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A guided time of reflection and prayer as we let go of one year and receive another.    Poems: What is Life? by Gregory Orr & To The New Year by W.S. Merwin Music by PS Derdall

Christmas 2023. A sermon by Tim on our responsibilities as parents to the baby Jesus.

On the possibility of all things happening and not.

Sermon by Tim Kim. September 2023.

Sermon by Tim Kim. Easter 2023.

A farewell sermon from Virginia. She will be missed, and we are thankful for this final blessing she offered!

Preacher: Danny Sanchez All summer long, we've been exploring this strange and compelling (and strangely compelling) idea of God's Kin(g)dom. We've asked questions, like: where is it? When is it? How do we know? What are our hopes for it, as individuals and as a community? This Sunday is our final Summer service, and we'll be wrapping up our conversation on God's Kin(g)dom (for now) with a call to action: what will you do to take part in building it? We'll explore the simultaneity of beginnings and endings, working and resting, power and resistance. In that same spirit, we'll send off our intern, Danny, as he ends his internship with us and prepares to begin his final year of Divinity School.

Preacher: Virginia White It's no secret that things are awry in the capital C church. Division, discrimination, deception, death-dealing doctrines, and dire boredom seem to rule the day. Perhaps that's why many of us ended up here at R+B: a little church trying to figure out how to remake belief. We wanted to find (or build) something a bit more wild and alive, and a lot more loving.  Collectively, we've been at it for a while now. We've learned a lot and yet we know our work is not nearly done. We have our own unlearning, listening, and growing to do. Remaking belief is a lifelong journey - beckoning us beyond what we know.  This Sunday we are going to recommit to this (re)making believe stuff in a fresh way. We’re launching our 95 (New) Theses campaign! A way for us to share our deepest dreams and biggest imaginings for a better church (and world) with one another and to hear from people beyond this community about what they yearn for as well. Scripture: Luke 13:10-17 Worksheet: https://www.rootandbranchchurch.org/rmb-worksheet Remake Believe Board: Community Vision Board

Preacher: Tim Kim If you haven't heard, I (Tim) will be going on sabbatical starting in July. Which means this week will be my last service until the fall. Which means I would love to see everyone before I go! Join us as we wrap up the last couple months of conversation around the ideas of Invitation, Contemplation, and Co-creation. If you were at our All Together Meeting, we talked about them being the values that have risen to the surface over years of conversation and practice. And now that we've laid them on the table, what's next?  Link to poem, Dreaming Accountability, by Mia Mingus

Preacher: Tim Kim Easter 2022. On the death penalty, the quietism of Easter morning, and the intersection of life and death.

Preacher: Danny Sanchez Pastoral Intern, Danny Sanchez, on what the events of Palm Sunday teach us about getting ready for big things.

Preacher: Virginia White Reading: Mark 8: 27-35 It might be a surprise that “Lent” has an etymological connection to the word “lengthening.” For many of us, if Lent means anything at all, it evokes ideas about mortality, self-denial, and “giving something up.” But these 40-days don’t end with the cross on Good Friday, they lead to the resurrection on Easter. Just as the world around us welcomes longer brighter spring days, luring back the tree buds, and coaxing the flowers to open in bloom once again, this spiritual season is meant to draw us into new life. Perhaps reframing the practices of Lent from the harsh self-disciplinary image “giving things up,” to the looser invitation to “let things go,” to enter into the messiness, maybe even lostness, of that space beyond our self-management, might be just the posture we need to discover new life on Easter morning.

Preacher: Tim Kim.  Reading: Luke 13:1-9.  Lent is a journey towards Easter, one that involves reflecting on things that many of us might find unpleasant and difficult at the moment. No doubt, death and sin feel very salient at the moment. But, such things need not be dour for dour's sake. After all, as we'll talk about this week, any reflection on death is really a reflection on life.

Preacher: Tim Kim - If Advent is a season of expectant waiting, what does it mean to wait well? How do we prepare with intention and purpose? We often turn in these moments to individual introspection, reflection, meditation. But as the story of Jesus' pre-arrival demonstrates, there is usually a messenger, a message, and a need to listen. Sometimes the messenger takes the form of Mary, as we talked about a couple weeks ago, and sometimes it looks like scary/weird John the Baptist (though in the painting above he looks more sad/sleepy). Sometimes the message is a beautiful song that calls into being a new world, and sometimes it is a voice in the wilderness screaming about things that are hard to take. There's a lot of both out there in the world right now. Are we listening?

Preacher: Virginia White - At the same time as the physical world around us descends into longer nights, colder days, and the stillness of winter, the advent season invites us into a spirit of warm and eager anticipation of the birth of Jesus Christ and the coming of the Messiah into the world. But what does it mean for us to anticipate an event that has already happened in the past? How can we hold onto certain hope that something good is promised to us and will be given to us when the world around us seems so broken, so (literally) cold, so cruel?  Advent asks us to hold the pains and disappointments of reality as we know it in tension with unshakeable expectation that no matter how difficult things may seem now, there is an ever present promise of a new and world-altering good yet to come. And even that this world re-making good thing that lies ahead of us in the future, has already been done before and so can be done again.  Advent, then, is like this topsy-turvy time warp land where by remembering the amazement of Jesus’ birth all those years ago, again, we become more able to expect that God will once again do great and wondrous things to care for this world in the future.  This week we will look to the woman who knew this time-warping experience well. Not long after Jesus’ mother-to-be gets word that she is going to give birth to the Messiah, while still pregnant with him, she breaks out into a prophetic song that explicitly describes the redistribution of wealth, the downfall of the mighty, and the uplifting of the hungry, poor, and outcast. Yet she speaks not in the future tense, but in the past. As if she has already seen God’s promise come to full completion.  Might advent be calling us to become like Mary? Can we, too, become visionaries of a just and redeemed world, of which we are so certain and so moved, that we are ready to speak of it, and live into it, as if it were already here? Perhaps that is how Christ will come into the world again now.