MAY 5, 2024
SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
ACTS 10:44-48; PSALM 98; 1 JOHN 5:1-6; JOHN 15:9-17
This Sunday’s image of the image of the life the risen Christ shares with us is the imagine of friendship. We are called to serve others as Jesus came to serve; but for John’s gospel, the image of servanthood is too hierarchical, too distant, to capture the essence of life with Christ. Friendship captures the love, the joy, the deep mutuality of the relationship into which Christ invites us. The Greeks believed that true friends are willing to die for each other. This is the mutual love of Christian community commanded by Christ and enabled by the Spirit.
MAY 12, 2024
SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
ACTS 1:1-15-17, 21-26, PSALM 1; 1 JOHN 5:9-13; JOHN 17:6-19
The gospel for Easter’s seventh Sunday is always taken from the long prayer Jesus prays for his followers in John’s gospel on the night before his death and always includes Jesus’ desire that his followers will be one as he and the Father are one. This oneness is not mere doctrinal agreement or institutional unity but mutual abiding, interpenetrating life, mutual love, and joy. This oneness is the work of the Spirit whom we have received but also await. Come, Holy Spirit!
MAY 19, 2024
DAY OF PENTECOST
ACTS 2:1-21; PSALM 104:24-34, 35b; ROMANS 8:22-27; JOHN 15:26-27; 164b-15
Fifty days after Easter, we celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Crossing all boundaries that would separate us, the Spirit brings the wideness of God’s mercy to places we least expect it – to a crowd of strangers of different lands and tongues, to dry bones, to our weak hearts. Jesus promises his disciples that they will be accompanied by the Holy Spirit, and that this Spirit reveals the truth. We celebrate that we too have been visited with this same Spirit. Guided by the truth, we join together in worship, and then disperse to share the fullness of Christ’s love with the world.
MAY 26, 2024
THE HOLY TRINITY/FIRST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
ISAIAH 6:1-8; PSALM 29; ROMANS 8:12-17; JOHN 3:1-17
When we say God is the triune God, we are saying something about who God is beyond, before and after the universe: that there is community within God. Our experience of this is reflected in Paul’s words today. When we pray to God as Jesus prayed to his Abba (an everyday, intimate parental address), the Spirit prays within us, creating between us, and God the same relationship Jesus has with the one who sent him.
