What's Been Saving Your Life? VI: The Practice of Walking on the Earth: Groundedness

Eastertide

May 12, 2024 • Katie Snipes Lancaster • Exodus 3:1–12

This message might have just as easily been received elsewhere. Maybe Moses didn’t have to go into the wilderness to hear, to see, to take off his shoes, and receive what was holy. Maybe he didn’t have to go beyond the mountains with a herd of sheep, into a wilderness beyond the wilderness in order to meet God.

This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the one who numbered the stars. The one who ordered the planets. The one spoke the words “let there be light” and there was light. This is not a God of the margins, but of the center, a God about whom this whole story is written.

But Moses isn’t paying attention. And it takes a burning bush to turn him toward God.

God After... III: God After Copernicus

June 9, 2024 • Christine V. Hides • Psalm 8

Psalm 8 is a poem that sings of a relationship with God in which humility and inquiry go hand in hand. Yes, we are lower than God but, also given responsibility for things here on earth. We are given the gift of reason that enables us to ask the question that echoes through history: “What is humanity’s place in the universe?” In the sixteenth century the church said “earth” and therefore humanity is at the center. Don’t you see the sun rising, moving across the sky, and setting each day? Nicolaus Copernicus was a priest who outlined a heliocentric theory of the universe in 1515. Though he was not the first to propose a sun-centered astronomical system, he developed mathematical techniques that made it substantially equivalent to the geocentric model that dated back to Aristotle. Perhaps because he was still working out the math, or perhaps because he feared the church’s response, he delayed publication of his book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until 1543, which happens to be the year of his death.

God After... II: God After Gutenberg

June 2, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Romans 10:13–17, Mark 14:22–25

And that almost instantaneous communication by junk-mail flier was only possible because 60 years before Halloween, 1517 a goldsmith from Mainz, Germany, had come up with a moveable-type printing press capable of mass-producing books and other written communication. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press enabled the Protestant Reformation.

God After...I: The God Who Is and Who Was and Who Is to Come

May 26, 2024 • William A. Evertsberg • Genesis 1:1–5, Revelation 1:8

It’s Trinity Sunday. It’s not as theatrical as other church holidays—like the fire, wind and ruddy paraments of last week’s Pentecost, for example. It’s the only festival of the Church Year that is devoted to a doctrine, rather than to a person or an event, like Christmas or Easter. But once a year, the Christian Church pauses for a day to remind itself about the nature of our God. And what it says is that God is Three.