About the Author: Samuel Alexander
Rev. Sam Alexander is Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael, CA. He is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, B.A., and Union Seminary in Virginia, M.Div. Sam has served congregations in Maryland and in the San Francisco Bay area and is currently Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael. He serves as an Adjunct Instructor in Homiletics at San Francisco Theological Seminary. What they call, “his provocative sermons” have inspired, disturbed, and delighted his congregations.
Does the church have anything left to offer? Not if we insist on staying in the 16th century, (or even the 19th century), we don’t. And yet it seems many of the words we Christians use to talk about God come from an earlier time, an earlier worldview. Many of us know that, but for reasons I don’t completely understand, we don’t talk about it. As a result scads of people jettison any involvement in the church because when we talk about God we don’t make any sense.
How are we seeking to have our needs met? How do you develop your self worth?
I’d like to invite you into a conversation we’ve been having at the First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael these last weeks of Lent, a conversation about evolution and faith. We’re not talking about a six day creation, with God resting on the seventh. I really, really hope that argument’s over and done with. No, we’re talking about evolution as the way in which everything unfolds in all of creation. We are looking at a creation that evolves and opens towards unity, or shalom, in the presence of God.
Beauty and new life emerge out of the chaos of the cross. Beauty and new life emerge from the challenges and chaos of creation itself – same thing. But how are we to live into that possibility? How are we to live with hope as we develop and evolve? The entire Gospel of Mark was written to answer that question. At then end, after the cross, the women come to the tomb. They are stunned. How will they and the other disciples live into the challenge before them? How will they live after the cross? Jesus has one answer: Meet me in Galilee. But what does that mean?
The creative urgency of God is very close to you - in your heart and looking for an opening so that it may be expressed.
A supersessionist view of the Christian covenant might have made some little sense in a mythic worldview, but never made any moral sense. The time has long since come for Christians to drop such an arrogant claim. It has contributed to extraordinary suffering and eroded any moral authority we might think we have. In that sense, it never made any just sense of the work of God we’ve come to know in Jesus Christ.
What does the Doctrine of the Trinity look like if we reject the idea that it describes a permanent unchanging God? It describes a God as close as your breath, a God whose creative power continues to create, a God who we can see incarnate all around us.
First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael Published on Oct 15, 2013 Rev. Sam Alexander is Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael.
Legion are a group of demons referred to in the Christian Bible. The New Testament outlines an encounter where Jesus healed a man from Gadara possessed by demons while traveling, known as "the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac".
Two healing stories intertwined, both involve females, both involve the number 12 - which brings the Reign of God to mind. What does it mean that it was women in this story. Surely it can't just mean, as some have said, (though not this way), that the gospel is for girls too.
