Meditations from The Church at Southpoint: Recent Episodes
The Church at Southpoint
www.southpoint.ca — A fully affirming and welcoming church. At Southpoint, it all begins with God’s Love. The more we know God’s love, the more we love. We encourage relationships rather than run programs. We are intentional yet organic, spacious yet authentic. We share communion every week — everyone is welcome! Our pastor is Rev. Anne Baxter Smith. Gather with us Sundays at 10:00 am, 15639 24 Ave, Surrey, BC, Canada. Get in touch at office@southpoint.ca
For the Creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. Romans 8:19. This calling does not require us to be heroes, but it does ask us to show up, sometimes in mundane ways and sometimes in heroic ways, and be present to what is happening around us. We are called to listen to the groaning of Creation, including our own. We wrestle with the complexities and search out what might be a just and generous response. And then, we act. We extend ourselves in ways that support the mutual thriving of life on Earth. In doing so, we are collaborating with God and Creation, participating in God’s ongoing renewal of the Earth.
“Hope is the virtue that asks us to take responsibility for the future, to act joyfully and with perseverance, despite the obstacles.” (Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit)
This Sunday marks the beginning of the Season of Creation, a global Christian commitment to care for creation, our common home. The theme this year is “To Hope and Act with Creation.” In the image for the season, many hands are lifted up in hope, action and courage. In the centre, this is a dove, representing the Spirit, holding a sprig of green, representing Creation. We are coming together as Christians, with Creation, and with the Spirit, and there is power in our togetherness. In hope, we are invited into a profound collaboration with the life-affirming, life-giving power of the Spirit and the Creation.
Hope asks us to participate with God in the renewal of the Earth, however that will manifest. Hope asks us to lean into becoming what we long to be—the very children of God that Creation longs for in Romans 8:19.
Carolyn's tender story of an unexpected friendship across generations weaves into this blessing from our liturgy this summer: May the God who befriends us and tenderly invites us to join in a divine dance of friendship, bless each and every one of us. May we daily grow in friendship with God and all that God has created as we journey through our days. May we trust that “Divine Presence” is at work in us and all around us, and entrust ourselves and this world to the faithful, sustaining Love of God. We go out from here, grounded in Divine Love, living from this grace given to us all. Amen
We often make friends with those who are similar to us. So often, cultural, historical, racial, and economic differences divide us, but sometimes, the richest gifts are found in friendships with those who are different from us.
On Sunday, Janice Young shared an unusual and personal story of unexpected friendships with the Nuxalk First Nation in Bella Coola.
Her story began 140 years ago when her Norwegian great-grandfather came to BC to collect cultural treasure for the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. The story she heard as a child about an adventurous and courageous explorer and collector began to shift when as an adult she realized that her ancestor had contributed to the harm and loss of culture experienced by First Nations people in Canada after European contact.
Seeking to find a way to create a better relationship with the Nuxalk Nation, Janice, with the help of the Rev. Donna Dinsmore and the United Church congregations in Bella Coola, made a visit in 2017 to Bella Coola with ten members of the Peninsula United Church congregation to listen, learn and speak the truth about her ancestors. That visit opened a path to grace-filled opportunities, more friendships, and witnessing and celebrating the repatriation of a Totem Pole from the Royal BC Museum to the Nuxalk Nation.
Janice is now working with her Norwegian cousin to find a way to help bring the Nuxalk cultural treasures home from Berlin to Bella Coola, hopefully in their lifetimes. Janice has been on a journey to bridge the gap between these treasures and the people they were taken from as part of her own work of restoration. In the process, she has found lost family members and experienced new, unexpected friendships. Her story is a reminder of how God weaves us into healing friendships across lines of difference, bringing restoration.
