Hi Friends,
Well, I have been looking forward to this sermon topic… all about David and Bathsheba; I keep hearing that second verse from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”:
Your faith was strong but you needed proof,
You saw her bathing on the roof,
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah.
We’ll see where the Spirit leads us.
And, this Sunday we are celebrating the Baptisms of Nicholas, Scarlett, and Elliott … and that will be exciting!
In addition, we will also be commissioning the folk who will be heading off to Guatemala on Monday the 20th.
We will be having some wonderful music offered by violinist Larisa Lebeda, as well as the gifts of our Vocal Ensemble.
And remember, right after worship, we are having a short Congregational Meeting, to hear the recommendations of the Search Committee: they are bringing forward a name for the half-time Ministry position of Adult Formation and Education; and they will also have a recommendation that we hire a quarter time person for Adult Programming… an exciting time in the growth of our congregation.
GLEANINGS: A friend recently sent me this excerpt from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd; it’s something worth sharing!! What follows is a conversation between two of the main characters, Lily and August, after the death of August’s beloved sister May….
We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl.
“There is one thing I don’t get,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“How come if your favourite colour is blue, you painted your house so pink?”
She laughed. “That was May’s doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the colour. I had a nice tan colour in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, ‘Well, this is the tackiest colour I’ve ever seen, and we’ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May’s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it.’”
“All this time I just figured you liked pink,” I said.
She laughed again. “You know, some things don’t matter that much, Lily. LIke the colour of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person’s heart — now, that matters. The whole problem with people is –”
“They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t,” I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.
“I was going to say, the problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribeean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”
Please click on the link below in order to access the Announcements and the Bulletin for this coming Sunday, July 18th.