Yesterday we began a new sermon series “Rock Bottom: What’s actually there when everything else falls away?”. Over the next seven weeks we will encounter different scriptures where we witness someone’s rock bottom. This isn’t always the rock bottom we initially think of, but can also be simply getting to the core, to what matters most, to what is found at our foundation.

Yesterday we began a new sermon series “Rock Bottom: What’s actually there when everything else falls away?”. Over the next seven weeks we will encounter different scriptures where we witness someone’s rock bottom. This isn’t always the rock bottom we initially think of, but can also be simply getting to the core, to what matters most, to what is found at our foundation.

Yesterday we began a new sermon series “Rock Bottom: What’s actually there when everything else falls away?”. Over the next seven weeks we will encounter different scriptures where we witness someone’s rock bottom. This isn’t always the rock bottom we initially think of, but can also be simply getting to the core, to what matters most, to what is found at our foundation.

Our own Mark Johnson, a retired Lieutenant Colonel and decorated combat veteran with over twenty years as a member of the US Army Special Forces, shared in worship while Pastor Clare is away with our middle school students at Rainbow Trail Lutheran Camp. Mark is also a student of history and has many stories to share of ordinary citizens answering the call to serve and sacrifice much for the sake of others. His inspiring witness will invite us all to consider how God is calling us to serve in our own arenas.

This Sunday we wrapped up our sermon series, Stepping into Freedom, as we thought together about how we live in response to the good news of Christ’s love and grace. We talked about the call to repentance that is issued both by John the Baptist before Jesus’ earthly ministry begins and by Peter after it ends. The call to repentance is the call to to change our hearts and lives. We reviewed the different ways our culture can cause us to get stuck in tombs we don’t even realize we are living in, alienated from our true selves, from one another, and from God. We named that we are made for more, created to to live this one wild and precious life we have been given.

This Sunday was Pentecost, the Sunday when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church as it is recorded in the book of Acts. We thought about what it means to be people who expect the Spirit to show up, in a world that so often is focused on our material realities alone. We heard wisdom passed on to the US Congress by Czechlozovakian play-write, dissident, political prisoner and then president in 1990, bore witness to the transformation of a founder of a cosmetic empire, and heard the moving letter of Major Sullivan Ballou to his wife as he prepared to head into battle at the beginning of the Civil War. Through it all, we saw signs of the Spirit at work and were encouraged to be attentive to the Spirit’s movement in our own lives.