Join us for in-person worship on Sunday, November 21, at 10:15 a.m.
WE ARE NOW LIVE STREAMING OUR WORSHIP SERVICES AT 10:15 ON SUNDAY MORNING. If you can’t join us in person, you can join us online in real time at https://vimeo.com/event/1424751. This streaming address will be the same each week.
The video of Sunday’s worship service will be posted on Sunday afternoon at https://vimeo.com/channels/1547852.
You can view and download the bulletin here.
At eighty years old and dying from cancer, the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote four essays collected into a book with the simple title, Gratitude. Certainly he had regrets, we all do.
But, mostly, Sacks was grateful. “My predominant feeling,” he wrote, “is one of gratitude. I am grateful that I have experienced many things—some wonderful, some horrible…I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written…Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
What is thanksgiving but an acknowledgement that there is a Giver that calls forth our gratitude?
For some, that Giver might be the simple but inexplicable fact that there is something rather than nothing. For some, the source of gratitude goes back to parents or grandparents or long ago ancestors, known or unknown. For those who are people of religious faith and religious doubt, thanksgiving is a time to humbly acknowledge that the creative power that brought forth the stars and space and our own watery planet, that the creative power that gave life and sustained life for all generations is a loving power that we name God. And, more specifically, we in this place confess together that this God has been and is made known to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
It is from God that all blessing do indeed flow.
SCRIPTURE LESSONS: Deuteronomy 8:7-18; Luke 17:11-19
SERMON “Return to the Source of Goodness”
The Rev. Bill Lovin preaching
ANTHEM “For the Fruit of All Creation” Hal Hopson
No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.