 By The Rev. Ted Thornton All three readings today remind us that if we want to call ourselves Christians, we cannot do so in isolation from one another, only together with one another, and, as the first letter of Peter reminds us, one with another even in the sufferings we endure in this life. In Acts 1 verse 11, as Jesus ascends into heaven we heard, two men (angels, maybe?), say, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?’” This is as much to say, “Why are you staring vertically upward when what you should be doing instead is looking horizontally at one another? That’s where you’re going to be seeing Jesus from now on, not up there, but over there: in the face, in the eyes of the person next to you, that’s where you’ll see Jesus, not up in an endless blue sky.” That this is what Jesus intends for his followers is made clear in our reading from the Gospel of John. In chapter 17 verse 11, part of what is generally known as the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus, we heard Jesus pray “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world and I am coming to you, [God]. Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we - you and I, [God], are one.” The period following Jesus’ ascension into heaven was a time of existential crisis in the lives of his followers. How will those early followers of Jesus, men and women, fill the void in their lives after Jesus has taken leave of them? What’s the key to turning their grief into joy and into the oneness Jesus prays for in John? Some of them, plunging wildly into denial, think this is the moment when the angel army in heaven will finally descend once and for all, to destroy political tyranny and hand the world back to God. But, after the foolishness of that expectation sinks in, denial stops working, and the pain of grief sets in. This is the point where genuine healing begins. It’s at this point, that the real grief work of the apostles begins.They do stop looking upward and begin to fix their gaze upon one another instead. They begin to permit Jesus’ priestly prayer to start working in their lives. It’s the beginning of agape, the beginning of the call to selfless, compassionate, self-sacrificing love for one another. It’s the birthing moment of the church. It’s now and only now that the apostles are ready to accept the gift of spirit, the gift of Pentecost. Recently, an expert in the field of grief counseling wrote, “Grief is a story of love looking for a place to go.” ‘Looking for a place to go after the loved one has left them behind. The place to go to find the “story of love” for those early followers of Jesus was with each other, and that togetherness, that community becomes the church. This community that we will eventually call the church is a community defined by the practice of agape (ἀγάπη): a place where our needs for contiguity and continuity one with another and with God are met, imperfectly for sure, but in my experience better than anywhere else in this world. The roots of the Greek word agape are obscure, but the central meaning of the word is connectedness to others including the practice of affection for others and the drive to protect and care for others. Perhaps more than anything else, what we human beings long for is connectedness: connectedness with others in the physical space that we call the world (that’s what I mean by “contiguity”) and connectedness with one another in time (that’s what I mean by continuity). When we lose contiguity and continuity with someone we love, we enter into one of the gravest crises a person can face. Healing happens when we find a place for our love to go. Psychologists call the sudden loss of a loved one “abandonment trauma,” and, as we know, it really hurts. It hurts a lot. And, those apostles were hurting a lot. Yes, it’s a physical and a psychological loss. But, it’s a religious and theological loss as well. The late theologian Huston Smith, used to say we all have those times in our lives when we catch the spiritual flu, those times when life just doesn’t feel very good, times when we realize we can’t live every moment of our lives “blissed out,” times such as this one - when looking up at the sky as Jesus ascends to heaven doesn’t work for the apostles. At first they probably sat around in a circle perhaps in that same upper room in Jerusalem staring at the empty space where Jesus blessed their last supper together, wondering if they would ever be happy again. We’re at the point where Jesus is gone and Pentecost hasn’t happened yet. It’s a time of the absence of spirit. It’s the spiritual flu. And yet we know that more is going on than apostolic grief-stricken sadness. The apostles pray, and they conduct business. They need a replacement for the traitor Judas Iscariot. We’re told later on in Acts 1 that this is the point where Peter steps in to lead apostolic business meetings, and at one of those first organizational meetings, Matthias is appointed as apostle number twelve. These important indicators of apostolic activity - the appointment of Matthias and the devotion to prayer - both begin with that gentle prod from the two men: “Apostles, why are you looking up into the sky?” How about less tearful looking up in the sky from now on, less