Message: Epiphany Gifts including Interview with Roberts and Battenfelder families
Full Worship Service:
Tag: Gospel of Matthew
Sun, Nov 29 Gratitude Reflection
Today give thanks for promises and covenants. What contracts and agreements define your life? What vows and oaths have you taken? What promises have you made and kept? Which have you broken?
With whom did you make such agreements, such as a marriage vow, or the choice to adopt someone? Did you make a commitment to an institution, such as serving in the military, or in another role that similarly includes an oath of service?
What symbols in your life represent these promises? Rings? Medals? Certificates? Badges? Flags or banners? Uniforms?
Who, then, has made promises and commitments to you? What oaths and pledges have been maintained or broken by others?
Give thanks for promises and covenants. — Rev Gail
While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; 28 for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. — Matthew 26:26-28
Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. ― John Green
I feel keeping a promise to yourself is a direct reflection of the love you have for yourself. I used to make promises to myself and find them easy to break. Today, I love myself enough to not only make a promise to myself, but I love myself enough to keep that promise. ― Steve Maraboli
Some things you don’t have to promise. You just do.
― Rick Yancey
Message: The Last Song
JCC 122919 The Last Song from architect on Vimeo.
Meditation: blessings among brokenness: based on Joshua 3 and Matthew 23
Themes from Joshua 3:14-17 and Matthew 23:11-12. The crossing from wasteland to abundance, from brokenness to blessing … gratitude arises from the chance to serve others.
Blessing of Enough — Jan Richardson
I know how small
this blessing seems;
just a morsel
that hardly matches
the sharp hunger
you carry inside you.
But trust me
when I say—
though I can scarcely
believe it myself—
that between
and behind
and beneath
these words
there is a space
where a table
has been laid
a feast
has been prepared
all has been
made ready
for you
and it will be
enough
and more.
Gratitude through Service
As soon as healing takes place, go out and heal somebody else … Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good. — Maya Angelou
In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others. ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay ‘in kind’ somewhere else in life. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
At times, our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. — Albert Schweitzer
Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings. ― William Arthur Ward
But fortunately for us, the soft spot — our innate ability to love and to care about things — is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment — love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy — to awaken … — Pema Chodron
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back. ― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers
As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. ― John F. Kennedy
To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. … It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality. ― Barbara Brown Taylor
Feast & Famine
In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices. ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
No one has ever become poor by giving. — Anne Frank
‘Enough’ is a feast. — Buddhist proverb
Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life. — Rumi
Eating, and hospitality in general, is a communion, and any meal worth attending by yourself is improved by the multiples of those with whom it is shared. ― Jesse Browner
If the home is a body, the table is the heart, the beating center, the sustainer of life and health. ― Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine
Call it the persistence of wonder, or the stubbornness of the miraculous: how Christ casts his circle around the fragments, will not loose his hold on what is broken and in pieces. How he gathers them up: a sign of the wholeness he can see; a foretaste of the banquet to come. — Jan Richardson
Meditations on themes from the Parable of the Sower & the Seed
Reflections on hard earth and fertile ground: sowing seeds, putting down roots, growing shoots … putting parables to work in current times.
The Sower by VanGogh
A Short Story of Falling — Alice Oswald
It is the story of the falling rain
to turn into a leaf and fall again
it is the secret of a summer shower
to steal the light and hide it in a flower
and every flower a tiny tributary
that from the ground flows green and momentary
is one of water’s wishes and this tale
hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail
if only I a passerby could pass
as clear as water through a plume of grass
to find the sunlight hidden at the tip
turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip
then I might know like water how to balance
the weight of hope against the light of patience
water which is so raw so earthy-strong
and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along
drawn under gravity towards my tongue
to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song
which is the story of the falling rain
that rises to the light and falls again
On Parables & Seeds
Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, it has not reached its goal. A parable. — Frederick Nietzsche
To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message. ― Chester Elijah Branch
Each day of my life I am sowing seeds that one day I will harvest. — Gautama Buddha
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. — Robert Louis Stevenson
A lower power cannot compass the full understanding of a higher. But to limit one’s belief to the bounds of one’s own small powers, would be to tie oneself down to the foot of a tree, and deny the existence of its upper branches. ― Mrs. Alfred Gatty, ie, Margaret Scott
Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. — Norman Vincent Peale
If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me. — William Shakespeare
Being an American is a state of mind, and to be in a family is to feel the power of belonging, the power of your roots. Family is a tree, the strength of a tree, the roots, the leaves, the past, the present, the future, the fruits, the seeds. — Esai Morales
He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking. ― Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale
Throughout the parables the paradoxical teachings continue: Give to receive. Die to live. Lose to win. ― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots
Maybe that’s why Jesus was so fond of parables: Nothing describes the indescribable like a good yarn. ― Cathleen Falsani, Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace
A journey or pilgrimage also follows the parabolic curve of an arch: it swings out from a known point and returns symmetrically to a point on the same line or plane, but farther along. For this reason, ancient philosophers chose the arch as a symbol for the process of interpretation. That is why teaching stories, such as those of Jesus or Buddha, are known as parables. ― John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City
A Parable — Arthur Conan Doyle
The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there,
And warmly debated the matter;
The Orthodox said that it came from the air,
And the Heretics said from the platter.
They argued it long and they argued it strong,
And I hear they are arguing now;
But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese,
Not one of them thought of a cow.
Parable of the Hostages — Louise Glück
The Greeks are sitting on the beach
wondering what to do when the war ends. No one
wants to go home, back
to that bony island; everyone wants a little more
of what there is in Troy, more
life on the edge, that sense of every day as being
packed with surprises. But how to explain this
to the ones at home to whom
fighting a war is a plausible
excuse for absence, whereas
exploring one’s capacity for diversion
is not. Well, this can be faced
later; these
are men of action, ready to leave
insight to the women and children.
Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased
by a new strength in their forearms, which seem
more golden than they did at home, some
begin to miss their families a little,
to miss their wives, to want to see
if the war has aged them. And a few grow
slightly uneasy: what if war
is just a male version of dressing up,
a game devised to avoid
profound spiritual questions? Ah,
but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun
calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s
loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens.
There on the beach, discussing the various
timetables for getting home, no one believed
it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca;
no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable
affliction of the human heart: how to divide
the world’s beauty into acceptable
and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy,
how could the Greeks know
they were hostages already: who once
delays the journey is
already enthralled; how could they know
that of their small number
some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure,
some by sleep, some by music?