This Sunday and next remain on-line only as caution during the Omicron wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We plan to resume in-person services on Ash Wednesday (March 2nd). The principal Sunday service will continue to be streamed.
You can join in our Sunday service, live or later, via YouTube! The stream will begin there at about 9:45, with a welcome and some prelude music. The service itself will begin at 10 am. As always, you’ll be able to use the same link to watch the service later, if you can’t join in live.
Everything you’ll need to join the responses and to sing along with the hymn of the day can be found in the order of service, so you’ll want to keep it handy!
This is the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany. Paul continues to preach passionately to the Corinthians about being joined to the resurrection of Jesus for eternal life (1 Cor 15.35-38, 42-50), and Jesus continues to preach what we often call the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6.27-38). Jesus invites us to a new kind of life, marked by love, blessing, forgiveness, generosity, and trust–not just to one another but to outsiders and even to enemies.
Here’s what Sundays and Seasons offers about this week’s theme:
Mercy. Mercy. Mercy. Joseph lives it in Egypt. [The lesson we omit from the Hebrew scriptures this week is Genesis 45.3-11,15.] Jesus preaches it in the gospel. The Spirit guides us into merciful lives with the power of forgiveness to reconcile what is fractured and divided. Such merciful living is the baptismal blessing of having put on Christ. It is the gift of the life-giving Spirit. It is a reflection of God’s glory revealed in Christ.
We’re excited to plan for the resumption of in-person services in March. Our annual vestry meeting will be held at 11:30 after church this Sunday (February 20th); please be in touch with the office if you haven’t received details about how to attend via email.
(Our cover image is “Love Your Enemies,” from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58810 [retrieved February 17, 2022]. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/boojee/2929823056/. We use it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.)