sad, nostalgic hand wringing, and more looking at each other and getting down to business. It’s likely none of them recognized it yet, but - yes - this was the birthing moment of the church. This is agape. And agape isn’t confined to what we do weekly within the walls of this beautiful church. It can happen anywhere anytime, and often when we aren’t expecting it. It happened to the English poet W. H. Auden when he was least expecting it, and in a part of his life when he did not consider himself very religious. As a young man, he was teaching at an English boarding school for boys. It was a custom in the early 1930s for the thirty or so senior boys nearing graduation to sleep out in the orchard under the stars. Sometimes there was a rain shower, but they pulled a tarpaulin over their heads and went to sleep again. Auden decided he would join them, and with help, he dragged his iron bedstead with its mountain of blankets down the stairs into the garden of the Lodge, the bachelor masters’ house. Here he slept for several weeks, putting up an umbrella if it rained. Sometimes a group of geese came to share the shelter of its umbrella. He had never been happier. This set the stage for a life-changing experience one June evening. He published an account of it thirty years later, telling the story this way. “‘One fine summer night in June, 1933, I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had any one of us had a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. “We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly – because, thanks to the power, I was doing it – what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself. I was also certain, though the conversation continued to be perfectly ordinary, that my three colleagues were having the same experience. (In the case of one of them, I was able to confirm this.) My personal feelings towards them were unchanged – they were still colleagues, not intimate friends – but I felt their existence as themselves was infinite and I rejoiced in it.” “I recalled with shame the many occasions on which I had been spiteful, snobbish, selfish, but the immediate joy was greater than the shame, for I knew that, so long as I was possessed by this spirit, it would be literally impossible for me to deliberately injure another human being. I also knew that the power would, of course, be withdrawn sooner or later and that, when it did, my greeds and self-regard would return. The experience lasted at its full intensity for about two hours when we said good-night to each other and went to bed. When I awoke the next morning, it was still present, though weaker, and it did not vanish completely for two days or so. “The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others, grossly and often, but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do.” Auden did not immediately return to religion, the Anglican Church of his youth. But he did immediately seek an opportunity of putting into print his understanding of agape, the selfless love of one’s neighbor. And, eventually Auden did return to the Anglican Communion. In 1940, he became a member of the Episcopal Church of St. Mark’s in the Bowery in New York City where he remained until his death in 1973. Where in your life is your love trying to find a place to go? A family member with whom you’ve fallen out? A friend? Your church? Try sending your love even more to others and especially at those times when abandonment trauma claims you or your brothers and sisters in agape as a victim and you must then find a place for that loving grief to go. Amen  By The Rev. Ted Thornton
It’s a Waiting Game If you got to church on time this morning, a few moments ago you sat through a major event in the geophysical history of our planet. It happened at three minutes past ten while we were listening to Heather’s welcome. Happy Solstice! Spring is right around the corner, right? And, here’s one more word about today: today in the Anglican tradition, December 21st is the Feast Day of Saint Thomas, perhaps the most famous voice of doubt in all Christian history, Thomas, who in John’s Gospel says he won’t believe in Jesus unless he can touch the wounds made by the nails of the cross; Thomas, who, in turn then also in John’s Gospel, is invited by Jesus to put his fingers in those wounds, and thereupon utters the strongest affirmation of Jesus’ divinity found anywhere in the Bible, “My Lord and my God.” (John 20:28) I was ordained to the Priesthood on the eve of the Feast of Saint Thomas, the evening of December 20th, 1978 (forty-seven years ago last night). Thomas has always held a special place in my heart. Advent: It’s a waiting game. Our gospel eyes and ears this morning turn to Joseph, one of the great biblical models of faithfulness, endurance, and patient waiting: patience, faithfulness, and endurance in the face of powerful social and cultural forces aligned against him, against his decision to stay with Mary and help her raise the son of God. In Joseph’s part of the world, women pregnant out of wedlock and their male partners were and remain to this day targets of honor killings, carried out usually, by the unlucky woman’s father and brothers. Thank God Joseph listened to and heeded that dream! Joseph, patron