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COPA 20th Anniversary Convention
Join us for in-person worship this Sunday, May 7, 2023 at 10:00 am
You are invited to the in-person Worship Service with Holy Communion on May 7 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 or 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.
Eastertide with Holy Communion
Sunday, May 7, 2023, 10 am
This Sunday is the In-Person Lego Sunday!
First, children will be in worship. Following the Special Music,
the teacher, Joan Culbertson, will lead our children to the Nursery Room.
Message All Things RESURRECTION: Rev. John Song
Part 2) “How the Resurrection of Jesus Changed Our Lives Today?”
Sermon series on All Things RESURRECTION resumes this Sunday with Part 2) “How the Resurrection of Jesus Changed Our Lives Today?”
Why did Christianity begin, and why did it take the shape it did? To answer this question – which any historian must face – we will explore the key question: what precisely happened at Easter? What did the early Christians mean when they said that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead? How does the Resurrection of Jesus change our lives today?
Luke 24:28-35
The Walk to Emmaus
28 As they came near the village to which they were going, (Risen Jesus) walked ahead as if he were going on. 29 But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. 30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.31 Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight. 32 They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”
33 That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem, and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. 34 They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” 35 Then they told what had happened on the road and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
May 2023 Pastoral Letter
I Am Enough
I want to pose a great question for us to grapple with. Who are we now, and who are we called to be moving forward?
I want speak about healing and wholeness — and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. Jesus was a healer. In the gospel stories, there are numerous occasions where Jesus heals the sick, broken, outcasted, and marginalized. And Jesus understood that healing was more than just healing physical ailments. It was ultimately about spiritual healing that will lead to wholeness.
And that word “healing” is different from “fixing”. Healing is about making whole. And to be a healer, you have to be able to listen, to learn, and to love. These are three-legged stool of becoming a healer.
Wholeness isn’t something we acquire by stacking achievements or checking boxes or acquiring products or consumer goods. The world tells us what success is. And what I worry about is that right now the world tells our kids and all of us that to be successful, you need one of three things: be famous, be rich, be powerful. But we all know people who have all three of these — who are famous, wealthy, and powerful— and profoundly unhappy and don’t feel whole or complete. And so I worry that many of our kids are being led down a path that will not make them whole or fulfilled.
I think to truly feel whole — it’s not about acquiring something that we don’t have. It’s about remembering who we fundamentally are: created in God’s image with built in self-worth.
When we come into this world, we are content. Our kids don’t care whether we have a big house or a small house. They don’t care about how fancy the clothes we wear or not. They care about finding moments of love and joy. They care about their relationships they have with the people around them. They observe things: bees and butterfly pollinating flowers and the play of lights as they come through the window in the setting sun. And they find joy in that, in those day-to-day, seemingly ordinary moments. The greatest gift that a parent can give to a child is not more stuff but a quality time with an attention. Even if it’s ten minutes a day the child will never forget.
The part of what is challenging us right now in this moment is that there are a lot of forces around us that make us feel that we are not enough, content and whole. We’re not good enough, not thin enough, beautiful enough, not popular enough, not smart enough, and certainly we don’t have enough. In those moments we have to ask ourselves, are those messages speaking the truth about who we are or is that a false narrative?
Your sense of inadequacy is what drives their profit margin. If all the women in the world got up one morning and liked what they saw front of the mirror, overnight the cosmetic industry will file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. “You are not enough” narrative is driven by an industry that wants to sell you something with the promise that their product will make you feel more whole and complete.
Healing and wholeness to me is really about recognizing what we already have inside of us. And coming to trust that, coming to rely on that, and ultimately coming to find fulfillment in who we are as God’s beloved. Without our humanity, we will possess nothing of value. And we have the power to change what is happening.
When we stand in that strength of reality, we allow others to find for themselves that they, too, are enough. Every time we treat others with love and dignity free of judgement, whether that’s to a member of your own family or a moment of kindness you express to a stranger, you are mirroring their own God given, innate self-worth. You are inspiring people to be a new way of being in the world that constantly seems to cut us down to feeling of inadequacy. Small act of kindness are radical acts of defiance against the world that incessantly tells us we don’t have enough, we don’t do enough, we are “not enough.”
Instead, let our daily mantra be “I have enough. I do enough. I am enough.”
John
Join us for in-person worship this Sunday, April 30, 2023 at 10:00 am
You are invited to the in-person Worship Service on April 30 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 or 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.
Eastertide
Sunday, April 30, 2023, 10 am
Children’s Time “What to Do When I Am Angry” Pastor John
Choir Anthem To Do the Father’s Will
Words & Music by Helen Griggs
Duet: Lynne E. Abenoja, Soprano & Febe A. Avitua, alto
Message “The Divine Anger of Jesus” Dr. Peter Coster
Dr. Peter Coster will wrap up his retreat topic, What to Do with ANGER: Our Misunderstood Sacred Emotion this Sunday. He will examine various places in the gospel where Jesus was angry and how he used his anger constructively. It will be an eye opening and fascinating look at Jesus and anger and what we can learn from them.
“Be angry, but sin not.
Do not let the sun go down on your anger,
and do not make room for the devil.”
~ Ephesians 4:26-27
“If you are patient in one moment of anger,
you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.”
~ Chinese Proverb
Join us for in-person worship this Sunday, April 23, 2023 at 10:00 am
You are invited to the in-person Earth Day/ Native American Ministries Sunday on April 23 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 or 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
Earth Day Sunday
Sunday, April 23, 2023, 10 am
Native American Ministries Sunday
Since 1989, United Methodist congregations have observed the third Sunday after Easter as Native American Ministries Sunday. The purpose is to elevate and support the contributions and voices of Native/Indigenous people in our church. A special financial offering on this day goes to support specific Native-American ministries in annual conferences.
This Sunday is Lego Sunday!
First, children will be in worship. Following the Special Music,
the teacher, Joan Culbertson, will lead our children to the Nursery Room.
Children’s Time “Things We All Can Do to Care for the Earth” Pastor John
Special Music He Speaks to Me Lynne E. Abenoja, Solo
Words by Betty C. Hughes, Music by Robert J. Hughes
Message “What Kind of World Are We Leaving Behind?” Rev. John Song
There is a spiritual sickness in America. We as people have become more fearful, distrustful and isolated. There is an out of control proliferation of guns and we are armed to the teeth. One of our major political parties, beholden by the NRA, cares more about having unfettered access to guns and the right to carry guns in public with no background checks than the lives of our children. Their argument is that more guns in the hands of the public is the solution to our insane gun violence plaguing our society.
How is it that when you mistakenly knock on someone’s door, someone’s car, drive into someone’s driveway, or to retrieve a ball in someone’s yard, you end up getting shot? What is going on? Our society is facing the polycrisis of gun violence, climate change, the loss of religious centers, to name a few. We are unglued. The center will not hold.
On this Earth Day, we will ask the question, “What Kind of World Are We Leaving Behind” for our children and grandchildren? What will save us from ourselves? What will restore us to social sanity in a world that has lost its center? How can we move from “othering” to neighborliness, isolation to connection, loneliness to community?
Matthew 22:34-40
The Greatest Commandment
“When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
