Church of the Apostles UCC invites you to our annual Easter Egg Hunt on Saturday, April 12th, from 10 AM – 12 PM in the grass behind Fellowship Hall.
This free, family-friendly event is open to the entire community! Children will enjoy egg hunts separated by age groups, ensuring a fun and fair experience for everyone. Don’t forget to bring a basket to collect eggs and a camera to capture free pictures with the Easter Bunny!
We can’t wait to celebrate this joyful tradition with you—rain or shine!
Hymn Sing with Lars Potteiger
Join Music Director Lars Potteiger on February 23rd at 3 PM in the Sanctuary for a beautiful afternoon of hymns! All are welcome to come together and raise our voices in song.
This is a free event, and we can’t wait to celebrate the joy of music with you!
The Gift of Freedom
On April 16th of 1963, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in jail in Birmingham, and he wrote a letter to his fellow clergy colleagues, which became famous, in it he wrote that there were words said to him that what he was doing was unwise and untimely. Dr. King argued in his letter that nonviolent direction and direct action were necessary to confront unjust laws and injustice. He also expressed his disappointment with his white friends who seem to be complicit. While others around them, particularly in the black community, were being hurt. He argued that the fight for justice is a moral responsibility.
Now, why am I talking about Dr. King?
Well, I want to argue that this moment that King had with his fellow clergymen was the same kind of moment that Jesus had in the synagogue with those Synagogue leaders.
Let’s set the scene a little bit. Our scripture today, Luke 4:14-21, begins by telling us that Jesus goes back to Nazareth, his hometown, where he’s known. He’s done the wedding at Cana where he changed the six stone jars of water into wine and he’s been teaching at other synagogues in the Galilean region. And now he’s come to Nazareth.
I don’t know what you remember about Nazareth. I’ve talked about it being like the hill country or “out in the sticks”. One of the pieces that came out in my research for this sermon was that Nazareth actually sits on a hill, and it looks out on a plain, and in that plain was the town of Sephoras.
The significance of that is that when Herod the Great was the Roman emperor, that was Herod’s capital city. When Herod died, there was a Jewish revolt and they burned and looted this city, trying to take it into ruins, essentially. With Herod’s death, Herod’s son Antipas came into power and he rounded up all the Jewish people and enslaved them in retribution for what they had done. He then went on to rebuild the city and called it Autocratoris, meaning belonging to the emperor.
These people in Nazareth watched all of this happening. Jesus and his carpenter father, Joseph, may have even been involved in rebuilding the city. But it was very much clear that that was the empire, and that they could see the empire. We have to remember that what the empire did was to look for every means it could to get money from the people.
First of all, I mean that they could live lavishly, but it’s more than that. One of the ways empires do control people is by taking money from them, and by keeping the people poor, they have less ability to rise up against the empire.
With that as a backdrop, today’s scripture, Jesus walks into the synagoguein Nazareth.
He is handed a scroll. I think that’s interesting. He doesn’t ask which scroll he doesn’t ask for Isaiah, but they hand him Isaiah. What he reads is Isaiah 61. What he reads is the first verse and the beginning of the second verse, which is not a lot. So people would have asked, “Why did he stop there? Why didn’t he read the rest of it?”
“The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives. Remember what I told you about the history and recovery of sight to the blind to set free those who are oppressed.” – Isaiah 61
For those of you who were following what did you notice? He added something that’s not in Isaiah. Sight. Recovery of sight to the blind is not in Isaiah. So, then that means we need to ask the question, why did Jesus add that?
It appears that it is a foreshadowing of what’s going to happen and that people are going to see the difference Jesus makes in the town of Nazareth and in other towns. They’re going to see how Jesus has been anointed because Jesus is going to do more than turn water into wine. It’s gonna be a lot more happening.
By what he says, he is also calling out the synagogue leaders. This is where I’m putting it with King’s letter.
He’s calling out the synagogue leaders who were not caring for the poor, who were not working for the release of the imprisoned. Who were not trying to help the oppressed, but who had taken on the Roman system and learned ways to also profit from the people’s thinking of Jesus.
He overturned the tables and the money changers because they were charging an interest. They were taking extra money, their extra cut, just like the tax collectors and all the other ways that Rome could get money out of people. The synagogue had learned it too and Jesus was challenging them. Yes, Jesus was proclaiming what his ministry would be about. But, he’s also saying you need to wake up and pay attention here because stuff’s happening.
Jesus is also going to be talking about the gifts that we can give. There might be a cost, but not a price tag. It’s things that you can’t buy, no matter how much money you have.