Having a summer series on friendship was Madison's brainchild, and what a beautiful theme it has proven to be. He suggested one subtheme be the emotional scripts of "white, self-sufficient masculinity" that get in the way of deep friendship. One of those scripts is: “Don’t be vulnerable. Be self-sufficient and independent.” Markku Kostamo was our chosen storyteller for this theme, and he shared this past Sunday. Weaving together imagery of Jonah in the belly of the whale and the voyage of St. Brendan, Markku talked about how his own journey of descent, uncomfortable as it is, was also necessary for his healing. In the deep, he faced challenges, found companionship, experience moments of divine consolation, and found himself renewed. The descent into darkness is not something we have to do alone. Companioned in our vulnerability by the friendship of God, creation, people who meet us there, and people who love us there, the deep becomes the necessary path to spiritual rebirth and authenticity.
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In today's meditation Brent Unrau encourages us to think about all the things we value about friendship. What if we get to develop a relationship with the Bible's narrative passages—especially the gospel stories—that's a kind of a friendship? Is there a way to make peace and find friendship with those stories and find yourself included? What if we get to explore the heart of God through these stories?
Using imagination and prayer is a way of heightening our sense of awareness and emotional identification in our prayer experience. It has been a normal part of Christian spirituality through the centuries, but it was brought into prominence by St. Ignatius of Loyola in his famous book of spiritual guidance The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius and through his follower St. Francis de Sales’ book Introduction to the Devout Life.
Praying with our imagination suits the character of the scriptural stories. Stories are not abstract, conceptual discussions. Any good storyteller will draw the listeners into identifying with the story through the use of contextual detail and dialogue. And the Bible just happens to be full of stories!
May we place the resurrected life of Jesus at the centre of our attention. May we become a fresh expression of the resurrected life force of the welcoming Christ.
Frederick Buechner said: "Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing." Losses shape us and humble us, and may break us, but they don't define us. We are more than the sum of our successes and failures to be who we want to be! Each day we plant ourselves in the flow of divine Love —which is what really defines us—and be part of that giving and receiving. What did that mean for Peter?
What it would be like to wonder what might be waiting — beyond the sorrows we witness, beyond the sadnesses you carry in your heart? Even if you don’t want to run to the tomb yet, maybe you can make some space for wonder, a tiny green sprig growing amidst the stones and sorrow of your heart.
This Lent we've been on a long journey with Peter — observing his journey of faith, and our own — we've been wandering, we've been wondering, but not today! Today, we are walking with purpose. Today, we are waving branches in the air, we are singing and we are celebrating the way God was on the move through Jesus, and the way God is on the move in our midst, now.
When the crowds saw Jesus coming towards Jerusalem, the people were exuberant, cheering him on joyfully as he approached the city. Enthusiasm is a powerful force which ignites our spirits and infuses our actions. How is Jesus on the move among us? Could our exuberance be a sign of his presence?
Peter seems to be someone who lives under the groaning weight of high standards. Being right, doing what is right, and naming what is right seems to matter a great deal to him. In this passage, he approaches Jesus, asking for how to do forgiveness right. Curious about how the conversation unfolding with Jesus? Come have a listen.
Like Peter, we feel angry and scared when what we expect doesn’t come to pass. When certainty gives way to disappointment, we feel disoriented. Jesus invites us to loosen our grip and open ourselves to his love, which is with us in the mystery, complexity, and pain. Jesus’s love, assuring us that after our long sorrow, there will be liberation.
Jesus says to the disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" Peter responds, “You are the Messiah.”
These words aren’t an intellectual assertion, but a clear articulation of Peter’s deeply personal, deeply experiential knowing of Christ: This is what I know to be true about you, because I have experienced you to be this—you are the Messiah.”
This post launches Southpoint's Lenten series "Not All Who Wander Are Lost", incorporating material from A Sanctified Art.
The theme, at its heart, is that at the deepest level of our life, our journeys—no matter how they twist or turn—are held safely within the labyrinth of God’s love. Be open, keep walking, surrender your feet to the next step, trusting the path will lead you home. You are held by the labyrinth as you wander! In today's episode we join Peter as he encounters Jesus and begins to wander.
