Pastor Hillary Watson preaches her final sermon in her tenure as pastor on 1 John 4:7-12. Beloved,let us love one anotherbecause love is of God;everyone who loves is begotten of Godand has knowledge of God.8 Those who do not love have known nothing of God, for God is love.9 God’s Read more…
Pastor Hillary Watson reflects on what the prophet Elijah teaches us about justice, burnout, grief, and moving through fatigue.
What, you may be wondering, does Job, sitting in his large home with his devout prayers while God and the Adversary argue, have to with wilderness? Throughout this series, we have lodged ourselves mostly in the wilderness. We have been to the desert, the river banks, the mountains, the forest. Read more…
21 So Jacob sent the gifts [to his brother Esau] ahead of him, but he spent that night in the camp. 22 Jacob got up during the night, took his two wives, his two women servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed the Jabbok River’s shallow water. 23 He took them and Read more…
God reconciles all things. That is our vision of the how the world goes, in a nutshell. But there are some things that are irreconcilable. Each of us could make our own list: murder, rape, abuse of children, dipping French fries in mayonnaise. There is a definitive category of actions Read more…
Judges 4:1-9, 12-24 I want to take a moment, first, to revel in the beauty of a good revenge story. Here we have the King Jabin and his General Sisera. (This Jabin with a b, totally etimologically unrelated to our own Javan.) Together, Jabin and Sisera anchor an oppressive regime. Read more…
Matthew 5:38-42Matthew 14:13-21Matthew 17:24-27 I would like to begin this morning with a reading from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. If you’d like to follow along, it begins on the bottom of page 132 or so in your pew copy, depending on your translation. [This is the scene Read more…
I wish I had a worry-o-dometer to step on each morning, like a scale, because as the election gets closer, I don’t know if I’m gaining weight, but I am gaining worry. So I’ve written a few notes about what I’m feeling, mostly notes to self. I’m curious, in our Read more…
We all deal with teenage angst in different ways. I managed by recording mixtapes from the radio and reading Jeremiah 12 obsessively. The mixtapes—which were, quite literally, tapes, have not survived the test of time, but the Bible has. Jeremiah writes: “You will be in the right, O God, when Read more…
Note the top podcast includes just the sermon; the bottom includes the poem 38 by Layli Long Soldier read by Elena Tsai and Trevor Bechtel’s pastoral prayer In March, I walked down the street and planted snap peas on the trellis at the preschool where no one went to preschool Read more…