Most of us have assumptions about the Holy Spirit that we might not always say out loud, but they shape how we move through our lives of faith.; we believe the Spirit is real, we believe the Spirit moves, and we have seen it in others, in moments of unexpected grace, in people who seem to carry a kind of courage we are not sure we possess. 

But we also think this Spirit is for everyone else out there. That this gift is either too big, too mystical, too nebulous, or too powerful for a normal person like me.

But Jesus did not say it like that, he said: “I tell you the truth, anyone who believes in me will do the same works I have done, and even greater [things], because I am going to be with the Father.” (John 14:12)

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The post Even Greater Things appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

In the moments of disorientation we inevitably experience in life we can confuse the many emotions and sensations we encounter as a lack of faith. Even worse, the fear, shame, and guilt we feel might be taken out negatively on those we love the most.

Today, Jesus meets us in this moment of disorientation and says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me, you will be satisfied, and you will do even greater works than I have done. I will show you the way to the home the Father is preparing.”

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The post The Way Home appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

Walk into a forest and look closely at the ground, and you will find a story that runs parallel to our own. A seedling survives not by its own strength, but by the community it finds itself in: mature trees that shelter it from drying winds, fallen logs that nourish it from below, and gaps in the canopy that draw it toward the light above. Successful seedlings are lit from above, sheltered beside, and nourished below. This is not an accident of biology; it is a pattern God has woven through all of creation.

The communion of saints works the same way. We grow toward the fullness of Christ through the legacy of those who came before us, the presence of those beside us, and the pull of the risen Christ who calls us forward into good and satisfying pastures. In the Kingdom of God, no one grows alone.

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The post Life Above, Beside, and Below appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

In a gift economy, wealth means having enough to share, currency is measured in relationships, and the unit of success is “we” rather than “I.” This is because all flourishing is mutual. We could be talking about a shrub full of juicy berries, a handmade gift from a loved one, or the gifts of love, compassion, peace, mercy, healing, and life given to us by a God whose very defining characteristic is generosity. 

The Kingdom of God runs on a gift economy, not a transactional economy like the one in which we live, and in the Kingdom of God, all flourishing is mutual. 

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The post Peace Be With You appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

Christ has a habit of showing up in the rooms we have sealed shut, and he always brings the same gift with him. Peace. He does not wait for us to unlock the door or get our courage up, or our theology sorted out; he simply appears, wounds and all, ready to help us sort through our doubts and steering us toward courage and faith.

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We are very familiar with death, but sometimes we are caught off guard by life, if we notice it at all. And that is exactly where the story of Easter begins. It begins in the shadow of Good Friday, still in the dark hours, in a garden before dawn, with a woman carrying burial spices toward a grave, doing the thing grief usually prompts us to do: stay busy. But she is in store for a miraculous surprise.

For seventeen centuries, the church has celebrated Easter with arms flung wide, calling everyone in, and the story we gather to tell is one we continue to admit we have not fully absorbed.

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The post Dawn in the Garden appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

Re-living the final hours of Jesus’ life is important. It helps bring into focus the miraculous victory the Father, the Son, and the Spirit enacted through overcoming the cruel cross and defeating the powers of sin and death once and for all. 

It’s also important to realize that the victory enacted in these events are part of Jesus’s life and ministry. In other words, Jesus’ death on the cross is not disconnected from His life.

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The post Good Friday Tenebrae Service appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

The kingdoms of this earth arrive in spectacular fashion, but Jesus arrives in a much more humble way, and that choice was the most important thing that happened in the world in a very long time.

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The post The Humble King appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

Death is an intruder, an enemy, a force that has no place in the world God intended. But the gift of free will, the very capacity that makes love and goodness possible, also means that the collective weight of human choice sometimes comes with a dark shadowside, and so sin and death entered into God’s creation.

Bad things happen to beautiful people. Even death. Even to people God loves. Even to a man named Lazarus in a small town called Bethany. But Christ meets us at every threshold where death is waiting, and in his hands, even the darkest doorway opens into life.

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The post On The Threshold of Life appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

This Lent, we have been learning to set aside our disordered desires: our self-sufficiency in the wilderness, our need to control new birth, our thirst for satisfaction in all the wrong wells. And now Jesus invites us to set down perhaps the heaviest thing we carry: the belief that if we can correctly assign blame to injustice and suffering, we just might be able to endure a little longer.

What if the question was never “whose fault is this?” What if the question was always “what is God doing here and how can I join him in that work?”

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The post Seeing Through the Blame Game appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.