Jesus has a vision for his Father's house. He has a renovation in mind. He wants to take down walls that keep people out. He wants to replace the architecture of legalism and make room for an abundant feast of grace. He is going to need other people to help him bring about this vision. (Even Jesus isn't expected to do it alone.) Who does he choose for his team?
Jesus holds a vision of who we are that is bigger, richer, deeper and kinder than the limiting beliefs we have of ourselves. When we are ready, Jesus calls us to step out and come wandering with him, so we too can participate in the feast of grace.
The partnership between Elijah and Elisha reminds us of the power and the importance of companionship, and of the way God longs for us to companion each other. We can do hard things, together. Our theme for Epiphany is that God Calls Us, and we’ll wrap up here with "God Doesn’t Call Us to Go it Alone".
Diving into words of hope and comfort — God’s promise of restoration from Isaiah 40:21-31, written for those exiled to Babylon—Anne unpacks the prophet’s call to hope in God.
This God, who spread the heavens like a big tent, providing a home for all, is vast, creative, and caring; a God of incomparably great agency who comes intimately close and with profound commitment to those who are weary.
This is God, who remembers the weak, who is ‘with and for’ them, particularly those who are in exile. God who will give strength and resiliency to those who need to make the journey from oppression to a place of greater spaciousness and wholeness, a place where they can rebuild their lives.
Which exiles, tiny in the presence of Babylon, come to your mind? Our LGBTQ+ siblings and their allies? People of colour whose stories and experiences are so often erased in white spaces? Folk struggling with mental or physical illness? Those experiencing the dissolution of a marriage, or close relational ties? Those suffering in zones of conflict or fleeing as refugees?“
Do you not know? Have you not heard?”
We have felt the radical embrace of the expansive love of Jesus, a Jesus who is spacious and inclusive, a Jesus who companions all of us on our long journeys towards restoration.
This season of Epiphany we look for and celebrate the ways God’s light is being manifest in our midst. When will the manifestation of God come to us this year? Where will this lead us? What will we be called to hear—or to bear? What will we be invited into?
Some themes in the Bible are so threaded through everything that we almost miss them. One of these fundamental, basic themes of the Old and New Testament is that God is a self-revealing God. God communicates. The Bible assumes that God is a god of self-revelation, a god of self-disclosure, the God of revelation. The God of revelation: that's what Epiphany is!
If you look at all the ways God communicates, you notice that God is quite creative about it. God speaks through dreams and visions, angels and animals, creation and prayer, Jesus, written words, the Holy Spirit, and scriptures and people.
Today, we lean into this idea of God as one who communicates: "I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites, and I will put my words in their mouth.” (Deut 18, from today’s lectionary reading). Wouldn’t it be comforting to think that God, who is with us, and for us, might put words in each other’s mouth to encourage us?
If God is one who communicates, then it might behoove us to lean into listening! Today, we are practising listening. What do you hear?
“We are God’s beloved”. This is our deepest identity. But this is only the beginning of the story. God takes this vast expansive love, as broad as the midday sun, and narrows it into a beam of light, shining within a human life in uniquely personal ways. Our awakening to that light is the next bit of the story.
In 1 Samuel 3:1-10, Samuel is waking up slowly to the presence of God calling him, singularly and personally, by name. At first, Samuel assumes the voice belongs to Eli, the priest who has raised him since he was brought to the temple by his mother, Hannah. After a few times, Eli suggests an alternate possibility: the voice MIGHT be God. Even though no one had heard the voice of God or received a vision from God for a long long time, Eli was open to the possibility that this MIGHT be of God.
So, Eli gives Samuel this beautiful piece of advice. He suggests that Samuel be open to possibility too. In other words, be open to the possibility that this thing happening in your life might just be of God.
Then he suggests that Samuel get curious. If he hears the voice again, says, “Speak Lord. Speak. I am listening.” He suggests that Samuel simply cultivates space to listen, to see if indeed God might have something to say.
The revelation of God and our awareness and response to this revelation is a relational dynamic that ebbs and flows throughout the course of our life. When we gather on Sunday, we are making room for one another on this ever evolving journey. What might God be doing among us? What might God be doing in each other, even if it looks differently?
