Tag: sermon reflection

Hi Tab Family,

This past Sunday, Pastor Katie quoted one of the brothers she met at the Holy Cross Abbey in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland this summer. Upon starting up the abbey, the brother said:

“We had to ask for everything! And this was the greatest
blessing of all: to not have money and to be in need! You know, self-reliance is not a Christian virtue.”

Pastor Katie went on to bring our attention to just how present loneliness has been, especially over the last three years, and highlighted some writing and research on the phenomenon.

What a blessing to be in need. What a blessing to be lonely. What a blessing to avoid having to be The End-All-Be-All of your own life, to avoid having to know it all, do everything right, constantly think twelve steps ahead, anticipate everything, be everything to everyone– including yourself. What a blessing to need other people.

It was a blessing to be lonely back in Spring 2021, when I found Tabernacle United Church listed in the More Light Presbyterians (MLP) directory of open and affirming churches. At that time, all I knew is I needed a home church closer to where I hoped to be going to seminary, because I knew I wouldn’t make it through seminary without one. I knew I needed a church already affiliated with More Light Presbyterians because I didn’t want to be The Person coaxing a whole congregation along further into the kin’dom of God, to a place of queer and trans affirmation.

And there y’all were, Tab. I didn’t know how much I needed this community both as a whole, but also specifically, down to each person. What a blessing to be in need. What a blessing to know also, that you’re needed.

My hope for all of us as the week continues is to revel in the ways in which we need one another. I hope you feel in need and needed. I hope we can run after each other across patches of great green clover, and find one another.

Blessings on the rest of your week,
Taylor

Hi Tab Family, 

This week, Sana preached:”Whether we like it or not, neoliberal capitalist ideology like white supremacy culture is the air we breathe. It determines our thoughts and the very act of thinking otherwise becomes more difficult without a counter narrative and disruptive beliefs that challenge the status quo – or the capitalist empire’s power and narrative. I know of such a narrative. 

It is the liberating message of Jesus. The good news of the gospel. Jesus shared with us, through his life, the truth that God is always with us when God chose to be made flesh. Through the incarnation, we are reminded that we are connected to God and that we are never alone. Moreover, our lives are not defined by our productivity or how the market values our worth. We know that in God and through Jesus we are worthy and loved. But this love that is given to us by grace requires much of us. The love and freedom given by God is meant to worship God by serving others. Accordingly it’s a love that finds its fullness in taking responsibility for justice and disrupting systems of oppression. Here is where Peloton and other forms of corporate spirituality fall short of the glory of God. Peloton and other corporate spiritual organizations aren’t trying to remake the world or dismantle unjust systems. Like Audre Lourde stated, the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house.” 

It’s not easy to find a sustainable source of worth in a world that, as Sana mentioned, is dead-set on selling you products to “help” you cultivate that worth. And since we live under global capitalism, those products are actually designed and produced to break and to be ineffective, so that you’ll return and buy it again. And again. And again. I could go on forever about anti-aging skin care products that instead of buying, you might as well just put your money in a paper shredder. Y’all do not want me to start about the diet industrial complex and pseudoscientific wellness— I’m confident I’ll preach on that myself sometime in the future, so, stay tuned.

At the end of the day, in a global capitalist hellscape, the rush you get after purchasing a product that promises wholeness and worth will quickly turn to dust and you’ll feel emptier than you did before you bought it because you are emptier. Well, at least your bank account is emptier. 

But as Sana said— we have offered to us a counter narrative to this and that is the liberating message of the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The message that God is with us and love is for us. The message that we all receive grace regardless of our deservedness or worthiness. 

What a relief. 

If you want to go deeper into the book Sana referenced this Sunday, take a look here!

Blessings on the end of your week,

Taylor 

Hi Tab Family,

This past Sunday, Sana preached:

“Practicing and embodying this love-centric Christianity will change how we see and engage with the rest of the world. We will come to expect to see this love-spirit in everything – not just in our churches or in our practice of religion, but in society at large, in work, in school, in family, and in all aspects of human existence. Our role, then, will be to continuously and intentionally offer our lives and ourselves as dynamic embodiments of Christ-like love in the world. In the brief time we spend on earth, we must use it to fill and overflow with love, joining together to create an ever-expanding tide of radical, transformative love.”

