Reflections

Every Sunday we come into this place and we confess: we have not always done what you wanted us to do. We have not always been what you are calling us to be. And it’s true, isn’t it? The mistakes of yesterday. The things we said we wouldn’t do again, and then we did them anyway. The person we meant to be and somehow aren’t.

But here’s what I don’t hear people say often enough: God keeps calling anyway. Not because God hasn’t noticed. Because God has noticed and decides you’re still invited into the work anyway.

We are called to join God in redeeming this world. Which—and I mean this—is both staggering and kind of ordinary. It’s not like you have to do something huge. It’s just that every single day, there are moments where you can either move toward justice or away from it. Toward healing or away from it. Toward love or away from it. And the claim is that God is working in that direction and wants your help.

You know what’s wild? God waits for us to show up. God actually wants our hands in this. Wants our creativity, our particular genius, our willingness to do the next small thing. Even though we’re going to mess up. Even though we’re going to do it wrong sometimes.

So yes, come ask for forgiveness. Come ask for a new start. But come also knowing that you’re not coming back for condemnation. You’re coming back because there’s more work to do. Because the world needs you. Because you’re called to leave this place saying it was good to be in the house of the Lord, and it’s good to go out and be God’s hands in a world that desperately needs them.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope

Here’s something we don’t talk about much: Jesus had to deal with difficult people. And I’m not talking about the ones who were obviously opposed to him—the Pharisees, the authorities. I’m talking about his own disciples. The people closest to him.

They argued about who was the greatest. They wanted special seats at his table. They asked for things out of pure ambition, not out of any kind of spiritual maturity. And Jesus didn’t send them away. He just kept trying to teach them something different.

The human one—that’s Jesus talking about himself—didn’t come to be served. He came to serve. And here’s what I think we miss: that’s not a sad thing. That’s not him being taken advantage of. That’s him modeling what wholeness actually looks like.

Because serving isn’t the same as being a doormat. It’s not about erasing yourself so that other people can have what they want. It’s about looking at somebody else’s actual need and doing something about it. It’s about putting down your own anxious need to be important and just—doing the work that’s in front of you.

And the minute you stop keeping score—the minute you stop wondering whether anybody’s noticing how much you’re giving—you start feeling different in your body. Lighter. More true to yourself. Because you’re not fighting anymore. You’re not competing anymore.

You’re just doing what you’re here to do. Showing up. Being faithful. Loving the people in front of you. Which, it turns out, is how you become the kind of person that actually leads. Actually matters. Actually changes things.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope

James and John came up to Jesus and asked him to do them a favor. And they didn’t ask for forgiveness or healing or to understand scripture better. They asked to sit at his right and left hand when he got his glory. They wanted to be important. To have status. To win.

And you know what? Jesus didn’t shame them for wanting it. He just said, you don’t understand what you’re asking for. Can you drink the cup I’m going to drink? And they said, sure, we can. Spoiler alert: they couldn’t.

But then the other ten disciples heard about it and got angry. And you can feel it in the text. The jockeying for position. The insecurity. The fear that if James and John get lifted up, there’s less room for them. It’s the same fight we’re all in, isn’t it? The competition for being significant.

And Jesus calls them all together and says something radical. You know how the rulers of the world do it? They throw their weight around. They order people around. But that’s not how it works with you. Whoever wants to be great, become a servant. Whoever wants to be first, become a slave to everyone.

And I think—I think he’s not saying this to make us feel bad. He’s not saying it like, oh you’re so selfish. He’s saying it because he’s seen the alternative. He’s seen what happens when people climb over each other trying to be important. And it destroys them. It makes them small, even when they’re in charge of everything.

But when you choose to serve? When you actually pay attention to somebody else’s need instead of your own status? You become large. You become free. You become the kind of person that actually matters.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope

There’s a prayer that runs through my head sometimes: Let the Son of God hold you. Please fill in your desire. Let it fill your heart.

I’m sitting with that word—desire. Because we’ve made it kind of dirty, haven’t we? We’ve turned it into something you’re supposed to resist, something you’re supposed to kill in yourself so that you can be more spiritual, more acceptable, more holy.

