December 14 - Gingerbread Houses following worship. A sticky, fun party for the whole family. Buy a kit or bake your gingerbread and join the fun! Pizza and fresh veggie donations are gladly accepted!
Advent devotional study every Sunday at 8 am downstairs (November 30, December 7, 14, and 21). This study will use a calendar of devotions by Jan Turrentine. There are brief readings for each day in Advent, from the first Sunday of Advent through Christmas day, including a suggested Scripture, a short devotion, and a short prayer or practice—all based on the Revised Common Lectionary. Advent is a time of spiritual preparation that focuses on the themes of hope, peace, joy, and love. Please feel welcome to attend any or all of the Sundays. You are invited to come whether you have read the devotions or not. Please contact Laura Rodgers (lrodger@linfield.edu) for a copy of the devotional study guide.
Advent Choir, rehearsal before or after worship November 23 - December 21. Come join the choir for this season. We are preparing Angels’ Carol by John Rutter. Our choir welcomes people of all musical backgrounds and abilities to come and make a joyful noise!
Advent Bible Study with friends from EPIC. Each Thursday in December (but not Christmas Eve!) we will meet at Crema Coffee in Mt. Tabor Presbyterian Church(address) at 10:00 a.m. or online at 6:30 p.m. We will study the scripture passages for the upcoming Sunday and have a chance to dig deeper into reflection than we can on a Sunday morning.
John the Baptist was thrown in prison after publicly questioning the legality of Herod’s marriage (Matthew 14:3-5). He was not afraid to go toe-to-toe with the powerful, and perhaps he expected Jesus’ ministry to look more confrontational and politically strategic. In questioning Jesus, I wonder if John sought a particular answer to hang his hope on, that maybe the Messiah would be how he’d imagined him. Maybe Jesus would bust him out of jail and take things straight to Herod, but Jesus offers something else.
In this image, John sits in prison, letting the disciples’ testimony settle in. People with hearing, visual, and physical impairments experience new senses and mobility. Those with skin diseases are cleansed. Those with little material comfort are offered irrepressible hope, and the lungs of the dead are filled with the breath of life. I decided to image this good news through the dancing light of a lantern¹ in John’s prison cell. I chose dancing figures because dancing feels like a primal response to the radical healing taking place outside the prison walls. As these six dancers illuminate the cell, I imagine John, even if for a moment, breaking into a bit of laughter at the magnitude of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus was quite literally doing the unimaginable. He was removing barriers so that the marginalized were no longer reduced to begging and sitting on mats, shoved to the edges of society. He was not only healing physical ailments; perhaps more importantly, he was restoring people to community.
Out of all the miraculous actions mentioned, the news did not include “release of the captives” (Luke 4:18-19).² With this message, John would know that he was not going to be freed,³ and so, the number of dancers would remain one short of seven.⁴ As we know all too well, God’s work isn’t completed in Jesus’ time. We are still woefully short of realizing the fullness of God’s desire for all of creation, and the work is ours to see through. Until then, let us keep our eyes peeled for the glimmers of hope dancing all around us and work toward a day when all can join in that dance of wholeness.
—rev. lauren wright pittman