This has been my affirmation all week. I’ve written it out on paper each day to help it really sink in. And I have a LOT of questions for myself:

-How exactly am I going to change the way I engage with the world?
-How exactly am I going to be an embodiment of this love?
-What am I going to have to de-prioritize so that I can even be capable of offering myself up to be an agent of this love?
-Is this something I really want to do?
-Can I trust that if I do this, I won’t be alone in my efforts?

Then I come back down to earth and ground myself in this community we are creating at Tab. I feel like I can trust that I won’t actually be alone in my efforts. In fact I’m really excited to move closer to Tab at the end of this month, so I can be in greater community with Tab’s neighbors at our Community Meals, and pass peace with you all face to face.

Peace upon the end of your week,
Taylor

Hi Tab Family, 

This week Sana challenged us to wrestle with the complexities of the Bible, and I really love the places it took me internally. 

Oftentimes, certainty is what I crave, and as someone who is constantly making and refining plans, I feel like I’m in a place now where I’d like to let that go a little — if not a lot. The pandemic has certainly thwarted many of our plans for these past couple years, but in thinking of my own trajectory, I’m realizing that the uncertainty actually was the biggest motivator to finally start answering my call to ministry, in the formal sense. After spending the first few years of my adult life constantly making plans and revising them, only to lead me to closed doors, I was finally in a space where I no longer craved certainty, because it simply was no longer sustainable. 

And as it turns out — uncertainty is sort of liberating, at least for me! In the context of the Bible being a complex, uncertain, unclear, living text, this uncertainty is also liberating. So why not take the pressure off? Why try to find The Answer when we can see there are actually Many Answers and sometimes no answers? 

How would your life change if you let go of certainty, and clarity, and instead basked in the liberation of the mystery? Is there anything you’d do differently? 

Blessings on the end of your week,

Taylor

Hi Tab Family,

This past Sunday, Sana preached:

“We as a church will not stop working towards the kin’dom of God, the kin’dom of love, where we care for each other as Ruth did for Naomi, where we can say your people are my people, whatever happens to you happens to me too, because we understand that our liberation and lives are tied together. We will continue to resist systems of oppression, but not only in the ways we have done before, because just giving to charity and hoping things will change from the top down isn’t working. We must work on mutual aid, establishing grass roots abortion networks and other support systems in our continued mission to secure the lives of the living and love one another with the steadfast love and loyalty Ruth demonstrated.”

I believe that the church is one of God’s chosen vessels of love on this earth, but I don’t believe it’s the only one. With that in mind, I don’t believe that the church could possibly be the end all be all of our networks that protect the vulnerable, fight for the marginalized, and resist this country’s death-dealing ways. So this week I’m asking: how can you expand your network? Who can you link arms with in this continuous work?

The folks waiting to link up with you might not readily make perfect sense to you on the surface. When Ruth linked herself to Naomi, she did so against all logical nature, which isn’t easy.

It’s easy to pour money into a political party or a multi-million dollar non-profit in these times because their scare tactics are powerful, and the chokehold they have on well-meaning, middle class, white liberals is tight as all heck. The calls for donations swarm social media and because we want to feel like we’ve done something, we put twenty dollars here and 50 dollars there and act like we’ve really done it.

So here is my alternative suggestion: give the 20 dollars directly to the person who asks for change at the intersection near your favorite coffee spot. Learn that person’s name. See if sometime they want to grab a coffee and a pastry (maybe don’t suggest coffee for that very moment because, yes, they are working! My guess is you probably wouldn’t be able to drop everything at your job either to chat for an hour with a stranger, so, it might not be the most polite thing to ask them to leave their job to talk to you).

Take the 50 dollars and make dinner for your neighbors and actually get to know them while you enjoy it together. Figure out who you live amongst, meet them, know them, know who you can trust, and start building your actual community because as our government guts us of our rights, our communities must grow stronger.

Giving 50 dollars to Nancy Pelosi isn’t doing what you think it does. Giving 20 dollars to the Human Rights Campaign isn’t doing what you think it does. Neither the Democratic Party nor multi-million dollar non-profits are going to save you while the excrement continues to hit the fan. You will not vote your way or donate your way out of this mess, despite many of us wishing it were that easy, but neither of these things is going to save us. Our communities will save us. God’s love embodied will help us survive.