These were just some that came to my mind. Amazon might try its best to have everything possible for us to buy with a click. But they don’t sell wisdom or compassion. Energy drinks or energy pills, but not the energy to do good. They don’t sell hope. It can’t be bought in a store. It’s something that comes from within.
As I was thinking about that, I thought about the gifts of the spirit from Galatians. Right after Galatians lines out all the gifts of the spirit, which include patience, kindness, and humility, it says there is no law against such things. There’s no law against them, and there’s no price tag on them.
How might we be about sharing those things? In a couple more weeks, we will be asking you to look in your houses for those things you don’t need anymore, the clothing you don’t wear anymore, and things that you might be willing to let go of for our Annual Garage Sale. That doesn’t cost you money. It might cost you a memory. It might cost you a feeling, but it will not cost you cash to donate it to the yard sale.
In what ways can we be about helping other people and who are those people in our communities now that need help?
I’m not going to answer that question because I want you to sit with that. Who are the people who need help?
Our country’s changing. Our community’s changing. What I asked you on epiphany was about how you will be the light. How will you be a light in the world? How will you be a voice of love, hope, peace, and joy in this world? Because that’s who Jesus is calling us to be.
Jesus told the leaders in the synagogue that’s who he was going to be. He was going to be about making a difference in the lives of people who are hurting. That’s the call on us. The question is, will we have eyes to see? Will we have ears to hear?
You might wonder what the Economy of Jesus is and I’m gonna get into that.
This series we’re gonna look at will take us through February. I want to begin by telling you the story of someone I will name John. That’s not their real name, but to protect his identity, I won’t give you his real name. But there was, in my life, a teenager named John who was very good friends with my son. John had more than his share of struggles in his life. So, John spent a good bit of time with our family. Until they graduated high school and my son went off to school and John just went away. I hadn’t heard anything about John until one day when my son was home from school, John showed up.
He showed up in a van that was not in wonderful shape, but it provided him with transportation and a place to sleep. If you’ve never heard the expression, you can live in a car, but you can’t drive a house. You’ll know what I mean. We found out that John had been living on the streets and what John had shared with us enlightened us because I had no idea. I’ve never lived on the streets. I didn’t know what that was like. I didn’t know how one managed or survived in that type of environment. But, he shared a lot of that with us.
As he went to leave, the van wouldn’t start. It needed a new battery. As it happened we had an extra car. He had an old van. We had an extra car that we weren’t using. It needed some work too, but what it did have was a brand new battery. So, my husband took the battery out, put it in John’s van and it worked. We wanted to gift John the battery, but he said “no, I need to trade you for it.”
So, he brought out his resources and we ended up trading a Target gift card for a battery because then he could feel good about himself too. That was part of what he learned in the community where he lived, was how to share resources. And how when we live out of a gift or trade economy, then everybody has something.
So, I am not an economist. Let’s just put that out there right now. But, I thought, before I start talking about the economy of Jesus, we need to talk about what is an economy.
What came to my mind first was that progressive commercial, where the kid gives up and says, “I’ll just go look it up.”
So I Googled, “what is an economy?” In its most basic terms, it is the way a group of people chooses to create, share, and consume goods and services. That is the most basic definition of an economy. When I try to look up types of economies only command, market, and mix came up.
But, one site gave me traditional. They didn’t want to define traditional very well. But I thought, that’s where I’m putting gift and trade. Because if we think of the indigenous people, our indigenous ancestors, that’s how it all started, right? We started with traders. If you grew corn and they grew beans, you would trade. They are equalizing economies so that the point is that everyone has what they need.
Command is more like communism where the government is going to control everything. The government is going to set all the prices and they’re going to decide what things are. Market is what we say we have in America, which is privately owned, and is driven by supply and demand. Or maybe we have a mixed economy. But, I’m not going to get into all that.
The command, the market, and the mixed economies are created out of a sense of scarcity. This is more important than we think. It comes from this mindset that if you need something, I’m going to lose for you to have what you need. This is where the mentality of hoarding comes in because we think we might need it.
In the history of civilization, there have been really hard times. We know that this kind of stuff lives in our DNA. Sometimes I look at my pantry and I go, why in the world do I have this much food in my pantry?
I’m Irish. So, my great-grandmother left during the potato famine. There’s this piece of me, this strain in me that says, “But there might not be food tomorrow. So you better have enough, not just for today.”
But that’s not Jesus’s economy. We’ll start with a great story about gifting. Jesus didn’t trade in this story. Jesus gifted.
