Luke 24:36-48

In this second in a series exploring questions, wonderings, and themes that come from our congregation, Juliet joins Melissa to bring today's message.

After Jesus' resurrection, he keeps showing up. Jesus meets their doubt with what they need and gives it to them.

Jesus helps us know that we all are special. What do you need for God to be in your life?

Colossians 1:15-23

Melissa started a new sermon series this week, "I'm not sure about that," exploring questions, wonderings, and themes that come from our congregation. The most frequent submission was around the subject of hell.

We live our whole lives bearing consequences, around retribution and punishment. If you make a bad choice with money, no one is coming to bail you out. If you break the law, you go to jail. We want bad people to get what's coming to them. But that should also give us pause.

Just a few months ago, Pope Francis was asked what he thought about the afterlife. "I like to think hell is empty," he told an Italian reporter. "At least I hope it is." Melissa also hopes that it is, and that hope is a core of her Christian faith. Core to a belief that no one is too far gone. No one is the worst thing they have done.

John 20: 1-18

Happy Easter to everyone! In this sermon Melissa Florer-Bixler preaches on the resurrection and the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene at his tomb. Jesus asks Mary, "whom are you looking for?" This is a loaded question, however, as Melissa shows us. The question asks us to look into our own selves, our own motivations, and our hopes when we seek out Jesus, who asked this probing question of Mary, his disciples, and also (tellingly) Judas. Whatever you come seeking for from Jesus you will find it, for even Judas got a quick payout. Ultimately, Melissa asks us to consider how we will live and conduct ourselves if all of this is true, just as the early Church sought to help the sick, the poor, and the downtrodden. This Easter when you consider the life, sacrifice, and resurrection of Jesus ask yourself, whom are you looking for?

Mark 11: 1-11

Note: The English voice you hear in this podcast is that of the translator. You can hear Miguel in the background, preaching in Spanish

In this sermon, RMC's Miguel Cruz preaches on the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem as related in the Gospel of Mark. While we often focus on the exhilaration of the scene with Christ surrounded by followers and having performed miraculous healings and casting out of demons in the previous verses, Miguel asks us to focus on the transition that is taking place at this moment in Jesus' life, ministry, and future which should act as a guide to order our own lives. Jesus arrives on a humble donkey, argues with the priests and vendors, curses a fig tree, and talks intimately with his followers about prayer, taxes, wealth, power, and betrayal. Miguel helps us to see in these passages that Jesus is leading us to a new understanding of triumph and success that rejects the accumulation of wealth, material possessions, and positions of power that the world teaches us to expect and respect.

John 12: 20-33

Note: At 2:19, ten seconds of audio was lost due to a technical problem during the live recording.

Melissa Florer-Bixler preaches on a time in Jesus' life where there is no time left for ministry, but only to speak to those present of his imminent demise and fulfillment of God's plan. The Jesus who has constantly upset our comfortable balance with life and often called us to the do opposite of what we instinctively think correct, again reminds us that if we choose to follow Jesus faithfully, our path will lead to the cross. But the wheat that dies bears a field of fruit, albeit of a type we may not expect to be helpful in creating what we think the Kingdom of God should look like. Herein lies a freedom that comes from our vulnerability, in giving up our attempts to control and rectify the problems of the world, history, politics, and society. We can instead leave it to a God that is always faithful in his love and work of redemption. Our sacrifices, living the life of wheat, brings more wheat, which brings more wheat - beautiful, vulnerable, and a fundamental part of our calling to follow Christ.

Numbers 21: 4-9 John 3: 14-21

Our perspective on the trials and tribulations of life can have a profound effect and how we formulate our understanding of God's character and our own place and purpose in God's creation. Melissa Florer-Bixler preaches on the long and arduous Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt and how their focus on the harsh environment, dangers, and discomforts of the wilderness caused them to doubt the truth of God's love and divine plan for their rescue. God's response to their criticism wasn't to send snakes as a punishment but to let them go: to remove some of the many divine protections that had quietly always been in place. God's constant effort shielded God's people from sand storms, snakes, bandits, and had mapped out places to rest and drink. When the desert started biting with a vengeance and yet God also gave Moses a new means for salvation, the people suddenly realized a new perspective about how much of God's love and planning for them existed that they had never perceived. Melissa asks us to consider this shift of perspective within our own lives as we think about Easter, the crucifixion, and why God sent his son in the flesh to die for us. Did Christ come just to fix the giant wilderness we have made of this Eden, and that God is set in wroth against his rebellious creation unless they bend the knee? Or...has God, from before the beginning, cared for, loved, shielded, and planned for our existence in a harsh wilderness and the death of God's son came as a demonstration that God would rather, more than anything, be with us than without us?

John2: 13-22

Melissa Florer-Bixler preached on the cleansing of the Temple by Jesus. From this gospel we learn that the existence of an economy for selling sacrificial animals and exchanging currency was not what angered Jesus, being necessary for travelers to participate in rituals, but rather the proximity of these activities, within the holy space that God comes to inhabit and meet us. Melissa uses the destruction of the Temple and the Crucifixion of Jesus, Earthly places God has inhabited, to wrestle with the question of what kind of home does God make among us now? Without these touchstones, how do we possess a thing we cannot touch? All we have to make a home for God in the wilderness is each other when we meet in His name and the remembrance of his body and blood in the sacraments. We are now the feet and hands of Christ.

John 15:14-15 & Acts 8:26-38

Ann Roberston shared two of the favorite songs of her father as our summer series continued. She spoke of learning from him how he loved the songs “In the Garden,” which many of us know better as “He Walks with Me and He Talks with Me,” and “What a Friends We have in Jesus.” In the process of reflecting on the songs, Ann weaves in the passages from John about Jesus calling us friends and from Acts about Phillip befriending the Ethiopian Eunuch and baptizing him.

The ways in which we walk with and befriend Jesus may be different for each of us. Our decision to be a Christian is personal and individually meaningful to each of us in our own way.