This Week at UPC

Season of Creation: For the next six weeks, we will observing a season of Creation. Each week there will be special activities that are designed to deepen our connection to the particular focus of the day, including centers where you can light a candle and pray, pick up a coloring picture, design and color a rock, and other activities that are suitable to the theme. September 10: We will celebrate the connections of all creation to our Creator, using one of the psalms of celebration that invites all things and beings to join the hymn of praise. September 17: We’ll focus on growing things and on the human relationship to crops and forests, fields and trees. September 24, “Water” Sunday: We will consider the water cycle and the ways in which water is life. October 1, World Communion Sunday: We will be thinking and praying about the nations and generations of humanity, created in God’s image and beloved by God, as we celebrate the sacrament and commit to the healing of o

Misfits: As we come to the close of our journey through the Dark Wood, we are considering one final gift. Eric Elnes calls this the gift of “Misfits,” and by that he means two things. The first is the experience each of us sometimes has of being a misfit in our cultural context or our community, when it seems that who we are and what we want is at odds with the world around us. And the second is the gift of others who are also misfits, who guide and challenge us along the way as we strive to find our place and our purpose in God’s commonwealth together. He names this second category of misfits as “mentors”, and invites us to identify and to keep regular contact with those who can mentor us toward living fully in the gospel, and keep us from becoming too comfortable on the wrong paths. Psalm 137: 1–6 The Psalm is the classic cry of the broken hearted, finding themselves in a faraway land and a world that does not value “Zion”—the reign of God on earth. By crying out their grief a

Disappearing: The gift of Disappearing is a tricky one, although I think it is a terrifically important one for American Christians, and particularly mainline WASP Christians to understand and claim. Psalm 19 Galatians 2.20: “...[I]t is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Disappearing comes in those moments when we can see the world beyond ourselves as it is, undistorted by ourselves in the frame. Sometimes, as in Psalm 19, it comes in moments of awe, when we are so caught up in beauty or in process or in relationship that our sense of self ebbs away, leaving only the experience. Sometimes it comes when our illusions about our false self are stripped away, and we stand undefended before the truth of our lives. Either one can be a powerful motivation for change. Both allow us to see ourselves as part of God’s plan, in relationship to others. Both

Getting Lost: This week we continue our journey into the Dark Wood by looking at the gift of Getting Lost. Dr. Elnes writes that, “People who find and live into their calling rarely do so without getting lost first. Yet since there are no straight or clear paths in the Dark Wood of life, they do not cease to get lost after once being found. Rather…[they] learn that the regular experience of getting lost is one of the most important gifts we can receive.” (p.84) Exodus 2: 11–15, 3: 1–12 In this week’s scripture, we’re looking at one of the early stories in the life of Moses.  Born to an enslaved mother, raised as a prince in Pharaoh’s house in Egypt, Moses loses himself by killing an Egyptian nobleman, then fleeing into the hinterlands of Midian. He marries and starts a life, but he is far from what God intends for him to be. Whether by his own actions or by the forces acting around him, he is lost. He’s going through the motions, but he is no more at home in this new life than

Thunderstruck: This week we continue our journey with the Gifts of the Dark Wood. The gift we are exploring this week is the gift of being Thunderstruck. This is the gift that stops us in our tracks and forces us to re-examine the path that we are on, or the choices that we make, or the views that we hold most dear. Our language and our stories are full of this metaphor, which was used in ancient times to talk about how God speaks. In Psalm 29 , the Psalmist describes God’s voice “thundering over the waters”, and “breaking the cedars of Lebanon” with its power. Dr Elnes says that this metaphor is not to describe where thunder and lightning come from, but to give us insight into where we can hear the voice of God: in flashes of insight, in moments of new vision, in experiences that change us in unrepeatable ways. Scripture Lesson: 1 Samuel 3: 1–20 The story for today is of the calling of Samuel, and what is perhaps the most noticeable in the context of our theme is that Samuel h

Looking Ahead—Seven Weeks on “Gifts of the Dark Wood,” by Eric Elnes:  I want to prepare you for the rest of the summer, starting on July 23, when we will be exploring the ideas raised by Eric Elnes in his book called “Gifts of the Dark Wood: Seven Blessings for Soulful Skeptics.”      Dr. Elnes writes, “This book is about finding your place in the world at the very point where you feel furthest from it. It’s about recognizing the fierce beauty and astonishing blessing that exists within experiences that most of us fear but none of us can avoid…failure, emptiness, and uncertainty are as critical for finding our way through life as they are unavoidable” (p. 2).      Dr. Elnes takes the expression “the Dark Wood” from Dante Alighieri, who wrote in the Divine Comedy that the Dark Wood was a place of stumbling, of turning away from God because of sin and terror. Yet there is also a strong tradition in Christianity that insists that the Dark Wood is the place where you meet God. In t