Sundays at Harvard-Epworth
Sunday School and Adult Forum at 10:00 AM online
Worship Service at 11:00 AM in-person and on Youtube
Epiphany Book Study: Freeing Jesus
Renowned author and religion commentator Diana Butler Bass delves into her personal experience and her historical research to consider how Jesus grows with us and helps us through life’s challenges in several capacities: as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence. Join us as we explore the multi-faceted nature of Jesus, keeping his teachings relevant and alive in our daily lives.
This class will be online at https://zoom.us/j/99809742967.
Please RSVP if you are planning to attend, at [email protected]
Most of the time, Barb and I are “Lectionary Preachers.” That means the Biblical texts on which which we preach come from a three year cycle of weekly readings that includes selections from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and the Psalms. Which inevitably means we don’t cover some pretty amazing material each week. This is one of those weeks. We’ll be preaching on Paul’s first letter to the infant church at Corinth about Spiritual Gifts (1 Corinthians 12:1-11 to be exact.) But that means we won’t be touching on the amazing story of Jesus’ first miracle in John’s gospel (John 2:1-11)— where he turns over a hundred gallons of water used for purification rituals into a snappy Beaujolais Nouveau to keep a wedding celebration going strong.
Steve Garnaas-Holmes, as usual, has a lovely poetic reflection on the scene:
Beloved,
you change the water of my life
into the wine of your touch,
if only I taste.
What was plain becomes mystery.
The cup of want
becomes jugs of abundance,
a lifetime.
The jars of obligation,
the pots of my attempts,
my hope of being acceptable,
my rite of shame and inadequacy,
you fill with delight instead.
Beloved, I see now—
this wedding must be mine.
As Harvard-Epworth UMC enters a third year of ministry in response to Covid, it may feel like our strength, resolve, and sense of adventure is becoming thin as water: our worship is hybridized, our coffee fellowship postponed, our classes online, our conversations done through KN95 masks, and most of us our desperate for a really good hug from a church friend we haven’t seen in months.
If we were alone through this exhausting endeavor, our spiritual lives would indeed be be thin and weak.
But we are not alone. We share life, learning, and worship with a vibrant community of faith, and we share our very being with the Beloved One who turns our water-thin solo efforts of obligation into something rich, invigorating, and overflowing: the excellent wine of grace, compassion, mindfulness, love, and life.
Even as we enter the third year of Covid, Jesus invites us to a whole-hearted faith in him and a whole-hearted fellowship with one another in his name.
In Peace,
Pastor Mitch