So go out and build your community. Get to know your neighbors.

With love,
Taylor

Dear Beloved Family,
Here is the end of my sermon from last Sunday. Please meditate on what resonates with you.
Warmly,
Sana

Sermon: https://youtu.be/EubQxUPmmGY?t=1402

In the first Christian Pentecost we witness the power of the Holy Spirit and its power to cause people to speak in other tongues. We witness the miracle of multiple languages being spoken, but each person hearing others in their own language. Since there were many pilgrims in Jerusalem, of diverse nationalities and languages, the Spirit allowed every person to hear the Good News in their own language. This testifies that God’s message is inclusive.

How many of our differences could be transcended if we allowed the power of the Holy Spirit to govern in our lives? What miracles could the Holy Spirit perform in our church if we embraced it and invited it into our midst? How many hearts and minds could the Holy Spirit possibly transform, if we prayed for the Holy Spirit to have its ways in our communities?

Let me get more specific and practical. We can all access the Spirit of God. It simply requires asking and being still. From this scene in the upper room, we see that folks were gathered and praying and seeking to connect with God. They sought the spirit of God and welcomed it to govern their lives. And they were transformed by it. You know the spirit of God by the fruit of the spirit – how people live and love in the world. It’s as simple as that. To access the Spirit of God, you must recognize it’s already here with you. You must be receptive to God’s spirit and ask it to guide you. Communion with others helps us to bear witness to the spirit. For me, my spiritual practice of meditation, contemplation, prayer with others, yoga (or intentional movement )and reading scripture help me to both feel Divine presence in my life as well as allow me to sense how the Holy Spirit is guiding my life daily.

Richard Rohr writes: “Even though we so often pray, “Come, Holy Spirit,” the gift of the Spirit is already given. The Holy Spirit has already come. You all are temples of the Holy Spirit, equally, objectively, and forever! The only difference is the degree that we know it, draw upon it, and consciously believe it. All the scriptural images of the Spirit are dynamic—flowing water, descending dove, fire, and wind. If there’s never any movement, energy, excitement, deep love, service, forgiveness, or surrender, you can be pretty sure you don’t have the Spirit. If our whole lives are just going through the motions, if there’s never any deep conviction, we don’t have the Spirit. We would do well to fan into flame the gift that we already have. God does not give God’s Spirit to those of us who are worthy, because none of us are worthy. God gives God’s Spirit in this awakened way to those who want it. On this Feast of Pentecost, quite simply, want it! Rely upon it. Know that you already have it.”

A Prayer to God, the Spirit
Here’s a prayer to God the Spirit from William Loader.

O God,
You are Spirit;
You are wind;
You are breath.

You meet us in the wonders of creation,
in the awe of wonderful things,
in the terror of fearful things.
You blow among the fallen leaves,
the broken branches,
the whining pain
and the whirlwinds of delight.

Your wind gently touches our brow
with comfort and caress;
your forgiveness raises us to life;
your challenge disturbs our tidy piles
and spreads opportunities before our eyes.

Gentle Spirit, breathe on us your life.
Strong Spirit, open our closed doors to your compassion;
Universal Spirit, inspire us to sing and sigh for justice;
Spirit of Jesus, teach us to walk,
to work, to pray, to live, to love,
your way.

Awaken our dreams,
expand our visions,
heal us for hope,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
~ written by William Loader. For more of his excellent writings, see this web page. http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/reflectiveindex.html

Hey Beloveds,

In the spirit of Chris’ word for us this past Sunday, I have no plans on lying to you all today. So, here are some things I think The Church Universal needs to be honest about:

The function of a church is not growing its numbers on its rosters nor in its pews. Growth in numbers/membership is not necessarily the marker of a healthy congregation and, as Chris mentioned, growth in numbers is not categorically “good.”
We as The Church waste a lot of time trying to decide who is Christian and who isn’t. (I have caveats to this, but that’s for another day).
Somewhere along the line, the Church made the mistake of prioritizing worship over following, and thus made a big swing and an even bigger miss when it comes to the ministry of Jesus. We distance ourselves from Christ when we put Christ on a pedestal, even though we (hopefully) know Christ came to meet us exactly where we are at and through the Holy Spirit we are connected directly to Divinity.

