A couple weeks ago I was talking with a friend about the proposed legislation for Financial Reform that is being reconciled between the US House of Representatives and the Senate. One of the many issues the Congress is wrestling with is should the families of those who intentionally defraud investors be allowed to keep a portion of the money they’ve “made” or should everything they own be taken and redistributed to those who had been defrauded? In other words, what the government is trying to figure out is, “How can we get people to act ‘more’ morally right?” because what’s out there now doesn’t do it.

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Not all the stories in Scripture about women are uplifting or empowering. Many are sad, some even horrifying. One such case is the story of Jephthah’s unnamed daughter. A story of blaming the victim, a story of a vulnerable person being sacrificed for so-called pious reasons, a story about a complacent community failing to act in the face of injustice. We find this unnamed girl’s story in Judges 11.

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Sunday, June 27, was the final one in our June series, “How Jesus Changed Christianity.” It focused on “The spiritual and humanitarian concerns in the current debate about Immigration Reform.”

Summer worship series:

A New Kind of Christianity:
Think differently,
Act differently,
Believe Differently.

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But if you’re content to simply be yourself, you will become more than yourself.

~ Luke 14:11

It used to be if you asked kids what they wanted to be, they invariably said doctors, teachers, or lawyers. But these days the typical answer is: “I want to be famous.” A Pew Research Centre poll in 2007 found that 81 percent of 18 to 25 year-olds surveyed said getting rich was their generation’s most important or second-most important life goal; 51 percent said the same about being famous. This in itself is not news; we all know that we are living in a celebrity-obsessed society.

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Last week we started a new series following the faith journeys of women in Scripture. We took a peek at one of the nameless women in Scripture, a Canaanite woman – an outsider. This week we will take a closer look at a woman who was even more suspect: an outsider and one who was involved in an act of sexual impropriety. Her name was Tamar. If you have never heard of her before, I would not be surprised – pastors have a tendency to avoid her story when choosing a text to preach on. It’s a shame – her story is both radical and profound.

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We recently started our new Bible Study series on prayer. We are doing it in the format of a Book Club. The book we are reading together is called Prayer: Does it make any difference? by Philip Yancey.

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We’ve all been in that awkward situation where somebody tells a dramatic story and half the people who have gathered around to listen “get it” and half don’t. Somebody then has to go back and explain the portion that wasn’t understood.

That’s the way it is with this wonderful story of the Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch. The problem is, for thousands of years, very few people have gone back to explain the portion that wasn’t understood.

As a friend of mine loves to say, “This is as gay as it gets!” Interestingly, many Biblical Scholars are coming to that same conclusion.

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We start a new series today taking a closer look at faith journeys of the female kind in Scripture. What can I say, most of the stories in Scripture are about men (no surprise there – it came to be in a patriarchal culture). But here and there you find stories about women, and they are gems. Particularly interesting are the stories about the NAMELESS ones. You know – the anonymous women in Scripture, women whose stories we know so well, yet they are never identified by name: the woman Jesus meets at the well, the woman about to be stoned, the woman who anoints Jesus feet, and so on, and so on. They may be nameless, but they are full of spunk, and they do not allow themselves to be boxed in.

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This Sunday, June 13 is the Gay and Lesbian Pride Festival in WeHo
We will have worship at 11 am that day. The sermon is:
“How Jesus Changed Christianity: The Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch.”
Many Biblical Scholars believe the role of the Eunuch is the same as gay and lesbian people in Christianity today. Phillip baptizes this person into the family of faith!
If you wish to attend church and go to the parade, there are two easy options.

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Among pastors, theologians, religious scholars, sociologists and even the great American soothsayers of our contemporary age – Pollsters – everyone is asking the same question: “What in the world is happening to the Christian Church?” Currently, there are two different opinions. One perspective is, as we enter the post-modern world, the very tenets of Christianity and certainly the organizational structure of the Christian Church is no longer relevant. In other words, Christianity and the Church are based on beliefs and experiences that come out of such a radically different world experience (world-view, cosmos) that it just doesn’t make any rational sense to the 21st century mind.

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