Instead of dying, Jonah is rescued. The whale isn’t God’s judgement, it’s God’s mercy (kind of an uncomfortable mercy!) The mercy of God, once again, triumphing over judgement… Now, Jonah, having been shown mercy, is feeling a lot of internal discomfort: he’d rather die than live with a God who forgives his enemies…
Have you ever felt seen, known, and celebrated by someone? Not for what you do, but just for who you are? Have you ever felt that kind of delight for another person, not because of what they do for you, but simply for who they are? What would it feel like to know that God sees you that way? To hear God say:
“You are my beloved. I love you, not because of what you do for me. Not because of how you serve me. Or how you fill my needs. Or how you serve others. Or how you fill their needs. You could walk out of this church and never return. You could walk away from all you do for me. And you would still be My Delight."
How Does a Weary World Rejoice?
“We allow ourselves to be amazed.”
It’s hard to describe awe. It's expansive. Something vast, yet near. Awe moves us. Softens our guard. For a moment, we forget about ourselves, lost in the moment.
Dr. Keltner is a professor at Berkeley who has studied awe and found it calms our nervous system, activating our vagal nerve. Our heart beat slows, our breathing deepens, and oxytocin is released, making trust and bonding easier. It even settles the part of our brain involved in how we perceive ourselves—we become less preoccupied with ourselves and have less negative self-talk. Awe gets us out of our heads.
I wonder if we aren't curating awe in this season? We put lights on our houses and trees, choose presents for each other, wrap them and tuck them under the tree, light candles, put on Christmas music, and enjoy lovely food—hoping that, if even for a moment, those we love will feel that fleeting, expansive sense of wellbeing.
At Christmas time, in a culture saturated by stimulus, the “awe” offerings are getting bigger, noisier, and brighter. Our economic systems grow rich by attaching awe to consumption, particularly the consumption of the spectacular. And we do find awe in the spectacular—the Nutcracker ballet, a forest light up with lights, a mountain covered with fresh powder.
It's comforting to know that Dr. Keltner also found awe amongst the prisoners of San Quentin State Prison. They told him they too experienced awe—in the light, in the air, in reading and spiritual practices.
Awe is found in the spectacular AND in the mundane. And today's passage, Luke 1:57-66, gives us even more information on awe. This week, I looked at this passage from this lens of awe, approaching it with attentiveness and curiosity, to see what it had to teach me about awe. Here is a summary of what I found.
—Anne
JOY
"When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leapt in her womb..."
In this moment of connection between Mary and Elizabeth, this deeply embodied, energetic exchange passed between them. Something moved between them, woman to woman, child to child. That thing was so palpable that John, the baby, leapt within Elizabeth. Standing together on that threshold of Elizabeth’s house, feeling that energetic flow of Spirit connection, they felt joy.
What if joy is that energetic flow within connections, like the electrical current that connects two filaments in a lightbulb? What if joy is an energy that can flow within even those tiny, seemingly insignificant, fleeting connections that happen everyday? What if these little eddies of energetic joy that moves through us, all intertwined and entangled into life, is the gift of the Spirit to us?
And what if this current of joy, which can contain elements of sorrow too, is flickering whether we are actively aware of it or not, keeping us warm, like the way a low flame on a burner warms a pot of soup.
Later, over meals with friends and family, Elizabeth and Mary would recount this fleeting moment—how Elizabeth felt the baby kick, and knew this baby was holy. Somewhere along the way, Luke heard this story, and decided to include it in his gospel. He takes it out of the discard pile of women’s embodied stories and gives it a place of honour, right there at the beginning of his narrative about Jesus. And that brings me joy, too:)
This Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, is also the very first Sunday of a new liturgical church year. Why does the church year begin here? Because a spirituality that pretends the darkness doesn’t exist is no good to anyone.