saint of all fathers, and, I like to think, the unofficial patron saint of all step fathers, step fathers like me. The patience, faithfulness, and endurance of Joseph are visible in some of the greatest Christian art in history. By the seventh century Byzantine period, artistic conventions of the manger begin centering our attention more fully on Mary and the baby Jesus. Joseph is more often moved to the side, standing among the animals, and we all know what stabled animals do on stable floors. Sometimes he’s brooding. Often he looks lonely. Often he’s depicted as a much older man, more of a grandfather to the adolescent Mary than a husband. Beginning in the sixteenth century, at the behest of Counter-Reformation theologians like Johannes Molanus, this trend is reversed somewhat and artists are encouraged to bring Joseph back to center stage, now depicted as a younger, more vigorous man, as most fathers of newborns tend to be. And, for all the attention devoted to Mary and the baby, it’s a very vigorous Joseph who in his own way makes the story move, especially in his efforts to save his little family from the wrath of Herod by leading their escape into Egypt, Herod, the Roman puppet King, whose paranoid jealousies led him to murder one of his wives, along with his eldest son and heir, and before that the high priest of Jerusalem, whom, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, Herod drowned at a pool party at his winter palace in Jericho. The story of Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” in Matthew 2, all boys under the age of two, certainly fits with what we know of his paranoid, murderous proclivities. Advent is the season of waiting in our Christian calendar. Patience, endurance, and faithfulness, as embodied in Jesus’ step-father Joseph, are the marks and the fruits of waiting. Much of life is spent waiting for things to happen. We wait to board flights. We wait for people to arrive. We wait in lines at checkout counters. Life is largely a waiting game. If we know what’s good for us, we learn early on to do our waiting with patience and mindfulness. Doctors and nurses refer to us as “patients” because we spend a lot of our time in their offices patiently waiting to see them. Our younger daughter, Annie, learned the word “wait” at a very young age from her grandmother as they sat in a doctor’s office before one of the countless medical appointments and procedures Annie has had to endure since her birth. “We’re waiting, dear,” her grandmother would say. Since that first time, Annie, who has multiple health issues, was encouraged to regard the word “wait” in an active sense, as an opportunity, never as a passive chore, never something that happens to her. Waiting is a discipline. She doesn’t like it, but, now in her forties, she does it, time after time. Perhaps the greatest literary meditation on waiting and what it means is Samuel Becket’s play “Waiting for Godot.” It’s a play about two men on a lonely road who await the arrival of a third named Godot, who, you may have guessed by now, never shows up. It’s also about the hopes and fears that go along with waiting. It’s a play that underscores the importance of patience and how to endure the discomfort and lack of certainty when we’re waiting for something to happen. When it was first performed in the United States, it starred two great American actors: Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell. Some of you may have never heard of Tom Ewell, but I’m quite sure many of you know who Bert Lahr is. He played the cowardly lion alongside Judy Garland in the classic 1939 film version of “The Wizard of Oz.” The first performance of “Waiting for Godot” in the United States occurred in – of all places – the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Miami. The year was 1956. Now, it turned out that choosing a Miami night club filled with vacationers to open a play about waiting for something to happen was a really bad idea. Think about it: do people go to nightclubs where the entertainment features waiting for something to happen? No, people don’t go to nightclubs to wait for things to happen. People go to nightclubs expecting instant gratification, instant satisfaction in the forms of drink, food, and entertainment. So, they started walking out in droves only minutes into the show. The play bombed; it closed after a very short run. One year later, in 1957, the play was produced in – again of all places - San Quentin Prison, one of the most notorious jails in the country and the former home of California’s gas chamber. The ferry into San Francisco from Larkspur passes up close right alongside the prison. I’ve ridden that ferry. San Quentin - close up - is a frightening sight. As the ferry glided along in the channel, an inmate stared out at us through a fenced in exercise yard, his fingers clutching the chain link wires, the high, thick walls of the cell blocks looming behind him. They put the play on in an old shed where, in the days before the gas chamber, condemned prisoners were hanged. The actors were nervous as the lights went down in the room with its 1,400 noisy inmates. Everyone in that shed knew that, contrary to what happened at the Coconut Grove, no one in the audience