement.  Ads are full of smiling faces, aesthetic home decor, and gifts purchased new from Amazon (or Etsy).  The season is all about enjoyment, we are told.  And if you can’t enjoy, then you can’t take part.  Those of us who are grieving the loss of a loved one, or spending the holiday alone, or who are simply nauseated by all the consumption, end up feeling like the season must always take place without us.  But we forget that the lead up to the first Christmas was not a happy one.  The world that waited for Messiah was a weary one, and the only reason it could rejoice at his coming was because he would go on to join us in our weariness.  This Sunday, come explore an unusual Advent passage: Psalm 22, a song of the suffering of Messiah.  Come and learn that it is only in the darkness of Christ’s sufferings that we realize why the nativity is bright.

We are continuing in our Gospel in Life series by bringing the Gospel to bear on a rising public health crisis in our culture: overuse of mass media.  That may sound extremist, but the medical and psychological communities agree that if something doesn’t change, our current use of media will just go on harming us.  To explore the issues as fully as we can, we’ve invited our resident commuications expert, Kristin Gumminger, to do an interview for us, where we will see how the Church has a unique opportunity to stand for what it really means to share community in the age of social media.