Seeds remind us of organic growth patterns. They are small, full of potential and can flourish when placed in the right environment. As we drink from the well and take our place at the table, the Holy Spirit works in us. The soil of our heart becomes softer, the stones are removed, bitter roots are pulled. As the soil is prepared, the seeds of the kingdom within us begin to grow.
The seed symbolizes the radical fertility of the Spirit. At Southpoint, growth isn't about numbers or programs but about bearing the fruit of the kingdom in our lives. We desire inner fruitfulness—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control. The Spirit nurtures these fruits within us as we realign ourselves back to Jesus' heart. We desire outward fruitfulness - the Kingdom coming through our actions as we realign our lives back to God's desire for justice, mercy, restoration. We desire this inward and outward growth for ourselves and for our children.
At Southpoint, we are responsible for cultivating a healthy environment for these seeds to grow. We seek to treasure the seeds within us. We watch for what the Spirit is growing in us. We look for new opportunities. We wait for leaders to emerge. We trust the Spirit to provide what we need for each stage of growth. We return regularly to the well of Christ's presence to water the seed. We do this as an intergenerational community on Sunday mornings—reading scriptures, praying, and sharing—making special intention to nurture the seeds growing within our children. We do this as a leadership team once a month, and in various circles of leadership, including congregational meetings, throughout the year.
Loving God, grant us a continually renewing experience of your love, acceptance and presence; grant us a core experience of being caught up in your net of love and mercy.
Grant us humility, hope, and grace that by actions of wisdom, courage and justice we might mend and extend those connections that are healing and humanizing and reconciling.
Inspire among us the prophetic vision of a deep, abiding, and all-embracing shalom. As Jesus prayed, may we be one as you are one.
It is this image of the Table that became the portal through which we became an openly welcoming and affirming church. In the early days, it was our weekly practice of communion that brought clarity to the conversation around membership. Gay and straight, we love Jesus and want to follow him. One day, we will sit around the banquet feast of heaven together. So, why would we not be that beloved community at this banquet table here on Earth?
Scott Simpson, founding pastor of Southpoint, and his team crafted this expression of the Table, which has carried us: “Trapeza is Greek for table. In the Christian writings, it often stands for the whole meal and is associated closely with the act of hospitality. The Table is a foundational ministry image at Southpoint. We gather midweek around a shared meal. We welcome people to our table with coffee and refreshments when they enter our gathering on Sunday mornings… just as Jesus welcomes us to his table. We practice hospitality with our neighbours, both giving and receiving. We are prayerfully seeking ways to extend our table to include the stranger, the poor and the forgotten of our society.”
Our first core image is the Well. Join Anne as she expresses "why the well?" and "why the well?" in a week like these ones, in which images of devastation sear our hearts.
In the work artist Joy Banks created for us, she has given us a vision of God, a vision of what community in God looks like, and even a vision of who we are as a church community. We pray that the Spirit will use it to refresh our prophetic imagination about who we are and who God is calling us to be. The actions that we are being invited to take in our four images are very simple: coming to a well to satisfy our thirst, making time to gather around a table, planting and watering little seeds, labouring together to repair our nets. They are not dramatic actions: they are small, they are homely. But we see in Joy's images that something really good, and really beautiful, and whole, is coming into being throught thse small actions. Something is being cultivated, and that something looks an awful lot like kingdom, like kinship. We are made for this. And at the heart of this is Christ restoring us back to that kinship of the kingdom. Jesus stands in our midst with arms outstretched, stepping towards us, welcoming us, bidding us to come. "You are wanted, you are beloved, you are part of God's family."
The history of a church is difficult to record in a few lines. We would have to tell you about the time when our children were born, or when people joined our community, or when others left. We would have to tell the stories of challenge, frustration, breakthrough, joy and sorrow. The true history of a church is found in the collected stories of the people, and the story of a collected people.
Southpoint has sometimes thought of itself as an odd little church, flying under the radar. There is ease in being small and hidden. The parables of Jesus remind us however that the kingdom comes—and becomes—something quite substantial, both in size and in substance, through small things such as seeds and yeasts and churches. May the Spirit broaden our imagination for the kind of spacious and substantial growth that unfolds as we continue to devote ourselves to small things.
