Legacy – November 2025

I picture November as punctuated with a beginning of candy-fueled emotions of gratitude following the cuteness of Halloween and the vivid memory making and recalling that we do in at All Saints Day. We end the month with Thanksgiving and the remembering of the past and gratitude for the present, before moving to Advent rooted in the hope that God is doing something new in the world through Christ that is already and not yet accomplished.

Ancestors figure into all of that. Those that gave us life. Those that gave us the country we’ve inherited. Those that walked before us in faith. Those that left us our church.

In our culture we’re not always the best at remembering the past and thanking our ancestors. We tend to assume that such a tradition is related to other cultures. We insist upon the notion that we are self-made men and women with agency and the power of our own choices. And yet… legacy is a huge part of life.

We are the hope, beloveds, and legacy of our ancestors. They lived in part so that we might – whether they knew us or not. Those who built this church building opening in 1917 left it to us with the hope that we, even unknown to them then, would carry one the gift of this space and community that we might tell of the grace, liberation and justice of Jesus the Chris in our actions, words and worship.

It’s all too easy to forget this. Life is busy. Things happen. There’s not enough time. We dream of the future, slow down at times to envision and name our hopes for the future. And yet…it’s often the tyranny of the urgent, or the distractions of noise and shiny things that our culture puts in front of us, that distract us. We easily, and naturally, get consumed by the challenges we face. But in being hyper-focused on the distractions of today – we don’t look to the horizon, dream of the promised land – live as if the future counts.

This month we’re focusing on our legacy. We’ll celebrate what we’ve received and where we are through the telling of our story of what it means to be the people of God: the church. We’ll hear from different groups within our community, stories of en-countering God through our shared ministry that make up our larger ministry and life together.

In this time when the stories and institutions of the past are be-ing dismantled what are we supposed to do, what will we do to pass on the story of the grace, liberation and justice of Jesus the Christ who has saved not just the world – but also us?