Message: “Thanksgiving” from Matthew Dyer
Take a fresh look at the story of Jesus healing 10 lepers, and consider the relevance to gratitude and becoming whole in this Thanksgiving message.
Celebrating Our Neighborhoods
A message from the series “Love Where You Live.” In this story, Jesus participates in a community celebration. When the wine runs out, the hosts face public humiliation. Jesus abundantly but quietly provides, allowing the festivities to continue, and others to take the credit. Join with us as we look at what this story can tell us about being a good neighbor.
Befriending Our Neighborhoods
A message from the series “Love Where You Live.” Jesus crosses all kinds of social barriers to connect with someone his culture considered an outsider. He vulnerably asks for assistance and engages in conversation in a deep and vulnerable way.
Serving Our Neighborhoods
A message from the series “Love Where You Live.” In this series we aim to fall in love with our neighborhoods; to see beauty with fresh eyes, and to develop a vision for how we can be agents of love, peace and hope right where we live. We could take our neighborhoods for granted, overlook their inherent and unique beauty, and even wish we lived somewhere more glamorous. Or we could see them as places of wonder and loveliness! For 4 weeks, we’ll explore how we can serve, befriend and celebrate our neighborhood in the way that Jesus did. Together we will work to become better neighbors and make our neighborhoods better places.
Message: “Commitment Sunday” from Matthew Dyer
Jesus said to his closest companions and followers that he did not consider them servants but friends. Before going to trial and execution, he told the same people that he wanted to spend his final precious moments with them. Jesus seemed to long for friendship (just as we do) and take incredible joy in it. Clearly he spent important and much needed time alone, but in everything else he did, he did it with others, and in many ways his life was a celebration of community. But this was no ordinary community. Jesus’ circle included Roman officials and anti-Roman freedom fighters, tax collectors and Pharisees, women and men, Pagans, Jews and Samaritans. The power of Jesus’ love, acceptance and inclusion was evidenced by genuine diversity. And this was no show: these were truly friends. Jesus’ life was an embodiment—an incarnation—of his higher purpose of reconciliation and healing.
The early Christ-following communities after Jesus embodied this same diversity and friendship. They were not only beneficiaries of this radical acceptance, but also extended it to others. Here at Cedar Ridge we are all descendants of this lineage, and are invited into the same adventure in friendship. Like all humans, we long to be fully known and fully accepted. But this is also a challenge: we have all experienced the joy of friendship and also the pain of rejection. We’ve all felt the comfort of inclusion but also the loneliness of being on the outside. So we are daring to dream that we can be a community where no one is alone. A community, like the one around Jesus, that is diverse in its beauty: black, white, male, female, young, old, gay, straight, married, single. A community that embraces difference, and is transformed by it. A community that demonstrates to the whole world that reconciliation and healing are possible.