was going to be walking out. But, fifteen minutes into the play a miracle happened: a deep hush descended on the room as the inmates began listening with rapt attention and kept listening all the way to the end. It turned out the play made such an impact on the inmates that they started a drama group inside the prison. Why? Why was the experience at San Quentin so different from the one at Miami’s Coconut Grove? Because, the play is a masterful exploration of what it means to wait, and those convicts – many of whom were lifers with no hope of parole - knew what it means and what it takes to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait. Are there prisons in your life? What do you need to do to walk out of them? Do your cellmates include despair, hopelessness, and worry? If you’re feeling locked in a prison of some kind this Advent and Christmas season, try cultivating prayerfully the capacity to wait patiently for release. And while you’re waiting, remember that the good life is a life of good doing. What good things can you do while you wait? Take a lesson from the San Quentin inmates who, after watching Waiting for Godot, were inspired to start their drama group. It’s Joseph with whom we stand this time around on the threshold of one of the two chief theological pole stars of our faith - Christmas and Easter - the mix of flesh and spirit that constitutes our human nature: the two pole stars of our our Christian faith when what we’re made of becomes most intensely revealed to us. Christmas is one of those pole stars. Christmas is that point in history when Spirit, Logos, the Word, the omnipotent power of God becomes flesh incarnate, born into human form in Jesus. The Easter season is the other pole star of our faith, and the more important one. The weeks of Easter mark that time when Jesus’ earthly life ends and returns to Spirit. The dialectical relationship of flesh and spirit at Christmas and Easter, a relationship often experienced as tension, is a mirror reflecting our human nature, recalling in the story of Jesus’ our own birth, foreseeing in Jesus’ death and resurrection at Easter our own death and return to God, and pervading everything we think and do in the time between those two great events in our lives: the who we and the who we can be. It’s a waiting game. What are you waiting for this Advent? Perhaps the answer will come to you this Christmas. I pray that it will. If it doesn’t, keep waiting with patience and prayerful trust in God that in time your release will come. My wife wears a ring on the small finger of her right hand bearing her family’s motto, an inscription first ascribed to the Roman poet Horace. It reads, “Nil desperandum,” (“Never despair!”). Horace is also credited for first uttering the famous phrase, “Carpe Diem (“seize the day”).” Seize each day this Christmas season to love others even better. And don’t forget to love yourselves as you love others: get plenty of sleep, eat and drink sensibly, and do what you can to alleviate stress. You know the drill. Merry Christmas and Every Blessing! Amen.  by the Rev. Ted Thornton
In Luke 10:9, Jesus instructs the seventy missionaries he’s sending out to spread the gospel with these words, “...say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ “ Imagine you’re a member of an updated 21st century group of “Seventy” called to go out into today’s world this coming week to proclaim this message. How will you choose to describe the kingdom of God to those who don’t know or don’t like God-talk? Is this assignment crazy? Think of what the original Seventy might have thought, especially after listening to Jesus admonish them about the resistance they were likely to encounter in a Roman province infamous for its hostility to Jews and Judaism. Jesus could not have put the danger more bluntly: “I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves (Luke 10:3).” Failure is at least in part assumed. Now remember: Jesus, like some of his Jewish contemporaries, was an apocalyptic prophet who didn’t think the world had much time to get itself ready to meet God. I don’t think many of us today really think that way or live that way. We more closely resemble Mark Twain, who said, “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky. They're always twenty years behind everything.” (Apologies to Kentucky!) In any case, most of us live our lives as if tomorrow will come and all too fast with its litany of first-of-the-work-week challenges. So, you should think about the words you will use in your preaching about the kingdom of God. For starters, is “kingdom” even the right word for our times? The evangelists after all didn’t take the Greek word basileia - “king” - literally to mean a person with a crown - so much as a realm or domain within us and between us [our Godly household or oikumene as depicted on the Whiteman window over the altar], the physical, emotional, and spiritual space we inhabit through which God’s love moves or tries to move if only we will let it. After all, haven’t we in our times had enough of kings actual and wannabe? “No Kings, no kings!,” shouted five million people across this country as they marched a few weeks ago on Flag Day, June 14, 2025. The “kingdom of God” is a communal