You are invited to the Sunday Service on June 9 at 10 am. The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.
You can worship live on ZOOM by clicking the link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9658816441 Meeting ID: 965 881 6441
You can also watch Sunday services at your convenience by going to our website “watsonville1stumc.org” and click YouTube or Facebook. Each Sunday worship will be uploaded on Sunday afternoon for your viewing.
Celebration of Pride Month Sunday
Sunday, June 9, 2024, 10 am
Special Music Don’t Laugh At Me Jesse Martinez
Peter, Paul and Mary
Let’s Get Together
The Youngbloods
Message: Into the Wilderness:“A Message for Pride Month and All of Us”
by Dr. Haley Feuerbacher
After the General Conference’s vote to remove the ban on ordaining queer clergy and marrying LGBTQ2IA+ couples in our United Methodist churches, we are being called to transformation and invited to venture into new spaces and ways of doing and being the Church. And perhaps this call to change and leave what we have known for something new resonates personally too, in this season of graduations and transitions. Change is more than hard – in fact, our brains have evolved to code change as threatening and traumatizing. It’s no wonder we stay in spaces, traditions, and patterns that do not truly serve us, others, or God’s vision when it requires that we step away from what we know and into the wilderness. But all throughout scripture, the wilderness was a place of divine encounter, of life-giving flourishing, and of transformation.
In Luke 15, Jesus tells a parable of a “lost sheep,” but a deeper look into this text that focuses on Jesus’ response to finding the sheep helps us read this story as a message inviting us to be courageous and wild enough to step out of overgrazed pastures, leaving behind what is no longer serving us, and venture into the wilderness, carrying with us what will grow in the future. May we be a wild sheep too and seek the blessing of the wilderness!
“Spiritual homesickness has been a constant in my life.
It was not an everyday experience,
but a predictable and always reoccurring desperation
to find a sense of sacredness within me.”
~ Brené Brown, Forward to Falling Upward by Richard Rohr
“To be treated as a mistake, unworthy to belong, to be excommunicated, is the cruelest punishment a community can inflict upon a human being. And that’s what we have been doing for far too long to a queer community in the name of religion. For the love of God, this needs to stop, now.” ~ John Song
“When you are not true to yourself you are harming us and the world.”
~ Rumi
“I am who I am in the eyes of God—
nothing more and nothing less.”
~ St. Therese of Lesieux, the 19th century France
BE-U-tiful!