When we talk about the wedding of Cana, we can talk about it in in several different ways. We can talk about it being the first sign. Which it is, it’s the first sign that Jesus was divine. Nobody else ever turned six stone jars of water into wine.
We can talk about that or we can talk about the fact that this is a story about a Jewish man who went to a wedding with his mother and he listens to his mama. He’s a good son. When Mama says you need to do this, he’s gonna do it. Even though he’s the son of God. He can do what he wishes.
As one who has had three weddings for my children, if someone was going to gift me, let’s say six 25 gallons of wine. I’d thank them so much, but could you have told me that a week ago because I would have saved on an open bar. We would just have your wine. Right?
I wanted to do this series because it’s helping us to think about the fact that we all have resources that we don’t even think about that we can use to help others. Jesus’ resource was water and his gifts as the son of God. So once again, we end up with a story where Jesus takes the ordinary, one of the most basic elements of creation, water, and creates something extraordinary.
I want us to think about that. What are the gifts that we have in abundance?
This photo was taken by Steve Daniels on Christmas Eve. There was a huge amount of candlelight created on Christmas Eve. In this space, when the lights were all off, just sharing the light that didn’t cost us. Look what we did when we came together, because none of us may feel like we have an abundance of resources, but when we pool our resources, when we come together and work together with our resources, I think we would find that we have an amazing amount of time, energy, wisdom, knowledge and money that can be used to help others.
We can gift money. That’s what we do with the Apostles Assistance Fund. You all put into that fund and when people come to us in their hard times with paying rent, bills, etc. We help and we gift them money. That’s what donating is, it’s gifting.
You gift this community with your offerings. It’s something that you do because you trust that we are not just using it for our pleasure, but to do the work of God in this community and this world. That’s how we come together.
I want you to think about your abundance rather than your scarcity, regardless of where you are.
Even if you can’t leave home you can listen to another person. That is a gift that is so needed. In our world right now, so many people feel alone and they just need someone to give them attention. That’s also driving some of the poor behavior that we see in our communities.
I’m going to give you another opportunity, something to think about. Next Sunday, join me in Fellowship Hall where we’re bringing together as many people as we can within our county to start dreaming about systems that can help protect people who are marginalized or feel afraid. That’s part of our mission, to be a safe space for those who feel powerless or afraid.
There are those among Power Interfaith, who believe that we are going to have times and there will be people in our community who are going to need safety. We’re either going to need to house them or we’re going to need to move them to a safe space. This may be shocking to you, but we are actually thinking about recreating an underground railroad. It’s that level. Some people feel threatened right now. If that’s something that you would want to be part of, then I invite you to come to the conversation. There’s no obligation right now. We are just in planning.
I pray that we will never have to use any of it. But rather than wait till something happens and try to react to an event, we’re going to prepare for it and pray we don’t need it. If that makes sense.
It’s called love through resistance. So I pray that you will consider in your life, what are your gifts or what do you have in abundance?
I talked to one of our members who can’t get out as much, and they said to me, well, I can’t really do much for the church. I said, you can do so much because you like to talk on the phone and there are people who are lonely. If you would call them, it would make an immense difference. Just a phone call for those of you that live in retirement communities, saying “hello” or “how are you” may be the thing that somebody needs.
We live in a great and wonderful world where resources are abundant, even in January. I invite you to start thinking about the abundance that you have and what you can share with others.
Technically tomorrow is Epiphany. It is always on January 6th. It is the 12th day of Christmas. If you know the song, 12 days of Christmas, tomorrow is the 12th day. In the Eastern Christian church, tomorrow is Christmas.
When my seminary class did our cross-cultural to Turkey we got there on January 2nd. On January 6th, when we went to church, we watched their Christmas pageant with their children, because they were celebrating Christmas day.
Not so much in the U.S. But we like to still lift it up. Sometimes it is a Sunday where we talk about the Magi because the Magi did not get there at the same time that the shepherds were there. Things just didn’t work out quite that way. We just like to put it together in a neatly packaged story.
But, today I chose this reading from Luke because we are in the Gospel of Luke for our lectionary this year.
I love this reading about Simeon and Anna. I think it’s a lovely story. So, that’s the one that I thought I wanted to bring up today. And as I was doing my readings recently, a story came up for me about the Maasai people.
The Maasai people are nomadic people who live in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. They are herders, and they have cattle, sheep, and goats, and they move based on feeding their livestock. Because they move around, they meet each other at different times. Other people that are part of their tribe. The greeting that they always do when they meet another person, another messiah is, “How are the children?”
I just want you to sit on that question for a minute. The answer that they’re hoping for is the children are well because the Messiah people understand that the children are the most vulnerable in their society and if the children are being cared for, then everyone is being cared for.