Seeing Ourselves Freshly through Our Four Core Images
Rather than crafting a doctrinal statement for Southpoint when its roots were planted almost twenty years ago, Scott Simpson, Southpoint’s founding pastor, and his leadership team chose four core images to communicate the heart of our community: a Well, a Table, a Seed and a Net.
Anne Baxter Smith has leaned into these images over the past 12 years as our pastor, weaving them into all aspects of our life together at Southpoint.
We hold them collectively as a church and as we hold them, they hold our vision. They have widened our theological imagination. They help us to freshly sense our longings. They help us remember who we want to be and what we want to do. The provide common encouragement and motivate us to think creatively.
They have given us the courage to make radical changes.
In this series we are reflecting together on our four core images as reimagined by artist Joy Banks of Vancouver, BC, from whom we commissioned new pieces. How will what Joy sees in our community be enfleshed in her art? Today, we look at what lies at the heart of Joy's work: the image of The Welcoming Christ.
** https://joybanks.ca/
A brief meditation from our All In service wrapping up our Season of Creation with a discussion of God's regenerative agency in Creation.
Anne suggests that maybe groaning is having its day.
Groans are powerful. Groans keep us from making peace with things that have no peace.
In Romans 8, Creation, every microscopic part of it, is groaning. Humans are groaning. God's Spirit is groaning—an inexpressible groan, too deep for words.
When we groan, our bodies and breath take over. Our bodies show us what is becoming intolerable, what is violating our deep values and convictions. A groan is prophetic. A groan dares to call out what must no longer be.
Last week, a super storm dropped an unprecedented amount of rain—a year’s worth—in a single day near Derna, Libya. Both dams in the city burst, washing twenty percent of the town into the sea. Folk acquainted with war, dislocation, and hunger now face the grief of thousands missing. It feels like the whole earth is groaning these days.
Despite all this, creation continues to hope. From Romans 8: “For the creation is waiting in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.”
Could it truly be, after all we’ve done, that creation has not given up on us? That it sees potential in us? Is waiting for us, the collective children of God, to step up and become kin? Could it truly be that we are the ones for whom the earth waits? Waiting for us to become our true selves?
The groans are the deep work of the Spirit, birthing a new way of being. Through our collective groaning, too deep for words, something is being liberated—being born. It is time.
This is the season of creation. All over the world those who follow Jesus are figuring out how to be better kin to creation. Young people are protesting in London. Farmers are planting trees in Central America. Nuns are holding prayer vigils. Church leaders are signing treaties. The river is building strength, building momentum.
We’ve been poking around in our Judeo-Christian Genesis origin stories these weeks, and Anne has found herself enamoured with a character in these stories, Adamah: earth, dirt, land, soil. In these origin stories, Adamah is often mentioned. Humans and Adamah are so interconnected—Adamah is the source of human form, abundance and provision for Adam. But Adamah is also cursed, unable to provide, negatively affected, by Adam and Cain's rash actions. “What have you done?” cried out God.
She was reminded of the words attributed to Chief Seattle: “Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.”
Mark Wallace, professor of religion at Swarthmore University, acknowledges that when Christianity focuses on the vertical alone (a God "up there" saving individuals to a life "up there”) and fails to recognize kinship here and now—the sacred presence of God in all life and between all life—we unwittingly at best, knowingly at worst, have encouraged the exploitation of nature. However, in his book, he builds a renewed theological scaffolding, showing how the Biblical witness reveals the world as “the enfleshment of sacred power”, and “God enfleshed in all life forms", even Adamah. “The earth is not dumb matter, an inanimate object with no capacity of feeling and sentiment, but a spirited and vulnerable living being who experiences the terrible and catastrophic loss”.
What is it like to sit with this possibility, that the very ground under our feet, the soil, is infused with the divine, and senses and responds to our presence? That the senseless killing in the world—the wars, the genocides, the bombs—have caused the land itself to suffer? What is it like to sit with the possibility that the very ground under our feet can also sense the generosity of our love and care, and is responsive to our overtures of kinship?
