This Wednesday: Modern Worship Collective @ 6:30 pm

Dear Friends,

I so look forward to worshipping with you all this Sunday, especially as I have had the blessing of participating — from Watsonville! — in the wonderful Peacemaking Weekend your pastor Rev. Hardy Kim organized with inspiring leaders from South Korea and Northern Ireland. Your church’s commitment to justice and peace are why I am so excited to share with you a little bit about the ministry we do at Somos. As you might imagine, the challenges faced by the largely migrant community we serve in Watsonville can often feel insurmountable. But we locate our mission in a long Biblical legacy of hope, remembering how our loving God longs to guide those who have been exiled home once more. It is this peace – the peace of feeling at home — which we will explore together, both in our own lives and the lives of the communities we serve.

Blessings,

Julie

Please join us immediately following the Sunday service for our Coffee Hour

(in-person in Trinity Court or online via Zoom).

bit.ly/SVPCCoffeeHour

Theme for Sunday

“No keen observation is required to see that something is amiss in the world. More than something—many things. That much is obvious. So obvious, in fact, that it’s all too easy to find oneself thinking that things are especially, uniquely awry. That they have never been worse. … In an important sense, everything is awry and has been awry… There is an abiding out-of-jointness to things, witnessed (but not exhausted) by the abiding disquietude of human hearts… Beneath or alongside or mingled with the disquietude, perhaps you have felt an amorphous but insistent longing… a longing for home.”

Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, in “The Home of God”

• Where do you feel most at home? 

• Why do we as humans not feel at home in this world? What is our Christian call in the midst of that feeling?  

• What is the future of the church?

Genesis 3:22-24 & Revelation 21:1-6

Then the Lord God said, “See, the humans have become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now they might reach out their hands and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever”— therefore the Lord God sent them forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which they were taken. He drove out the humans, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them and be their God;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away.”

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.