attitude, an orientation, a sphere of action, a commitment to live a Godly life. And so, a growing number of Christians think a better translation of “kingdom of God” is “realm of God”: “realm” because that word conveys better the conviction that God’s presence is found in the way we conduct our everyday lives, not in the symbols of crown, scepter, and absolute power as we see them in history. This brings us to the most important question of all for how we might best proclaim the realm of God in our times: which is more important, proclaiming Jesus’ as our personal savior, or performing acts of loving kindness for others (what Jews call chesed)? Both themes are present in the New Testament: emphasis on right actions in the synoptic gospels and emphasis on belief in Jesus as savior in John. Have the meanings of love and belief changed since New Testament times? Actually, members of the early Church drew no distinction between Godly love and belief. They regarded practicing loving kindness toward others as the primary way we express our belief or faith in God and God’s son Christ Jesus. They didn’t think you could separate belief in Jesus from doing what Jesus told us to do: to treat one another with loving kindness. A reading of the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 5-7] makes this pretty clear. We express our belief and our faith in Jesus by behaving lovingly, compassionately, mercifully, and in the spirit of forgiveness toward one another. Martin Thielen, a retired Southern Baptist minister put it this way, “At its core, authentic spirituality is not about beliefs. It’s about behavior.” Rev. Thielen cites a scene from The Americans, a TV drama that aired from 2013 to 2018 in which one of the characters asks, “What if you don’t believe in God, or religion, or prayer? Her friend responds, “None of those things matter. All that matters is how we treat each other.” And, this corresponds to the dominant theme that unites both the synoptic gospels and John. The Great Commandment in Matthew 22:36-40 - “Love God and love your neighbor” - fits tongue and groove with John 13:34, where Jesus tells his disciples, "A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." Rev. Thielen concludes, “This ‘new’ commandment is a call to us to love each other in the same way that Jesus loved his disciples and the world. It emphasizes the importance of practical acts of love, kindness, and service within the Christian community and in the world at large.” This isn’t an easy fit for us in a world where zero sum thinking is the day to day “kingdom” we live in. Nevertheless, we Christians, the new Seventy, are called to challenge this plague of zero sum thinking that infects our relations with one another. Damien Cave wrote in a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (March 1, 2025, “Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out?“). Mr. Cave challenges the notion that the best outcome is winner takes all. How much saner and productive for all of us to work toward an outcome built upon collaboration and cooperation, where benefits and risks are shared across the board.The belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another has no place in the realm of God. Here’s a final problem for the new Seventy. Does the realm of God within us expect us and others to be perfect? This obsessive and cruel pursuit has spawned more bloodshed than any other philosophical and political doctrine in history. Think of Robespierre in France (as many as 17,000 heads fell to the guillotine), Lenin and Stalin in Communist Russia (thirty million dead), Pol Pot in Cambodia (seven million dead), and the worst of them all, Mao in China where an estimated sixty-million starved to death during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” sacrificed in the pursuit of a perfect society. Each of these leaders believed in the perfectibility of human behavior. Consider how at least one of these enterprises ended: the French Revolution finishes with Napoleon crowning himself emperor, a far more absolute ruler than the king whose head they cut off. It took France nearly a century, until the Third Republic came into being in 1870, to usher in a more stable form of democracy. We have badly misunderstood what Jesus meant when he says in Matthew 5:48, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." I’m among those who think that translation is again the problem here, especially when taken out of context. In Matthew 5:48, the Greek word translated as "perfect" is τέλειος (teleios). Instead of perfect, a better translation is the goal of completeness, maturity, or wholeness, not faultlessness or sinlessness, and certainly not literal perfection. Jesus certainly didn’t think perfection was a reachable end. He dramatically illustrates this point when he tells the mob that’s about to stone the adulterous woman to death in John 8:7, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” What Jesus means is that we are to strive to love one another as God loves us, and here’s the important part: to love one another without prejudice or partiality, not favoring one religion or race over another, or one sexual orientation over another, and to do so even if we can’t do it perfectly. And, when we fail, as we’re bound to, to confess our failure and ask God and those we’ve offended to forgive us.This is how the realm of God works, folks. The expectation that we will fail or make mistakes along the way is built right in. It’s one of the fundamental articles in the Constitution of the realm of God. The late poet and singer Leonard Cohen expressed this beautifully in his song, Anthem. “Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.” Your light, my light, our light; we shine through our cracks, our shortcomings, our errors, our vulnerabilities, not through our vain and selfish fantasies of perfection. Good luck and Blessings as you go forth this coming week to proclaim and live in the realm of God. Amen.  By The Rev. Ted Thornton
