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

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Sermon: Sabbath-ing
Texts: Deuteronomy 5:1-7;12-15; Exodus 20:8-11; Mark 2:27-28
Speaker: Joel Miller

With Mark’s Sabbatical almost here, it’s a good time to revisit the role of Sabbath in all our lives.  If you’re not sure whether you have Sabbath in your life, or are pretty sure you don’t, let’s start with a broad view.

Before Sabbath was a holy day, a noun, it was a verb, with nothing especially holy about it.  To sabbath means to cease, to rest.  Verbs are action words, and sabbath is an action word meaning, basically, to refrain from action.  Sabbath is the un-verb.

The first four times the Hebrew word shabot, sabbath, appears in the Bible it is in verb form.  It’s mentioned twice in Genesis 2, where the Creator Elohim famously and somewhat mysteriously ceases, rests, sabbaths from all creative activity.  This happens on the seventh day, which is not yet called The Sabbath.  The seventh day is declared holy because on it Elohim sabbathed.         

The word appears nowhere else in the book of Genesis, and so we’re on to Exodus, chapter five, where Pharaoh is scolding Moses and Aaron for daring to ask for a three day holiday for the Hebrew slaves.  Holidays and paid or unpaid vacation leave were not part of the slave benefits package.  Rather than give them a break, Pharaoh makes their work more difficult, demanding the same quotas for brick production, while making them provide not just labor, but some of the materials.  From now on, the Hebrews will have to gather their own straw to mix with clay.  Pharaoh says to Moses and Aaron, “Why are…

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 | Jacqui Hoke, Ryan Hoke, Kyle Kerley, Andy Minard, Heidi Minard, Oralea Pittman, Shannon Thiebeau, Daryl Turley, and Trisha Turley 

…

CMC Service 5-1-22 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 | A common center, ever-expanding

Text: John 21:1-17
Speaker: Joel Miller

Every fall I teach an Inquirers Sunday school class.  It’s open to anyone, with a special invitation to new-ish folks.  We do an overview of Christian faith in a Mennonite perspective and look at the story of this congregation. 

One of the things we talk about is a couple different ways of forming community.  One focuses on strong boundaries, the other focuses on a strong center.  If you’ve been part of that class, this will sound familiar. 

In a community with strong boundaries, there’s a pretty clear line between who’s in and who’s out.  Or at least what you need to do to be in, and stay in.  In congregations this often comes down to a set of beliefs and a few moral issues.  The key is whether a personal can intellectually assent to this set of beliefs – about God and Jesus and the Bible and salvation and such – and if they live a moral or righteous life – sometimes narrowed down to certain understandings of sexuality, sometimes a bit broader.  Sometimes focused on dress codes – like head coverings for women and jackets with the right kinds of buttons or no buttons for men.  Rarely focused on other Bible-based issues like whether or not you pay your workers a fair wage or whether you welcome the refugee or share your resources with the poor. But, alas.

In a faith community with clear boundary lines if you can believe and do or not do these things,…

CMC Service 4/24/2022 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.

Sacred Work

Scripture: John 20:19-29

(Sermon by Mark Rupp)

Last Sunday while I was worship leading, I mentioned that Easter is not just a day, but a season.  It is a season on the liturgical calendar that extends through Pentecost and invites us to ask the “so what?” questions about the resurrection that we celebrate on Easter day. 

So what?  These questions about what Easter–what the resurrection–means for us today are questions that we ask all year long.  In fact, if you’ve ever done the math about how Lent is supposed to represent the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, you may have noticed that on the calendar, Lent lasts longer than 40 days.  This is because Sundays don’t count toward those 40 days of repentance and contemplating our mortality.  Every Sunday is meant to be a kind of “mini-Easter” celebration. 

I’ll let you decide what that might mean for any Lenten fasting you do…

We ask these “so what” questions of Easter and mini-Easters all year as we continue to both celebrate and ponder what the resurrection means for us, yet especially in these days and weeks immediately after the big day of celebration, we ponder them afresh alongside the stories of the disciples and others in the first century Biblical narratives who were trying to make sense of everything that had happened.  Encounters with the risen Christ in locked rooms, on seaside, or along the road show us how those early disciples grappled with the questions of the resurrection. 

And in many ways, how we order our life…

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 | Return from the depths, turning toward life

Texts: John 19:38-20:1,11-18; 1 Peter 3:18-22

Speaker: Joel Miller  

When I say “Christ is Risen” you say “Christ is Risen Indeed.”

Christ is Risen…

Christ is Risen…

Every story, we are told, has a beginning, middle, and end.  Our lives track this simple outline with our birth, our life, and our death.

It’s one of the great wonders and delights of Easter to break the mold of this story. 

On Easter morning, “early on the first day of the week,” as John and the other gospels tell us, Mary Magdalene, and other women, visit the tomb.   This is a story that starts with a tomb.  Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ death on a cross, is what begins the Easter story. 

The cross has come to be a primary symbol for Jesus followers.  You can put it up on a banner in church, you can wear it on a t-shirt, you can buy it in gold and hang it around your neck, but let’s be clear: the cross was absolutely a symbol of death.  And not just a symbol.  People died on crosses.  And Rome made sure these were very public events.  The power to inflict death was what kept the world spinning, kept life in submission, kept the order ordered.

The Easter story starts with death, which is to say an ending so final and disorienting one barely knows what to do next.    

To enter most fully into this story, is to bring our own experiences of endings.  Perhaps this is the actual death of a loved one without whom the world…