You are loved, you are honored, you are cherished.
You belong here.
Every Sunday we begin our worship with a prayer, asking that our hearts may be open to all those who cross our threshold and that we may welcome each person in the spirit of God's love. At the heart of our community is this welcoming spirit of love and acceptance for all God's children. Because we know that we have been made welcome by Jesus, that we have been drawn in an embraced by the love of God.
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You may have run across this story over the last week or so, but if not, the above is the Nativity scene on display out from on St. Susanna Parish, a Roman Catholic church in Dedham, MA, a suburb of Boston. Notice what's missing from the scene: Yep, Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus are gone, replaced with the sign "ICE was here," a reference to the federal agency that has been engaged in aggressive raids and detentions targeting immigrants and refugees the government argues are in the country illegally. The implication, of course, is that the religious figures have picked up for immigration violations. Despite criticism from some in the Dedham community, and leaders of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, the parish says the display will be kept as it is: "Father Stephen Josoma said he chose to focus the nativity on immigration after speaking with several of the refugee families the church has worked with in the past few years. Several of his congregants, who come from countries like Honduras, Guatemala and Afghanistan, expressed fear about what the stepped-up deportations could mean if they were sent back to the violence they fled. ... He said th.e display is meant to show “the context Christmas is happening in this year,” adding that current immigration policies feel “brutal” and threaten the status of people who have already settled in the U.S." A spokesman for the archdiocese called the scene "politically divisive" and called on the parish to return the display to its "proper sacred purpose." You can read more in this article from Boston Public Radio station WBUR . For its part, the parish says it has no plans to budge on its nativity display, which for more than a decade has served as a vehicle for the congregation to comment on politically charged issues like gun control, climate change, and immigration. What do you make of this? Both the specific display at St. Susanna's this year as well as the larger idea of using a Nativity scene to comment on controversial issues of politics and social justice? Josoma, the parish's rector, acknowledges that some people might just want to come and see "a nice little place for baby Jesus and his family to celebrate Christmas," but that he believes religious art should engage the viewer in more profound ways. So is this sacrilegious or a creative act of bearing witness? After all, in the Gospel of Matthew we learn that a few days after Jesus birth an angel comes to Joseph and warns him to flee with his family to Egypt to escape King Herod's plans to find and kill the infant Jesus. Is the parish's display an act of political resistance, and is that appropriate for a church? Join us for the conversation tomorrow evening, Tuesday Dec. 9, starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion.
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
"Only when I understood that I had a primal need for silence was I able to begin my search for it – and there, deep beneath a cacophony of traffic noise and thoughts, music and machinery, iPhones and snow ploughs, it lay in wait for me. Silence." -- So writes Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge. In tonight's discussion we're going to talk about the role of silence in our everyday and spiritual lives. For one window into this, consider the practice of Quaker Meeting, in which worship takes place in collective silence. As Tracy Chevalier writes in The Guardian : "Since their establishment in the mid-17th century, Quakers – or the Society of Friends, as they are formally known – have worshipped in collective silence, without the intervention of priest or minister, listening in the stillness for something non-verbal and timeless tucked deep inside. Some call it God, or the Spirit, or the Inner Light, or something less overtly religious. By stripping away noise, it is easier to let go of the everyday, settle one's thoughts, and listen. Quaker Meeting is much like meditation, except done together. The communal nature of the experience is essential, for being with others makes the silence more valuable. Sometimes at Meeting when I'm restless, I sense the stillness of those around me and it reminds me of what I'm doing, so that I sit still and try again." In his book, "Silence, in the Age of Noise," Kagge asks, and then seeks the answers to three basic questions: "What is silence? Where is it? Why is it more important now than ever?" We will look for our own answers in our conversation beginning at 7 pm this evening at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion. Check out the link below to read an excerpt from Kagge's book. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/23/the-power-of-silence-in-the-smartphone-age?fbclid=IwY2xjawObzTNleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFObmh6OEdIZGJjUklzR0dEc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHocsRhIVswsmRIzbW5YQMFbtEEaZX0DCx_8wGMMljDE0ojk0MuzgCHlR63M9_aem_Ea0AQyoEEfNf5o7ebu_OPg
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
Artificial intelligence (AI for the uninitiated) seems to be worming its way into more and more aspects of our daily lives. Or at least AI hype seems to be. In high schools and colleges we have students using AI to do their homework, in the working world job-seekers are using AI to write and submit job applications while businesses use AI to read and evaluate those applications. Folks are using AI to plan their vacation itineraries, set fitness goals and create workout plans, write recipes, give them relationship advice, to take the place of therapists, and even as stand-ins for real world friends, confidants, or romantic partners. And now it's come for our churches. Some years back in one of our pre-pandemic conversations, we talked about the role of technology in our faith lives, but at that time the most exotic application we had run across was a "virtual reality Jesus experience" that purported to let users walk alongside Jesus and the disciples through the Gospel narrative. That sounded pretty lame to all of us, including our resident VR enthusiast at the time. Let's just say the technology has ... moved forward ... since then. Where VR Jesus offered a chance to walk with Jesus, new AI-based apps will let you talk with the Son of God, or at least a chatbot version of the Savior. The Text with Jesus app lets users ask questions of and converse with not just Jesus, but other biblical figures, from apostles to prophets. Apparently the premium version will unlock the ability to chat with Satan too. Other AI-powered faith resources are out there too, including EpiscoBot , created for The Episcopal Church by TryTank, a research institute associated with the church's Virginia Theological Seminary. This draws on church resources and teaching to respond to faith-based and spiritual queries. For Roman Catholics, apps like One Day Confession and Confession -- Catholic (you can find them in the Apple App Store) help the faithful confession and spiritual reflection. And a California megachurch pastor has created an AI chatbot version of himself to provide one-on-one spiritual guidance, all for the low, low cost of $49 a month. We're not providing a link to that one. What to make of all this? That's the topic of our conversation this week. To help you think about the issues, here's a link to an article just published in the UK-based web magazine UnHerd, written by a friend of mine, a priest in the Church of England. In it the Rev. Gerry Lynch writes that despite the perils and pitfalls, "Some churches will nonetheless become tempted by the AI hype. They should heed the lessons learnt during the pandemic, when online services and “virtual church” were presented as a God-sent means of Christian revival instead of a regrettable necessity in extreme circumstances." And here's another story on one experiment in having an AI Jesus hear confession at a Roman Catholic Church in Switzerland. Join us for the discussion this Tuesday evening, Nov. 18, starting at 7pm at Irish Tavern in downtown Lake Orion. Word on the street has it that we may even reach out directly, or via text at least, with Jesus himself and see what the Redeemer of Mankind has to say.
