The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.

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CMC Worship Service 03:13:2022.mp4 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.

Lent 2 Sermon Manuscript

Speaker: Joel Miller

Cutting a covenant | Text: Genesis 15:1-18

After Abram had looked up at the stars.  After he’d tried to count them and lost track.  After the Divine promise that his descendants would number just like those innumerable stars.  After, as the text says, “he believed the Lord and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”  After this, Abram still needed more. 

Abram had no children in a time when children, specifically sons, were how one’s life and honor continued past one’s death.  Abram has access to some land, but he was still a first generation immigrant, having left the urbanized land of the East, Ur of the Chaldeans, to settle in this new place.

Abram is thinking about his legacy and the land on which that legacy will live. 

The stars he could see, sure.  The land currently under his feet he could touch.  But the future. The gap between the little pieces he could see and touch now, and the future for which he hoped…that was as vast as the gaps between those distant stars.   

Abram was looking for assurance about the future.  His future.  He wanted a promise and maybe more than a promise, whatever that might be, about where all this was headed. 

If you’re familiar with this story, that’s likely where the familiar part of this chapter ends.  Because we have hardly any cultural frame of reference for what happens next.   

Here’s what happens:

The Lord, Yahweh, Abram’s Divine conversation partner that evening, takes him up on his wish for a…

The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.

Reflections Manuscripts

First speaker: Joel Miller

Last summer I found myself reading books about people in the wilderness.  This wasn’t my intention.  I had gathered books for the Sabbatical project about adulthood transitions and how we undergo these through reflection and rituals.  And lo and behold, pretty much all the books were making references to wilderness.  From Malidoma Some recounting the initiation rites out away from village life of his native West African Dagara culture, to Bill Plotkin’s collection of stories of people’s transformative experiences in the Colorado wilderness where he leads nature-based soul-initiation programs.

Our Lent theme this year is Turn/Return, the literal meaning of the Hebrew word shuv, sometimes translated as repent.  In many ways, the season of Lent is always a return to wilderness.  Calling us back to this undomesticated place.  The unsettled wildness informs our lives in ways our carefully built environments can’t.  The wilderness holds surprise, encounters you can’t plan for on your google calendar.  It is inhabited with soul, embodied in plant, creature, and stone.  It is in one sense hostile to human life, and in another sense holds the mysteries of what makes us most deeply human.  

Lent begins, even more specifically, with a return to this particular story of Jesus in the wilderness after his baptism.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke each have their own version, and the three year lectionary cycle gives them each a turn on the first Sunday of Lent.

Jesus is on the cusp of beginning the part of his life that will have the most lasting impact.  He is, as we might say, waking…

CMC Service 2-27-22 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.

Sermon Manuscript

Seeking shalom in a strange land | Coming of Age
Text: Jeremiah 29:1-14
Speaker: Joel Miller

Disoriented.  Unsettled.  Uprooted.  Displaced.  Exile.

These are some of the words we might use to describe what these past two years have felt like.  The pandemic years.  Even if we personally feel a little more settled these days, our society is still feeling the effects.  In our schools.  In the workforce.  In the economy.  In our politics.  Now a war in Ukraine makes it feel all the more uneasy.

Uprooted, Displaced, Exile. 

These are some of the words that describe the people on the receiving end of a letter written by the prophet Jeremiah.  Jeremiah is writing from Jerusalem, and his letter is going all the way over to Babylon, in the East, where his fellow Judeans have been exiled.  The life they knew was over – their king dethroned, their temple destroyed, their land conquered, their houses flattened. 

And the life they were currently living in Babylon had no clear direction.  Was this temporary or long term?  Could this actually be their new home, or should they be striving to return to what used to be home?  And who should they listen to to give them guidance?

Disoriented.  Unsettled.  Uprooted.

These are words we use when we are going through a significant life transition.  Like moving away from home for the first time.  Like retirement, or getting married or divorced.  Like losing a beloved pet.  Like falling in or out of love.

And…this universal human experience of transitioning from childhood to…something else.  Different cultures have different…

CMC Service 2/20/2022 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.

Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.

Sermon manuscript:

Text: Luke 6:27-38

Speaker: Mark Rupp

Title: Life, Unscripted

A friend of mine from college recently wrote and published a book called, The Funny Thing About Forgiveness: What Every Leader Needs to Know About Improv, Culture and the World’s Least Favorite F Word.  I haven’t talked to Andrea Flack-Wetherald since back when she was Andrea Flack, but I knew through semi-regular Facebook updates that in the last few years she had taken up improv comedy as a hobby.  What I didn’t realize until I started seeing updates about her book was that she had taken her love of improv and combined it with her training as a social worker to create a method of conflict engagement and leadership development she calls Mindful Improv. 

Andrea’s book and much of her work is geared toward leaders in corporate work-place type settings, but she recognizes that the methods and goals behind Mindful Improv are much farther reaching than the office or the boardroom.  She even boldly claims that the ultimate goal is nothing short of world peace. 

If I wasn’t already interested, this claim definitely caught my attention. 

As I read her book, I realized that while her focus may be directed at a very specific audience, the methods she suggests do, indeed, get at some very foundational elements of relationship building, conflict transformation, and what it means to live from a place of our values.  If those aren’t some of the building blocks for world peace, I don’t know what is.

As Andrea…