** When God was a Bird – Christianity, Animism and the Re-Enchantment of the Word by Mark Wallace
This Sunday Anne takes on the dominant—and toxic—interpretation of the story of Adam's creation in Genesis 2. She discusses how it, in fact, invites us to see that God’s design was for us to be part of the net of kinship, not the exercise of human dominion.
Further, the humans and the trees are drawn from the ground by God for each other. There is an implied relational connection between the forest garden and the first human, a mutuality of care and kinship. God gave the forest garden, with its abundance of trees, to the human as home. God then gave the human to the forest garden to tend and care for it.
How people treated the trees was interconnected with the way they treated God. Would they embody the wisdom of the Creator and respect the unique purpose of the tree, or would they treat it as a commodity to fulfill their own curiosity and pleasure?
We share the same ground of being with the rest of creation. We are of the earth. We are of God.
The path of domination is spiritually bankrupt. The pathway forward is mutuality of care and kinship.
Breathe in: "Be"... Breathe out: "Held."
Interviewed by Brent Unrau, Jess shares what she experienced during her journey with cancer, when, prompted by a rich inner vision, she reached out for help, breaking past her assumptions about what the response of others would be in her time of vulnerability.
Our pastor, Anne Baxter Smith, introduces and finds out a bit more about Madison Friesen. We are so excited to welcome Madison as our Community Life Coordinator. This is a get-to-know-you exchange between Anne and Madison so you can get to know him, too. : )
"Jesus wept.” Guest speaker Leah Kostamo imagines it felt "“achey, but good”. It was evidence of his wholeness, of his congruency — that he not only preached love but he felt love, and he felt the commensurate sadness in the face of loss. And so, he wept. (Maybe a lot.)
Well worth a listen, this episode eases us into the goodness, and discomfort, of our emotions, and how they function in our refreshment.
"Once you catch the scent of Joy, it's like everything else falls out from your attention." In the book of Hebrews 12 the writer says of Jesus that "for the joy set before him", Jesus endured the cross, and the shame of the cross. He was moving towards joy... maybe Joy is the very thing that leads us on the path of life — connected not only to our own refreshment but to the gift of who we are, how we are made, and what we have to offer the world.
"Consider how the wildflowers grow: they do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon, in all his splendour, was dressed like one of these... " —Luke 12
This summer our theme is Refresh. We’ve talked about rest, we’ve talked about play. Today we explore turning to regard the present with openness and curiosity, even in the hard things. This one, this podcast, has it all: the sublime and the ridiculous. Imagine this: God is like a marshmallow. Or, imagine this: there’s a burning bush—on fire, not consumed—and a voice, and an aging man alone in the desert, drawn aside by a little bit of wonder. This is where Anne takes us today. At this moment, in this place, as in all moments and all places, God IS. Yahweh, “I am”. Therefore, this moment and this place and all moments and all places—even in the burning, even in the suffering—are holy, because God is within it. So life itself is the burning bush and our survival is a miracle, and the holiness is that, after all you have been through, you are HERE: your life a burning bush, your life holy ground. What if we took off our shoes and sat with that for a while?
Our summer offering at Southpoint is a response of compassion to what we've been through. Instead of focusing on something you should do, our summer series reminds you that you are worthy of care, and that God has woven into everything an abundance which can resource us when we are depleted. Anne speaks of children as the pied pipers who can lead us back to this abundance, if we are willing to follow them. This week she speaks with Colin and David about their profound commitment to dive into play with their daughter, as a response of compassion to joining her in her child's world, instead of expecting her to join them in their adult world.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” — Matthew 11: 28-30
Jesus reveals for us more clearly than anyone or anything else who God is. “Come to me. I will give you rest.” Rest is a gift of God, an expression of God’s loving kindness and compassion towards us.
