As a Christian community, called to peacemaking and reconciliation, we affirm that people of any race, ethnic identity, gender, who are gay or straight, of any ability, age, or economic status, are welcome to full participation in our congregation.
Scripture: Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 Jesus’s baptism is what shows that he was not just the Son of God, but also human. His baptism is what shows his solidarity with humans. On this Sunday, Melissa encouraged us to take time to remember our own baptisms, or to consider becoming baptized if we weren’t already. Baptism in […]
Luke 6: 17-36 Our intern Emily Alexander preaches from the Gospel of Luke on the final week of Advent, as we ready ourselves to celebrate the good news of Christ’s kingdom arriving. In this passage, Jesus is trying to get his followers accustomed to a radically new kind of kingdom philosophy. He inverts the natural […]
Luke 1:46b-55 Melissa preaches in the third week of Advent on Mary’s leap of faith to obey God, immaculately conceive and eventually give birth to our savior. As an unmarried, pregnant, Jewish woman, Mary had to put her reputation, future, and life at risk given the societal and medical conditions of Israel in antiquity. Likewise, […]
Luke 3: 7-18 The second week of advent Melissa preaches on John the Baptist from the Gospel of Luke, who is paving the way for the coming of Christ. His message is fiery, convicting, and demands dramatic change of those who would desire to answer God’s call. However, Melissa reminds us that John’s call is […]
Luke 21: 25-36 What do you do when the stress, cares, and bad headlines of this world weigh you down and threaten to choke out the life-giving good news of the Gospel? As Advent begins, Melissa Florer-Bixler looks to this week’s passage in the Gospel of Luke for inspiration. Jesus had just finished informing his […]
Luke 24:36-48 In this second in a series exploring questions, wonderings, and themes that come from our congregation, Juliet joins Melissa to bring today’s message. After Jesus’ resurrection, he keeps showing up. Jesus meets their doubt with what they need and gives it to them. Jesus helps us know that we all are special. What […]
Susan Scott preached during Christ the King Sunday, and yet the lectionary scripture for this sermon is Luke 23: 33-43, telling of the crucifixion of Jesus where he is mocked by the guards and one of the condemned for proclaiming his lordship. Susan invited us to see the kingship of Christ not as a ruler […]
Melissa preached from Luke 24:13-35 on this third Sunday of Easter. Bread weaves a thread through the pages of scripture. Bread is a character in our salvation story. Even though they had talked at length with this stranger, it wasn’t until the two traveling on the road to Emmaus sat and broke bread with Jesus […]
Scripture: Luke 23: 33-43 On this Sunday celebrating the reign of Jesus, Melissa shared the image of some graffiti archaeologists uncovered depicting a man with his arm raised toward a man with a donkey’s head nailed to a cross. Under it bears the inscription “Alexamenos adores his god.” There are frequently two depictions of Jesus. […]
Melissa reflects on and gives voice to the hypothetical woman who was married to seven brothers from the story in Luke 20:27-38. The Sadducees pose this question about the resurrection, but all along what Jesus wanted to tell the Sadducees, wanted to tell us, is that all women, all people, need good news. We need […]
Melissa began the four-part message sharing the story of the widow who demanded justice from the judge in Luke 18:1-8. This was followed by three stories of RMCers who shared out of their calling to work for social justice in their varied roles: Rachel “RED” Davis, Elizabeth Korver-Glen and David Rohrer.
Susan brought the message from Luke 16:19-31, telling the story of the rich man and Lazarus. How often are we so caught up in our own world that we miss those at the margins? And it’s not just about being blind to those at the margins but about being so sure you know what God […]
Scripture: Jeremiah 18:1-11, Luke 14:25-33 Melissa is back from her sabbatical and will use this month’s sermons to report on several aspects of her family’s travels and some of the learnings along the way. This Sunday she contrasted the work of Akram, a Palestinian craftsperson who recycles tear gas canisters into works of art, with […]
Susan Scott brought this Sunday’s message based on Luke 13:10-17, the story of Jesus healing the crippled woman at the synagogue on the Sabbath. Susan asked us to contemplate, “How does God feel about you at this moment?” Jesus was chastised for breaking strict Sabbath rules by the leader of the synagogue. This leader was […]
Scripture: Luke 12:13-21 Liddy Grantland brought our message this morning. She serves as the service team leader for two L’Arche homes outside Washington D.C. Liddy shared with us stories of L’Arche community life, particularly during COVID, including some of the joys and the frustrations. God wants us to live in the world as our home, […]
Scripture: Colossians 2:6-19 and Luke 11:1-13 Elizabeth Korver-Glenn provided the message this Sunday, drawing on four themes from the Gospel of Luke passage. May our bodies, the bread and the breaths we ask for and receive, and the baptism in which we participate through breaking, recreating, crush the empires of this world, and usher in […]
I Corinthians 12:12-26, Luke 24:44-53 On this last Sunday before Melissa and her family leave for a three-month sabbatical, it was also Ascension Sunday. It was also the Sunday following another deadly mass killing in a Texas school, and just a week after a mass shooting in a Taiwanese church in LA, and a day […]
We’re brought up in a system that divides people from commodities. All that other stuff–oceans, animals, trees–all of it is neutral material used to benefit people to make us happier or richer, or to give us more space or more stuff. But we can’t separate ourselves from other creatures because over and over in the […]
The parable is The Prodigal Son but Melissa’s sermon focused on the older brother. The brother that stayed behind, served his father, tended the fields and flock and waited for his inheritance. He’s working in the field when his brother returns having squandered the inheritance he demanded while his father was still alive. Facing starvation […]
Continuing the series during Lent, Melissa preached from Luke 13:1-9. Despair is that intractable boulder that won’t move. Despair is the feeling of weariness after prying and pushing and pulling with all your might. From the passage, Jesus doesn’t provide pat answers when folks come to him in despair. “No, I tell you, but unless […]
On this second Sunday of Lent, Brian Recker provided our sermon based on the passage from Luke 9:28-36. The last two years have been tough. During that time we’ve had lots of expectations that have been thwarted. Whether they were expectations in our personal lives or in the world around us, the last few years […]
On this first Sunday of Lent, Melissa preached from Luke 4:1-13, the story of Jesus’ temptation. The last two years of the pandemic have held untold losses. We are entering Lent brimming with trauma and fear of these past two years. We each have been holding in so much. It’s hard to know what the […]
Rachel preached from a passage not often preached about, Leviticus 12:1-8. Leviticus is sometimes a book of the Bible that we need to read multiple times and keep wrestling with. The book spells out in a very nuts and bolts sort of way what it meant for the ancient Israelites to love your neighbor as […]
Brian Recker provided the sermon on this third Sunday of Advent based on the scripture passages in Judges 13:2-7 and Luke 1:46-56. The writer of Luke doesn’t keep Mary in the margins. Not only do we hear her voice in this passage, this is actually the longest set of words spoken by a woman in […]
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