So– in a time when corporations run by distinctly gluttonous and greedy men are ravaging this Earth, what are we to do? Are we going to continue to play a game of linguistic gymnastics, or bend backwards pulling stunts to put butts in seats without truly engaging those butts in the work and the struggle and joy, let alone loving those butts, or are we going to continue to assert that God’s love is not for us, and that Christ is to be set aside in a trophy box on display on our mantle as a representation of someone we could never embody, and that the Holy Spirit moves not at all?

I hope not.

Blessings on the remainder of your week,
Taylor

PS – In light of the most recent mass shooting, I want to share this article about getting kids through “unspeakable horror.” While I am not a caretaker of children and I guess I’m not a child either (though that’s arguable), I have to say reading this helped me manage my own feelings. So, even if you are not a caretaker of children, I offer this article for you.

Hi Tab Family,

This past Sunday, Sana preached, regarding Peter’s observance of the Holy Spirit falling on Cornelius, a Gentile, saying:

“If the holy spirit is in Gentiles, then God the creator did not intend to exclude anyone from the community of God’s care. Through the power and witness of the Holy Spirit, Peter welcomes Cornelius and his tribe of Gentiles into the community of believers through baptism. The scripture for today ends with Peter stating to the Jerusalem leaders, ‘If God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to hinder God?’ This is a big deal.”

Who are we, to hinder God? This question has stuck with me all week.

While this story is a revelation to Peter regarding Peter’s preconceived notion that only a few can receive the Holy Spirit, and that the “other” cannot, I’d like to invite us all into a space where we point this question toward ourselves regarding ourselves.

In what ways do we insist we are unworthy, in what ways do we insist we are the “other” unable to receive God’s love? Who are we to say God cannot or will not love us, too?

God loves you even if God only sees the worst thing you’ve ever done. And that is often how we judge ourselves— we see the worst and we position that up against what we attribute to God’s standards. Often those standards are entirely our projection onto God, and not God’s own self. Whether from our upbringing, our societal conditioning, or from pesky intrusive thoughts, we often create a standard impossible to live up to. And then we choose the worst parts of us and we fashion them up against that impossible standard. And then, we judge.

But God sees far beyond our worst. And even if She saw only our worst, who are we to hinder Her love, to say no– that love could not possibly extend to our very worst.

What might happen if you extend God’s love to the parts of yourself you consider the worst? What would you do differently if you not only knew, but acted, like you were loved entirely?

I hope you find space to reflect on this during the end of your week.

Peace and grace to all,
Taylor

Hi Tab Family, 
This past Sunday Joanna preached on a difficult text from Genesis, one that has often been used as an excuse to wield power over people. I for one am so grateful that Joanna shared with us some of her story, both in terms of her childhood understanding of the text, and her soon-to-be-over time working with the Catholic Church. 

What stood out to me this week was Joanna’s story regarding advocating for parental leave at her workplace. To me, it is good and right, and it brings glory to God, when employers provide paid parental leave that is entirely separate from vacation and sick time. Childbirth is not a vacation. Pregnancy and parenthood of a newborn are not diseases (though as many who have been pregnant know, pregnancy transforms the body in more ways than one. It is not easy. It is physical and embodied. But I don’t think I’m comfortable classifying it as a disease to be covered by sick time). 

And it got me thinking — who told the people making decisions about parental leave– who told them pregnancy and taking care of a newborn child are diseases, to be covered by accumulated sick leave? What did their source information look like? Who did they believe? 
When God asks, “Who told you you were naked?” I think about all the questionable sources I’ve believed throughout the years. I think about all the putrid things I’ve believed about the world, and about myself, because I filled in the blanks with whatever less than accurate information I’ve digested. 

What are some things that you’ve digested over the years? What backwards beliefs about yourself and your body have you been fed? What do you think God would say to you if you brought those things to God in earnest instead of hiding in shame? 

I love that in this story, instead of being immediately critical, God is instead curious. God asks Adam a question. Maybe next time you catch yourself hating your body, or hiding your sexuality in shame, or believing the world/humanity is seeking your personal demise, you can ask yourself that some question: 

“Who told you that?”

Maybe you, too, can be curious at first instead of critical. Maybe you can try to get the whole story. 

Blessings on the end of your week, fam! 

Best,Taylor M Silvestri (they/them)