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Let me tell you a classic Thanksgiving story created by the brilliant Garrison Keillor, which takes place on the outskirts of Lake Wobegon, where “All the women are smart. The men are good looking. And the children are above average.”

The Season of Creation ends with the commemoration of St. Francis and the rhetoric of election season together with the events chronicled in Paul Moses book “The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace” inspired this sermon.

… as I attempt to respond to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s question: “Who is Christ actually for us today?” I first encountered the phrase “Jesus Is the Memory of Our Future” on a t-shirt from Holden Village.

Then Jesus brought a little child into their midst and putting his arm around the child, said to the Twelve, “Whoever welcomes a child such as this for my sake welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the One who sent me.” Readings included Exodus 40:34-38, Mark 9:33-37

Homecoming after a splendid summer respite. Readings Proverbs 1:20-23; Ephesians 4:11-13 and John 8:30-32. I am indebted to Peter Rollins for his excellent insights into the need for church to be a place where we consult our suffering.

The Cathedral of Hope, a congregation of the United Church of Christ, is based in Dallas, Texas, and is the world’s largest liberal Christian church with a primary outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Local and national church ministries, outreach programs, pastoral counseling, television media and the internet touch thousands of lives each day.

The literary world is in an uproar, learning that a prequel to Harper Lee’s great American novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” depicts the beloved Atticus Finch as a southern white racist. Is it possible that, like the fictional character, we can ever evolve and change?

Speaking at Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO, Bishop Spong gave us a taste of sections of his next book which will be on the Gospel of Matthew. In this lecture he is speaking to the need for the modern church to abandon its outdated commitment to belief in substitutionary death/atonement theology.

When we go to war, we put the children of the poor into uniforms, arm them, and ship them abroad to kill the children of the poor in a distant land. Sure, there are tyrants and illegitimate, violent governments all over the world (many of whom are our closest allies) but as Howard Zinn pointed out, our modern wars always make things worse. We have to find other ways to solve international crises. Our nation should be smarter and our communities of faith should be more conscientious. Being strong and rich does not mean that we are a great nation. Being morally good and diplomatically intelligent…. That would make us great!

The nine deaths in the mass murder in the Mother Emanuel AME church will not automatically become redemptive suffering. Those deaths may be simply sad victims of senseless, racist, violence unless their deaths inspire transformation. It is up to us. The universe, on its own, is capricious and chaotic, entirely devoid of meaning UNLESS we bring meaning to it.

When someone places a newborn human in your arms, it opens you to MORE. Humans have a strange relationship to MORE. Most of us spend our entire lives longing for more, looking for more, hungering for more, desiring more, striving for more, waiting for more, searching for more.

Humanity is not inherently evil, or sinful, or broken. Creation has been groaning for billions of years so that we might evolve. Creation continues to groan as we continue to evolve into all that we can be.

“My passion is guiding faith communities to more fully live out the mission of being witnesses to Christ’s peace with justice,” said Rev. Murphy in accepting the appointment to lead PCU. “I see the future of Christianity as modeling a spiritual social movement and see PCU’s role as supporting congregations that seek to be part of that modeling.”

One gal’s observations during her “stumble-through” with God.

We must treat the earth with the same kind of compassion that you would want from creation; the same kind of compassion you would want from the divine. As we travel this road to Emmaus, it becomes less and less important for us to believe in a certain way and vital that we behave with compassion. God is not dead. God is alive and well. God walks with us on the road. God is our companion on the road.

When someone shares in our suffering, somehow the knowledge that we are not alone, that there is someone out there who knows the pain that we are going through, the knowledge that we are cared for by someone who truly knows our pain comforts us and gives us the strength we need to endure our suffering.

To be alone in our suffering is the most terrible thing that we can imagine. The Good News that God is LOVE means that LOVE will not let us suffer alone because LOVE is determined to suffer with us. Working in, with, and through those who have experienced our pain LOVE is able to enfold us and say, “I know, my child, I know.”

The mythical stories of Jesus’ transfiguration remind me of old-fashioned love songs. You know the kind of songs that were playing on the radio when you first met, and when you hear them, you are instantly taken …

Jesus Seminar scholars (Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, John Spong) talk about the panentheism beyond traditional monotheistic faith. We can love and cherish the concepts of trinity, atonement, substitutionary faith without taking them literally. God is too big for any one religion.