From John, chp. 19, verse 30 we read, “When he had received the drink, Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” A few millennia ago on this day, this Good Friday, Jesus’ business in this world was finished. What about your business in this world? Is your business finished? Is what the world sees when it looks at you the final version of you? What is the unfinished business in your life? There are a great many untidy and unfinished businesses in my life. With that line from our general prayer of confession in mind, I ask myself, “what have I left undone that I ought to have done?” When I sit and pray with people who are dying, more than once they’ve said to me, “I’m not afraid of death. I’m at peace with God on that score. What frightens me, and what I’m so sorry about is the mess I’m leaving behind for my beloved family to deal with.” Unfinished business. Adults in the room: have you discussed with your family or left written wishes to help them plan for the time after you’ve passed on? What unfinished business remains to prepare for your departure from this life? Consider the unfinished business of human society, not only here but across the globe. One of our penitential keynotes this Lent has been the role we Christians have played throughout history spreading the plague of antisemitism. Just before Lent began, some of us explored the role infantile narcissism plays in the creation of the cruel patterns of hatred and behavior directed at Jews, hateful remarks and behavior that have also targeted members of other minority racial, ethnic, religious, and immigrant groups today as well of those with different sexual identifications and how we Christians have been complicit in all of this. Holocaust camp survivor Elie Wiesel was once asked if he thought Christians were responsible for the Holocaust. He replied, “Christians were certainly involved in creating and carrying out the Holocaust. Was it the Christianity in them that caused them to do so,” he asked? Answering his own question, he said, “I hope not.” Good Friday is a solemn and subdued day to be sure. But, we need to remember that Jesus’ suffering ended a long time ago. In a few days we will once again proclaim his triumph over death. At a minimum, we bear witness to that triumph in the faith of the millions who have gone on before us throughout the two thousand years since it all happened. We rest assured even on this solemn day that for the Jesus who walked through this world, there are no more friends or enemies betraying him and abandoning, forsaking, or denying him. No more ridicule, no more false accusations. No more taunts from the mob. No more crowns of thorns and lashes across the back, no more brutality and sadism at the hands of his Roman executioners. For all its grim fixation on the cross, Good Friday is not really a day about a wrongful death. It’s a day about taking stock, which after all is what we’ve been doing since the long season of Lent began on Ash Wednesday. That was the day we started thinking harder about what kind of dust we’re made of, about who we are, about our unfinished business as those who say we want to follow Christ Jesus. How can we lead better lives, how can we be more kind, more good, more loving; how can we be released from our prejudices and become truly reconciled one with another especially in light of the fact that we don’t have unlimited amounts of time to finish our business? This is the real meaning of mortality, the real meaning of “dust to dust,” the sense that our own eventual deaths define a temporal boundary for us which is the price we pay for living in the natural, physical world. Lent introduces a healthy sense of urgency into our lives and it all comes to a head on Good Friday. Good Friday is not really, then, a day of grief alone. It’s a day that calls us beyond grieving into renewal, taking steps toward finishing our unfinished business. In short, Good Friday marks the final stage in our preparation for Easter. May God Bless you as we all strive toward finishing our own personal and collective unfinished business. AMEN. |
Mission
We believe God is calling us to cultivate a community of love, joy, hope, and healing. Jesus is our model for a life of faith, compassion, hospitality, and service. We strive to be affirming and accessible, welcoming and inclusive; we seek to promote reconciliation, exercise responsible stewardship, and embrace ancient traditions for modern lives.
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