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Lilly Ettinger reflects on Genesis 1:1–2, 26–27 and Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, exploring how God’s shared life of love offers a model for relating to ourselves and our neighbors. As people made in God’s image, we are invited to receive the belonging already extended to us and make room for others within it.   Reflection Questions What spiritual practices or intentions inform your image-assumptions about God? What fruit does the image of God produce in your life What might it look like for our community to reflect the mutuality and belonging we see within the Trinity?

Brandon Kinder continues our fall vision series, Tethered to Belonging: A Theology for Wanderers, Skeptics, and Believers, by exploring our relationship with Scripture through Psalm 1. Drawing on poetry, ancient Christian wisdom, and a personal story about music and memory, Brandon asks what happens when we approach the Bible not simply as a book of answers, but as an invitation to encounter God. What if Scripture is less about getting every word right and more about remembering how to sing?   Reflection Questions What “fruits” do you want to grow this next year? Would you rather memorize the menu, or eat the meal? Where/when have you felt that Divine Union?

Vanessa Maleare launches our fall vision series, Tethered to Belonging: A Theology for Wanderers, Skeptics and Believers, with a reflection on unity in diversity. Drawing from Philippians 2:1–8, she invites us to consider how humility, shared love, and care for one another can hold us together amid our differences.   Reflection Questions How are you peculiar? Do you have resistance to deep conversations about faith? What beliefs about faith and belonging are baked into your DNA?

Lynn Osgood continues her series, God in Ordinary Places, and walks us through Jesus' parable of the tenants, a story set in an ordinary workplace, where everything the tenants fight to keep was built with care before they ever arrived. In this text, we can ask ourselves: What happens when something entrusted to us begins to feel like something we own? What happens when something we've earned begins to keep us from receiving what we cannot earn? [Matthew 21:33-39]   Reflection Questions: What has been entrusted to my care? Where am I holding on too tightly? What from my past can I receive with gratitude, and what am I still learning to release?

Vanessa Maleare leads us through a study of magical objects, Moses’s staff, and the movement from destruction to provision. In Exodus, the same staff once used to turn the Nile to blood becomes a tool for bringing life-giving water from the rock. What might this transformation teach us about redemption—and how might we discern our own place in bringing real, good change to the situations around us? [Exodus 17:1-7]   Reflection Questions 1. Has your freedom come at the cost of something else? 2. What is something in your life that perhaps once was used to bring destruction and has been redeemed for a more life-giving use?  3. Do you feel comfortable "putting God to the test?

Lilly Ettinger explores Jonah alongside the prophetic tradition of bringing anger, disappointment, and protest directly to God. What if complaint isn’t a failure of faith, but part of a faithful relationship with God? Lilly considers how making room for honest complaint might expand our understanding of justice, restoration, and God’s surprising mercy. [Jonah 3:10-4:11]   Reflection Questions 1. Where am I waiting for judgment instead of hoping for restoration?  2. Where has God been gracious to me in my discomfort?  3. Where might my idea of justice be smaller than God’s mercy?

Eric Robinson notices that many of us have suffered heartbreak in our journey with God and the church, and asks how might this be an invitation to open us to living in a new reality?   Reflection Questions: 1. When are the times your heart has been broken in your faith journey? 2. Where do you see your life resonating with the story of Joseph? 3. How might God be inviting you to allow your heart to be broken open?

Lynn Osgood walks us through Luke’s story of the road to Emmaus where the risen Christ is present long before the disciples recognize him. This sermon opens a new series, God in Ordinary Places, by asking what might change if we looked at the world around us in the same way: not as places where we bring God, but as places where God is already at work.    Reflections Questions:   1. Where in your ordinary routines are you most likely to overlook the presence of God? 2. We often imagine spiritual life as directing our attention away from everyday things toward something “higher.” What might change if we instead encountered God through the world around us? 3. In what places do you feel closer to God? What makes those places the particular places they are?

Catherine Johnson reframes Jesus’ invitation to “lose your life” not as self-erasure, but as a release from the survival strategies we cling to for safety. Jesus models another way: to live from our deepest values even in the presence of fear and loss—to love what is mortal, hold it fully, and, when the time comes, let it go.   Reflection Questions   What survival strategy has helped protect you in the past but may no longer be serving you in the present? Where in your life are fear or self-preservation tempting you to act against what you most deeply value? What might it mean for you right now to practice the movement of loving, holding, and letting go?

With a new school year and new expectations approaching this fall, Lilly Ettinger notices that it can be easy to feel overwhelmed and on our own. God reminds us that we are not isolated human beings, but part of a community that helps us not to conform to hyperindividualism, but to lean into  being a part of the story of God and the world.    Reflection Questions Where in your life are you acting as though you have to do it alone? What becomes possible when we understand ourselves as members of one another? Where might God be inviting you to create the community you also need? Tags: Spiritual Growth, Progressive Church, Community, Transformation

Vanessa Maleare Interviews Dr. Lynn Osgood, Vox’s new Scholar in Residence, as she explores our sense of calling through the theology of placemaking, asking how the physical places we inhabit shape us, and how our calling shapes those places in return.   Reflection Questions   When in your life have you felt a call? What did that call feel like in your body? What difference did you witness between the call you felt and how it lived out in the world?

Nic Acosta notices that with each passing year, we seem to get better and better at optimizing time management and reducing wait time. But what if waiting is a fundamental experience of being human and fertile spiritual soil that we're depriving ourselves of? What if God is offering to meet us in our moments of waiting and inviting us into the riches of living according to divine time? [1 Kings 19:9-18]   Reflection Questions Are there truths that we might need to say in order to make the experience of waiting for God more bearable? How can our periods of waiting be opportunities to embrace the silence of God? How would our waiting be different if we lived according to the fullness of God's time (kairos) instead of the tyranny of the world's time (chronos)?

In honor of Christopher Mack’s last Sunday at Vox, Vanessa Maleare leads us through an exercise in discernment using the story of Esther and the Buddhist teaching of impermanence. [Esther 4:12-17] Practices: Listen and notice what/who is around you this week. Release the need for everything to be permanent. Take stock of what your context is. Where are you embedded? What is the need in the world around you? Listen and notice what is within. What gifts do you have? What power do you have? Be honest and really listen to the answer to this question. Esther thought she had none. But she did in fact have position and beauty on her side which proved to be powerful indeed. Finally ask yourself: how can I meet the needs of the world around me?

Christopher Mack shares his final message as a pastor on staff at Vox. He picks up Jesus’ Parable of the Wheat and Weeds to challenge ourselves personally and communally to participate in God’s wholeness. [Matthew 13:24-30]   Reflection Questions   When was a recent ‘aha!’ moment, when you awakened to Divine Presence already-present to your one wild, perplexing, challenging, and beautiful life? Where are you mercilessly fighting against imperfection, yours and the world’s? How might you practice giving thanks as a way of getting unstuck from resentment and despair?

Gena St. David glimpses in Jesus’ Parable of the Sower, a hope that the nonviolence we see in the life of Jesus can grow “a hundredfold” in our own lives and world–creating ripples larger than we dare dream or imagine. [Matthew 13:18-23]   Reflection Questions   Where are you already practicing nonviolence–and what ripples do you imagine it could create? Where would you like to become more nonviolent–toward the planet, animals, another person, or yourself? When you practice nonviolence, how do you feel?