Please join us for in-person worship this Sunday, October 17 at 10:00 am! The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.

*[Our 10 am in-person Sunday worship in the Sanctuary requires masks for all. Please continue to practice 6 feet physical distancing whenever possible.]

Season of Ordinary Time ~ Sunday, October 17, 2021, 10 am

For Special Music, Ms. Vanessa Yearsley will sing “I Carry Your Heart” by John Duke based on the poem, “i carry your heart,” by ee cummings.

i carry your heart with me
(i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it
(anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

 i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)
i want no world (for beautiful you are my world ,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Message: How Did We Lose Our Way & How Can We Find Our Way Back? Part 7) “So where is everybody?”

This Sunday, Pastor John will be taking us into Part 2 of the world of Richard Powers. Powers has a new book out this year, “Bewilderment,” following the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Overstory.” His new book explores if we are alone in the universe or if there is life outside of the solar system.

Theo, Robin’s father, is an astrobiologist. Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these night times, bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. And they make this journey across the universe for life and the possibilities of life. Robin asks his father, “So where is everybody?”

Father and son imagine going to a new planet. What would life look like if it was able to get started here? And what would that change in our sense of who we are and where we’ve landed? It is another way of getting at the question of human meaning:

                                                              Where do we come from?

                                                              Who are we?

                                                              How are we to live here?

                                                              Where are we going?

The 2021 Pajaro Valley CROP Hunger Walk is on Saturday, October 16, 2021. Our walk will begin at the Watsonville Second Harvest Food Bank, 800 Ohlone Parkway, Watsonville CA, 95076. Check in time is at 8:00 am with the walk starting at 8:30 am.

Pajaro Valley CROP Hunger Walk is sponsored by Watsonville First United Methodist Church and Church World Service. Participants raise funds either by fundraising or donating themselves. 75% of the money goes to Church World Service to help families fight hunger internationally and 25% goes toward our local Second Harvest.

Since 2010 the Pajaro Valley CROP Hunger Walk has raised a total of $30,428.60 with $7,607.15 allocated to our local Second Harvest Food Bank. Last year, we raised $1,960; Second Harvest Food Bank received $521.25. Pastor John agreed to dress up in an avocado costume if we reached our fundraising goal of $2,100 this year!

Participants walk 3.5 miles from Second Harvest Food Bank on Ohlone Parkway to Main St, down along Rodriguez St to West Beach St, back to Second Harvest. A shuttle van will be available to pick you up along the route if the walk gets lengthy and take you back to Second Harvest Food Bank for some refreshments. Each participant receives a CROP Walk t-shirt. 

Sign up now and join the Watsonville First United Methodist Church team! Register HERE!Questions? Please email Bob or Joan Culbertson at joan4peace@yahoo.com or Marjorie Martinez at walkamolies@gmail.com

Please join us for in-person worship this Sunday, October 10 at 10:00 am! The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.

*[Our 10 am in-person Sunday worship in the Sanctuary requires masks for all. Please continue to practice 6 feet physical distancing whenever possible.]

Season of Ordinary Time ~ Sunday, October 10, 2021, 10 am

For Special Music, Ms. Vanessa Yearsley will sing “La Rosa y el Sauce” by Carlos Guastavino under the piano accompaniment of Marina Thomas.                                       

Message: How Did We Lose Our Way & How Can We Find Our Way Back? Part 6) “Entering the World of Richard Powers”

This Sunday, Pastor John will be inviting us to enter into the world of Richard Powers who is the author of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Overstory.” If you haven’t read it, you should. It’ll change you. It changed me. I haven’t walked through a forest the same way again. And I’m not alone in that. The former President Barack Obama recommended, “It changed how I thought about the earth and our place in it.”

Powers has a new book out, “Bewilderment.” And I think “The Overstory” and “Bewilderment” should be understood as a couplet. “The Overstory” is about the world beyond us — the slow, powerful life of the trees and the forests and the way all of that shapes us. You can also call “The Overstory” the outer story. And “Bewilderment,” by contrast, is the inner story. They are about how we treat delusion as normal and clarity as lunacy. They are enchanting, and they are devastating.

Ultimately, they are about how shifts in our consciousness can radically change our relationship to creation and the world around us, and therefore, can change our societies. In other words, they are about embracing the Kingdom of God, the transcendent reality of God, that Jesus came to proclaim for the world.

Join us for our National Night Out 2021 event today! Come out and meet your neighbors and Watsonville Police Officers. You will also get to meet and talk with your local Council Members. There will be free food and drinks and plenty of entertainment for kids and adults. The fun begins at 5:00 pm in the back church parking lot at 229 Stanford Street. See you all soon!

Please join us for in-person worship and the Celebration of Holy Communion this Sunday, October 3 at 10:00 am! The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.

*[Our 10 am in-person Sunday worship in the Sanctuary requires masks for all. Please continue to practice 6 feet physical distancing whenever possible.]

This Sunday there will be in-person Lego Sunday School! First, children will be in worship. Following the Children’s Time and Special Music, the teacher, Joan Culbertson, will lead our children to the Nursery Room where Lego Sunday School will be held.

The fabulous guest singer, Vanessa Yearsley, will sing “Must the Winter Come So Soon” by Samuel Barber under the piano accompaniment of Marina Thomas.

The message for this Sunday will be based on the enigmatic sayings of Jesus in Luke 23:31(see below) that seems to have uncanny meaning for what humanity is facing today. Pastor John will be exploring the latest book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard who is a forest ecologist and the Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. She sheds light on the vitality of the living system of forestry and how similar they are with human families and society. She has proven, beyond doubt, that trees communicate with each other — that a forest is a single organism wired for wisdom and care. It is a groundbreaking discovery that will make a paradigm shift in our consciousness that will make an impact on how we relate to nature and our planet. All of this turns out to be catching up with intelligence long held in aboriginal science.

Message: How Did We Lose Our Way & How Can We Find Our Way Back? Part 5) “What the Wisdom of the Forest Can Teach Us”

Gospel Reading: Luke 23:31 ~ What will happen when the tree becomes dry?

“²⁶ As they led him away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him, and made him carry it behind Jesus. ²⁷ A great number of the people followed him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. ²⁸ But Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. ²⁹ For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’ ³⁰ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ ³¹ For if they do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

Genesis 1:11-12 ~ God saw that it was good

¹¹Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them”; and it was so. ¹²The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.

Isaiah 41:19-20  “I will put the cedar in the wilderness, The acacia and the myrtle and the olive tree; I will place the juniper in the desert Together with the box tree and the cypress, That they may see and recognize, And consider and gain insight as well, That the hand of the Lord has done this, And the Holy One of Israel has created it.”

Words of Meditation Hildegard of Bingen heard God say, I am the breeze that nurtures all things green. I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits. I am the rain coming from the dew that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life. – Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century German woman Christian mystic

Keep a green tree in your heart and a songbird will come. ~ Chinese proverb

For if they do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry? 

~ Luke 23:31