Can we talk about the actor Ben Affleck a minute? He’s been in the news this week. I used to really like this guy! I loved the friendship he and Matt Damon had and their success together in the movie Good Will Hunting.

He offers us a healing intimacy, a restructuring of who we are, perhaps even at a celluar or sub-cellar level to rid of us death, and revive us, heal us, restore us to a life that will never end.

I know the David story—the darkness, the redemptive element—is seemingly the text we might focus on. It’s not where I’m focusing us this week. Instead, I’m arrested by this metaphor: “The Bread of Life.” Metaphors are a big deal.

What would be on your list of fears? Because we all have them don’t we? We all have areas of our lives that if we are not careful can become a tsunami of fear, overwhelming us and making us feel completely unable to move ahead in any kind of meaningful way.

Today we are talking about how in the kingdom of God values things differently than the culture around us. What’s important, and how God is at work is hidden for those who are not immersed in the Kingdom of God. People may be looking at the exact same event, and see two completely different things.

1 Samuel 8 is a turning point in the history of Israel and also a train wreck of failure. This chapter fundamentally changes the nation of Israel, they go from a gathering of tribes with a version of a theocracy lead by divinely appointed judges to a monarchy.

I never liked the term ordinary time, because I thought it meant plain, unexciting, boring. But in some research I did this week, I found out that “Ordinary Time is called “ordinary” not because it is common.

Today is Trinity Sunday. It is unique in our worship as a church because it is one of the few feasts that are celebrated because of a doctrine instead of an event. We are celebrating the unique three-in-oneness of our God. Father-Son-Holy Spirit.

The vision of the valley of dry bones is probably the most well known passage in Ezekiel, and like the rest of Ezekiel it is wild. Not as wild as him shaving his head with a sword, ch. 3, but still real wild.

This morning we are going to talk about why celebrating Pentecost is such a big deal, about how we can prepare ourselves to experience Pentecost again, and about how we can begin to anticipate the new work God wants to do among us.