But what if your desire matters to God? Not the destructive stuff that eats you from the inside. But the actual yearning of your heart. The thing you want to be true about yourself. The person you want to become. The way you want to love. The difference you want to make.

Scripture keeps telling us that God notices. That God cares about the actual texture of your life, not just whether you show up to the right place on the right day. God fills the heart. That’s what we’re promised. Not a list of rules. Not a judgment about whether your desire is the right one. But a filling. A provision. An abundance.

And here’s what I’ve learned: when I’m operating out of that kind of trust—when I actually believe that God is not stingy with good things, that there’s enough for me, that my desire matters—I’m a different person. I’m kinder. I’m less defensive. I’m actually more able to help somebody else.

The fear-based version of faith tells you that you can’t trust your own heart. And maybe that’s right about some things. But the Jesus version of faith keeps saying: your hunger for good is real. And I see you. And I will fill you.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope

So there’s this tax collector named Levi, sitting at his booth doing what tax collectors did—which in that time meant collaborating with the occupying power and probably overcharging people for the privilege. Not exactly the guy you’d invite to dinner.

And Jesus walks up to him and says, follow me. Just like that. And Levi gets up and leaves everything and follows him. All his money. All his position, such as it was. Gone.

Then Levi throws a party. A great banquet. And he invites all his friends—other tax collectors, other sinners, other people who didn’t fit into respectable society. And the Pharisees, those careful, rule-keeping folks, they’re watching from the sidelines going, are you serious? This guy is eating with them? With the wrong people?

And Jesus says something that I think we’ve turned into religious platitude without letting it land in our bones: Those who are well have no need of a physician. I didn’t come to call the righteous. I came to call the sinners.

Not the people who have it all figured out. Not the people who are doing everything right. The ones who know they’re broken. The ones who know they need help. That’s who Jesus looked for.

And I wonder how many of us have been sitting in church for years thinking we’re not the ones Jesus came for, because we’re too messed up, or too aware of our own mess. When the actual invitation is to you. Exactly you. The parts of you that don’t fit. The parts you’re trying to hide. Jesus walked right past the righteous to find you.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope

There’s something about coming to church on a Sunday when you’ve just watched people celebrate something beautiful. Two couples who have been married sixty years. Sixty. And you sit there thinking about what that means—all the ordinary Tuesdays, all the mornings you didn’t want to get out of bed, all the times you stayed anyway.

But we were also holding space for someone on hospice care. Sleeping peacefully. Unresponsive. And her husband sitting there with her, or her daughter, or whoever it was, just keeping vigil. Just being present.

That’s what love is, you know. It’s not the greeting card version. It’s not even the celebration-at-the-anniversary version, though that matters. It’s the showing up when there’s nothing left to do but show up. It’s the choosing, over and over again, to lay your own need aside and just be with somebody.

I think that’s why Jesus came the way he did. Not as a mighty king who fixed everything from a distance. But as someone willing to get tired, to get hungry, to sit at tables with people the respectable folks wouldn’t touch. To eventually let it cost him everything.

When you love somebody—really love them—you’re vulnerable. You can be disappointed. You can lose them. And yet. And yet we keep doing it. Because the alternative, which is to protect yourself by not loving, it turns out that’s a slow death too. Just a different kind.

So maybe the call is not to love more carefully. Maybe it’s to love more honestly, knowing what it costs.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope

Patience leads to abundant understanding. Jealousy rots the bones. You read that and you think, well, sure, obviously. But then you wake up at three in the morning thinking about something somebody said at church, or comparing your life to what you saw on someone’s Instagram, and suddenly that Proverb isn’t theoretical anymore.

A peaceful mind gives life to the body. Literally. Your bones, your cells, the actual physical shell you live in—they respond to whether you’re eaten up with envy or whether you’ve found some kind of rest. And I don’t mean rest like sleeping in. I mean the kind of peace that comes from not constantly measuring yourself against someone else.

That’s the wicked get thrown down by their own evil part. It’s not that God comes down with a lightning bolt. It’s that your own jealousy, your own insistence on somebody else’s wrong, your own inability to let a thing go—it does the work for you. It destroys you.

