This Sunday’s service will continue to follow some threads of interdependence we’ve been weaving through the summer. I had intended to space out some weeks away throughout the summer months, but with the timing of Summer Institute, Board retreat, Worship Team retreat, and other bits of excitement, there have been some important things happening for which I wanted to be present.
And so, after this Sunday, I’ll be taking a few weeks leading up to our Ingathering/Water Ceremony service on September 13. I’ll be missing some of your reflections on interdependence, hearing about the rich spiritual lessons carried back from this year’s General Assembly delegates, and an exciting time with guest speaker and musician Carl Rust. What I’m hoping from that time, though, is a deepening and continuation of some of the insights I gained during sabbatical months—to begin the new church year ahead with a grounded and centered sense of what ministry means to me.
Some big changes are coming in the next year or two. I know we’ll be having a lot of conversation about the building. I’m excited to be alongside you for that journey of transforming your space and envisioning what future generations will need from it.
I also hope we leave room for other questions and conversations. Like the question of who we are called to be in deeper relationship with. Or what our faith is inviting us to create beyond our walls in this moment. None of our spiritual values can be fully embodied as individuals pretending to be separate and disconnected from everything. And I would say the same holds true for us as a spiritual community. We do not fully express our faith if our gaze is only inward.
So, I’ll be taking some time over the next few weeks to look outward in multiple ways. Not to identify opportunities to suggest, but just to immerse myself in various kinds of connection as an expression of my own spirituality. I hope your own spiritual practices guide you toward the sacred and the authentic in your relationships, and that you find a deeper sense of our shared values in connection with other people and the web of existence that holds us all.
This Sunday, we’ll be inviting hope by honoring an old practice that weaves its way to us from indigenous practices from many cultures, pulses at the core of Afrofuturism, and flows through at least a few centuries of speculative fiction. May we travel as far as our vision can carry us, trusting that we’ll perceive more of the path when we reach the limits of what we can see today.