Christmas Eve Concert and Candlelight Service Choir concert at 5:00 p.m. Service at 5:30 p.m. “Heavenly Peace” One of the most cherished Christmas hymns, “Silent Night,” turns 200 this year. For some, the line, “Sleep in heavenly peace,” is the most moving and relevant to their personal lives and to the state of the planet. … Continued
READ HERE On the eve of Christmas, we might grapple with whether we’re entitled to celebrate, admire, and even love the babe in the manger if we’ve chosen along the way to pour off the filmy bathwater of Christian doctrine in which that babe has soaked for two millennia. This morning we ask: Should we, … Continued
Candlelight service with Carols and Lessons Choral Concert 5:00-5:30 p.m., under the direction of Aimee Reash Homily: “The Perfect Imperfection of Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tree” For more than 50 years, a “Charlie Brown Christmas” has graced our TV screens. In it, Charlie falls in love with the most despised little tree on the lot. “This … Continued
The publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird prequel, Go Set A Watchman, unleashed a torrent of opinion pieces, critiques, applause, and befuddlement about the recasting of Atticus Finch from paragon of white virtue to an emblem of deep south racism. Mary Louise goes home as an adult and sees a different shade of Atticus than she had seen through the adoring eyes of Scout. In this sermon, we’ll explore the disturbing, empowering, and liberating ways our lives, our world, and the people in it, become more real when we are willing to “declare what we see” through unblinking adult eyes (even with the thickening vapor of half-truths and fake news). How do we reconcile the beautiful with the ugly, the vile with the just, the illusion of a leader with the reality, the fondness we have for friends and family when it is sullied by expressions of prejudice? And what will we do with the truths we see? “When I was a child, I reasoned like a child…but when I grew up, I put away childish things.”