And the righteous? They find refuge even in death. Which sounds kind of bleak when you read it like that, but it’s not. It’s saying that there’s something deeper than the mess you’re in right now. That even when everything falls apart, there’s ground underneath you. There’s belonging to something bigger than your own shame or your own comparison or your own story about how you messed up.

So I guess the practical application is this: jealousy is the lie that someone else having something good takes something from you. Patience is the truth that there’s enough. That God’s not running out. That you don’t have to beat anybody else to the finish line to know that you matter.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope

You know, I brought a stack of calendars to church one Sunday because I wanted us to see something. How do we actually make sense of what we’re being told? How do we know what to believe?

And here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: we sift everything through multiple filters. We have scripture—the big red calendar, if you will. That’s the foundation. But then we’ve got tradition layered on top of it, all these patterns that have been passed down. And then we’ve got our own experience, our own reality, and that brings something to the table too.

Now, you hear it on the news. Someone’s convinced God told them to do something horrible. Something that doesn’t fit. And you know what? If you actually sifted it through scripture, through tradition, through the experience of faithful people before you, it wouldn’t hold up. It wouldn’t survive. But see, that’s the thing about filters—they only work if you actually use them. If you actually do the work of sifting instead of just grabbing at the first thing that feels right to you.

And here’s where it gets hard to talk about, because some of the people who get pulled into that kind of thinking—they can’t use reason because their reason isn’t working right. They need help. They need mercy. They need someone to help them sift, because their mind is struggling.

But the rest of us? We’ve got no excuse. We’ve been given these tools. Scripture. Community. Our own lived experience. The question is whether we actually use them before we act.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope

All right, so. There are moments in our lives—actual moments, not just the big dramatic ones we tell stories about for years—where we just need to get on our knees. Not because we’re supposed to. Not because it’s Sunday morning and there’s a liturgy that says so. But because the path has gone dark and we can’t see the next step.

I’m thinking about the times when circumstances used to make perfect sense to us. You know that feeling, right? When you could see the logic, you could understand what God was doing, you could trace the shape of it. And then something shifts. The clouds come in, the rain starts falling, and we’re tempted to believe that God doesn’t actually know what’s happening. That we’ve somehow slipped through the cracks of God’s attention.

That’s when you bow the knee. Not because you’ve figured it out. But because trust isn’t about understanding. It’s about what you do when you don’t understand. And the marvelous thing—and I mean marvelous—is that wherever you are at that moment, that’s exactly where God finds you. That’s where God meets you. With an offer of peace that cuts across all the ways you’ve been taught to think, all the personality types in the room, all the questions you haven’t figured out yet. God shows up anyway.

One of the things that keeps me from despair is that scripture keeps coming back to this. The psalmists write their anger, their doubts, their hollering at God. And then somewhere in the middle of all that fussing, there’s this turning point. But God. Just like that. And they find themselves held.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope

It’s July. Fireworks and parades and all of that. And I’m sitting here thinking about what it means to be a nation, to have leaders, to live together with people who are different from us.

You know, our prayer life has to be big enough to include all of that. We pray for our leaders. We pray for the leaders of other nations. We pray for the people who are at risk. And we do it all knowing that God’s not on anybody’s side in particular—God loves all of us.

Here’s what bothers me sometimes: we think love of country means we can’t see the ways our country gets it wrong. Or we think seeing the ways our country gets it wrong means we can’t love it. And that’s backwards. Real love includes seeing clearly and wanting better.

I pray for my nation. I pray for its leaders. I pray that they see each other as human beings instead of enemies. I pray that we all learn to do that—to see people who disagree with us as still beloved children of God.

And I pray for people who are at risk. People on the margins. People whose bodies or lives or families don’t fit the way society wants them to fit. I pray God protects them. I pray we all become the kind of people who stand with them.

The prayer you taught us to pray—Our Father—that’s about all of us. Not about my nation or my tribe or my people. About us. All of us. Together in God’s love.

That’s what this season calls us to. Not blind patriotism. Not cynicism. But clear-eyed love. Love that sees what’s good and wants to protect it. Love that sees what’s wrong and wants to fix it. Love that never stops believing people can change.

A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope