What’s Going on at the Church
Important Message from the USRC Board of Directors:
Please read these guidelines about Squier Hall and the formation of the USRC Board of Directors, who will be overseeing the groups meeting in Squier.
As part of the guidelines, please use this form if you have any concerns so that they can be addressed.
Join us in watching The Chosen after coffee hour. Check out dates and times in announcements. Also follow us on TikTok: firstpresofrahway.
Our Mother’s Day Service is always special as we celebrate the women we love and appreciate! Here are some pictures taken of that special day.
“Weighing Truth and Life”
There is a common assumption that a life of prayer or contemplation is impractical, if not impossible, for most people. We imagine that it must require sequestering ourselves for prolonged periods of time, in very specific (aka sacred) spaces. The following is a different perspective from Professor Wendy Farley, director and teacher of spirituality at the Graduate School of Theology at the University of the Redlands.
Theology sometimes is a heavy enterprise. Some theologians live so high in their ivory steeples most of us on the ground can’t understand a word. Rev. Dr. Cynthia Rigby is a theologian (at Austin Seminary) who works hard at making lofty theological concepts more accessible. Here is an excerpt:
“One of my favorite theological quotes comes from Saint Augustine who insists that “if we have understood, what we have understood is not God.” Augustine wants us to approach all of our God-talk with the awareness that we are finite and God is infinite — that whatever we know about God is a drop in the ocean compared to who God actually is.“
It might be tempting, once we realize God can’t be exhaustively known, to give up trying to answer, “Who is God, really?” Perhaps we should, instead, throw up our hands and cry: “I don’t know! It’s a mystery!” But if we respond in this way, we risk being as closed off to the capaciousness of God as the stereotypical know-it-alls we don’t want to become. I once tried responding “I don’t know” to a friend who asked me what God was up to as she lay in a hospital bed, dying. “Now, Cindy — I know you don’t know,” Joyce said, smiling up at me. “But I figured you’d be able to say something after all those years of studying theology!” In that salient moment, Joyce taught me something I have hardly forgotten since: that to engage in God-talk, as those who realize we are incapable of comprehensive understanding, is a vulnerable, relational enterprise. It is funded not first and foremost by eloquence or rightness, but by faith, hope and love.
The mystery, as it turns out, is not that “who God is, really” lies beyond our comprehension. The mystery is that we can know the God who is always greater than our best understandings. But how? Theologians through the ages have tended to agree it is possible to know the God we can’t get to on our own because God comes to us, acting in the context of our creaturely existence and history. There is, to be sure, a lot of debate about the flow of the revelatory delivery system. Is God’s character revealed in the intricacies of nature? Through our moral propensities or innate sensibilities? Or through special acts of intervention and election, marked by starry skies (Genesis 15), burning bushes (Exodus 3), a newborn baby wrapped in swaddling clothes (Luke 2), the written Word? Even as we argue about these important matters, we would do well to pause now and then in awesome wonder. We can know the incomprehensible God because God has come to us in love!”
Peace, Pastor Ed
Interested in Getting Involved?
We have a lot of different ways for you to get involved – short-term projects, one-time opportunities, working with our livestream technology on Sundays, plus much more. Click on the button below to see what we have on our ‘volunteer wish list’. As more opportunities become available, we will be sure to update our listings.