Of the four Sundays in Advent, Advent 3 is perhaps the one most rife with traditions in many congregations. Gaudete Sunday gets its name from the opening words of the Latin introit antiphon for the Third Sunday in Advent in the Roman Catholic Church, “Rejoice (Gaudete) in the Lord always.”
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I don’t think “peace and quiet” is what Isaiah meant when he conveyed God’s message, “Comfort, O comfort my people…” Or, more specifically, I don’t think he meant quiet. Quiet isn’t the right adjective for the just peace that we are both waiting for and called to live into as
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It’s here! The season of waiting we’ve all been waiting for is here! Too much? Probably. But nonetheless, this first Sunday of Advent comes with a sense of arrival. As the days grow darker, we draw closer to the arrival of the Light that turns the world upside down—or right-side
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If the Sunday before Thanksgiving invited us to look at the community and the family that surrounds us, this Sunday encourages us to look up to the Christ as we give thanks for the kingdom he asks us to see and to lean into. This week casts back over the
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This week we turn to that familiar passage from Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I will say, Rejoice” (Philippians 4:4). Here again, we find that gratitude and joy are woven together and that it is sometimes hard to tell one from the other. But it does reveal that
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Three weeks before the end of the liturgical year, and we turn to gratitude as the guiding theme for worship. What does a life of gratitude look like? Or perhaps more importantly, what does it feel like? Our gratitude begins with God, Of course. But when we invite others to
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All Saints Sunday will be a glorious celebration of the body of Christ in our local context. There is no church like ours, no collection of gifts and graces, no accumulation of wisdom and experience, no place of joy and sorrow exactly like ours. So let this be a time
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We continue to envision what it would be like to live in the kin-dom of God as a community of faith. But this week, we focus on the doing. It is important for us to understand that loving God and loving neighbor is not about cultivating attitudes or about generating
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The invitation this week is to adjust our vision. We are called to see God in the world in which we live. We are called to identify the things that are God’s, including ourselves and the people around us. Even the surprising ones. This requires, first of all, the faith that
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The theme this week might seem harsh. It might also lead us to point fingers at those out there or over there who are stiff-necked. Rarely will we realize that we are the ones in need of a neck massage. This week begins with confession. We ask forgiveness for being
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