Speaker: Anton Flores-Maisonet, our Winter Seminar Speaker, is a co-founder of an alternative community of housing and welcome for immigrants in Atlanta, Georgia and author of the recently published book, Welcome, Friends. 

Scripture: Revelation 21:1-5 and Luke 16:19-31

An adapted sermon, in conversation with Martin Luther King Jr.

I need not pause to say how very grateful I am to be here this morning, to have the opportunity of standing in this pulpit, among a people who have long sought to follow Jesus in the way of peace, justice, and costly discipleship. And I do want to express my deep personal appreciation to the leaders and members of Columbus Mennonite Church for extending this invitation.

It is always a rich and rewarding experience to take a brief break from our day-to-day demands and from the ongoing struggle for freedom and human dignity, and to reflect together on the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of goodwill. And certainly it is always a deep and meaningful experience to be in a worship service. And so, for many reasons, I am glad to be here today.

This sermon is offered explicitly in conversation with, and in deep gratitude for, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 sermon, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” I claim no originality here—only responsibility—to receive that witness, to tell the truth about our own time, and to ask what faithfulness requires of us now.

I would like to use as a subject from which to preach this morning: “Remaining Awake

Through a Great Revolution.”

The text for the morning is found in the book of Revelation, where we hear this promise:

“Behold, I am making all things new; former things have passed away.”

I am sure that most of you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled “Rip Van Winkle.” The one…

Text: Matthew 3:13-17

Speaker: Marty Troyer

The boundary between heaven and earth is thin.

Charles H. Spurgeon once said, “I am convinced that there is no great distance between heaven and earth, that the distance lies in our finite minds…”

As a hospice chaplain, I’ve become very comfortable in spiritual spaces. I can’t fully explain the mystery of it, but I witness it often—people near the end of life interacting with a world we cannot see.

Take Donna, for example. She was a former nun and a well-known psychologist. By the time I visited her, she hadn’t spoken, eaten, or had a drink in days. I sat quietly with her and her two cats, reading scripture and singing softly. Suddenly, Donna sat up. She reached her hands toward the ceiling, her eyes wide with wonder.

I asked, “Who do you see?”

With a huge smile, she said, “I see Jesus.” A few moments later, she lay back down. Within the hour, she was gone.

I see moments like this regularly. People reach out to hold invisible hands, wave goodbye, or speak with loved ones who passed years ago. To them, these visitors are as real as you or I. I don’t need to understand it to know this—it brings them deep comfort.

The boundary between heaven and earth is thin.

In Celtic Christianity, this idea is called “thin places.” These are moments when the spiritual and physical seem to overlap. They describe it as “a place in time where the space between heaven and earth grows thin and the Sacred and the secular seem to meet.” Or as the saying goes, “Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.”

Many of us experience this in nature—in mountains and rivers, in the sound of wind through trees. Or sometimes, through a cuddly dog…

Texts:

Psalm 72:1-7, 11-14

Isaiah 60: 1-6

Matthew 2:1-12

Ephesians 3:1-12

…

Text: Luke 2:8-20

Speaker: Mark Rupp

It was the night of the Winter Solstice back in the year 2020. On that longest night of the year, the staff at the Atlanta Friends Meeting House decided to invite the refugees that had been staying with them to pack into their van for a driving tour of the Christmas lights in the neighborhood. 

The meeting house had become a kind of sanctuary for refugees and immigrants making their way through the Atlanta area, a place where they could find a clean bed for a night or more, good food and hearty conversation around kitchen tables, and the open arms of hospitality in a strange place that so often looked at them with suspicion and fear. 

On that Winter Solstice evening, they packed their little interfaith, multilingual caravan and set out to enjoy the beauty of the season together. As part of this caravan, there were three young boys, and the leader of the group gave them an invitation. He told them, “At the end of the drive, tell me which house had your favorite lights.” 

They turned on some soft holiday music in the background and set out along the neighborhood streets. But the sounds from the van’s stereo were quickly overtaken by the chorus of exclamations from the backseat. The leader had told the boys to wait until the end to tell him which house had their favorite lights, but the youngest among them either didn’t hear that part or simply couldn’t hold back. 

The very first house they passed, the young man lit up with joy and yelled out “Oooo, my favorite!” This was the first full sentence the leaders of the Atlanta Friends Meeting had heard this boy say since he had arrived. And it was “not just a sentence, but a song. A proclamation….

Text: John 1:1-14

Speaker: Joel Miller

About 100 years ago, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble published a paper that changed the way we think.  Using what was then the world’s largest telescope, combined with a theoretical model developed by fellow American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Hubble argued that the universe was larger than the Milky Way.  Not only were there other galaxies, but these galaxies were moving away from each other.  We live, he proposed, in an expanding universe. 

Seventy years before that paper, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species.  Rather than cosmology and physics, Darwin’s interest was biology.  He focused on life and its unfolding on this singular planet.  Darwin presented a sweeping theory that life on earth descended from a common ancestry, through a process called natural selection, with adaptations to different environments across time producing the vast diversity of species past and present.

None of these ideas were brand new.  It took a bit for them to be widely accepted within the academy.  They have since been largely affirmed, and refined.  As our best current models about where we, and everything we can see, touch, and measure, come from, they present a remarkable picture.

Like – A common ancestry – not just on the tree of life, but all the way back to an unimaginably hot and dense point, which explodes – not into space, but as space and time, still expanding. 

Like – The gifts of stars, drawing the most basic particles into themselves, fusing the simplest atoms of hydrogen and helium into oxygen and carbon, physics giving birth to chemistry. Lighting up the dark universe like a Christmas tree on a winter night.  And in their death, creating the higher elements through supernovae explosions and mergers of leftover cores.  Stars’ spectacular sacrifice seeding the universe with new possibilities. 

Remarkable,…