The Maasai tribe understands that even if you don’t have a child, the well-being of the children is your responsibility. Everyone takes responsibility for the well-being of the children.
I just wonder if that’s not something we should think about. As a congregation for 2025, I’m suggesting that we become the beloved community that would be concerned about the well-being of the children.
Think about our community. Think about our country. Could we answer that the children are well?
We don’t know why Simeon and Anna came up to this child when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus into the temple for his dedication. It was part of the law that the firstborn son was to be dedicated to God, to the Lord. So, they did this.
One of the first early ones is in the Bible, and there’s a good bit made about it was when Hannah dedicated Samuel. Hannah also was one who had prayed for a child, and then a child was given to her, and she dedicated Samuel to God. But here, Joseph and Mary come to the temple, they’re following the law.
Luke is reminding us that yes, they are Jewish. They are Jewish and in good order, right? They know the law. They are following the custom, the tradition. They’re bringing this child to be dedicated. It’s also for Mary’s purification. That’s part of it, too, so that she will be considered clean again.
But Simeon and Anna come up to this child and then Simeon sees something in this child. There is something different about this child that we know as Jesus. In their language, it would have been Yeshua, which means the Lord saves. His name means the Lord saves.
And then we have this part, “Now let your servants go in peace for my eyes have seen the salvation” – Luke 2:29.
It’s called the song of Simeon and I read it every at every funeral. It’s the commendation prayer. That’s the song of Simeon. The note de Midas is the Latin for it, meaning it is the dismissing. You are now dismissing that as Simeon’s. Call of liberation, his song of liberation. He no longer feels that he is under Roman at the Roman empire. His soul is at peace because he has met the Lord, the Lord’s salvation. He is just a member of the Lord or a slave to the Lord, not to the Roman empire any longer, and his soul can depart in peace.
It’s quite powerful. I hope the next time you attend a funeral here, which I hope is not anytime soon, you listen for that. Because I almost always do it. I don’t know how many other people do that prayer at funerals, but it’s a beautiful prayer about how God is making the world right. Even if that means that we have lost someone, we are at peace. It’s acknowledging that we are at peace as Simeon was at peace. Now that he has met this baby.
Anna agrees. Anna just supports what Simeon has said. Usually in Luke, he tends to favor the women. Luke tends to give women voices. And in this one, Simeon gets the voice. Simeon gets to say everything and Anna just goes along with it and supports it. But it’s a lovely story.
So, if we have been redeemed, if our salvation has come, if the light of the world has come, and now it is our job to carry that light into the world, what does that look like?
How do we carry the light into the world? Well, that’s where I thought Colossians 3:12-17 tied nicely to this. I boiled it down to just a few items.
So being the light of the world means clothing ourselves in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. What if those were our top virtues? What if that is what we valued? Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. That to me is being the light of the world.
It’s not easy, and we always fail. Sometimes we’re better than others. But we have the ability to remind ourselves that we also get forgiven. Because God does not expect perfection. God expects that we will try. That we will do it to the best of our ability.
So we are called to be the light. Remember, the light is what all of creation needs. If the sun went away the rest of us would wither. Everything needs light to grow and to be healthy. However, if we have too much light, we’re blinded, right? Too much light is blinding. We can’t see anything. So we have to be enough light without being overpowering.
But the light that we are to be is to be a light that attracts others to shine.
We want them to say, “I want to know what they know. I want to live like that. I want that peace. I want that love. I want to be that compassionate and kind. That patient.” I know that’s one of my challenges. I could always be more patient with myself and others.
So how will you be the light of the world in your place? We can’t affect the whole world, but you can affect the people around you.
How will you be the light of the world in 2025? And how are the children? Are they well?
Mark your calendars! On Sunday, February 9th, Church of the Apostles will host our annual Souper Bowl Sunday collection after the 10 AM worship service. This year, our Primary Faith Formation and Rooted in Faith classes are teaming up to gather donations for the COA Breakfast Ministry.
Every first Saturday of the month, COA serves a hearty breakfast at First Reformed UCC on Orange Street. Guests receive breakfast sandwiches, peanut butter sandwiches, cereal, snacks, milk, juice, coffee, and more. Your support directly helps us continue this vital outreach!
Want to get involved?
We’re always seeking volunteers (no experience necessary!) to help serve on these Saturdays from 8–10:30 AM. If you’re interested, reach out to office@apostlesucc.org.
Let’s come together on Souper Bowl Sunday to support this meaningful ministry. We can’t wait to see you there! Don’t forget to bring your donations!