To launch our summer series, "Refresh", Brent Unrau delves into the gift of becoming like child. Starting with Mark 10:13-16, Brent weaves in reflections from being a grandparent and draws upon The Hummingbird, a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye and an excerpt from Erling Kagge's Walking. One Step at a Time. And, in case you miss it, he also manages an allusion to running shoes, from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.
“The world is big and I want to have a look at it before it gets dark.”
—John Muir
Humans tend to cling to their customs — their ways of being and believing and thinking. When we come up against “difference” — people or ideas offering a fresh voice, or a fresh take on things — how do we handle our encounter with that which risks influencing our beliefs and behaviour?
Guest speaker Pastor Lee Kosa of Sanctuary Church (Delta, BC) examines belief, belonging and mutual transformation, drawing on Acts 17:22-31 to explore what Spirit-inspired encounter with fresh voices looks like for Jesus-followers.
Join us today as Rev David Morrison continues our Easter Season theme "Fresh". (The sound quality is at times a little muddy, so you may like to increase the volume. Apologies!)
Love won’t stay hidden in abstraction. One way or another, love will show up in the particularities of time, space, words, and deeds.
In Jesus, love showed up so concretely and with such great specificity, that it seems to be his form of art.
When love showed up in Jesus, something broke open, something fresh emerged. That breaking open and fresh emergence through the power of love was the coming of the kingdom, which offered everyone a new way of being. A new way of seeing. A new way of acting. An alternative reality to the ways of Empire, with its protective social hierarchy, and the ways of Religion, with its protective spiritual hierarchy.
After Jesus died, love showed up among the early disciples, too. We see this in Acts 6. Violence was the greatest coercive power known to humankind. With violence you could build an empire, snuff out your enemies, subdue social unrest, punish lawbreakers, silence dissident voices, and control people with fear and intimidation. It was into this container of violence, as Stephen was about to be stoned, that love showed up again. Jesus, killed by violence yet very much alive, joined Stephen within the crucible of suffering.
And when love shows up, old patterns break open and new life emerges.
These weeks after Easter, as we head to Pentecost, Pastor Anne invites you to make room for a rewilding of your faith. To allow space for the possibility that the movement of God is beyond your imagination. To allow room for a fresh hope in the endless creative possibility of God who is perpetually birthing new life.
We are made. We are loved. We are kept.
While Peter’s initial hope for the Messiah was falling away, Peter was kept by God, loved by God, and then remade by God. At Pentecost, Peter keeps hold of these profound experiences of suffering and hope, and extends them out to us.
This week we watch Jesus, very intentionally, very knowingly, walk right into a confrontation with the power structures that seek to destroy him. He enters into this confrontation without any kind of defence—no armour, no strategy, no argument; just his presence. His presence is Divine Resistance to these massive strongholds.
He arrives at the city gates and crosses into the ancient city, which is both a symbol of God’s presence and people, and a symbol of Empire, knowing that most likely this confrontation will result in his very violent, very painful death. And still, he goes.
We are witnessing the fruit and fulfillment of Jesus’ wilderness experience. There, in the barren discomfort of the wilderness, he wrestled with temptation. There he chose whom he would worship. It was there that he set aside the empire’s vision of power, success, and popularity, and chose again God’s vision of kinship.
As we transition from Lent to Holy Week, let this be a reminder to us: we must not underestimate the power of the wilderness. Do not underestimate the power that comes to us as we sit within discomfort, leaning into the questions, welcoming the cold and heat and the loneliness and the hunger and the longing until we have clarity on the next step that love asks of us.
The three images of Palm Sunday’s Visio Divina:
(1) Power Play, 2023. Artist: Lisle Gwynn Garrity Link
(2) Guatemala: Procession,1978. Artist: Betty LaDuke Link
(3) Jesus Enters the City / from The Passion of Christ—A Gay Vision, 2014. Artist: Douglas Blanchard Link
Sometimes life feels like the branches of a tree in winter: barren, empty, cold, hopeless. It can feel like things will be that way, forever. But trees teach us to wait a little longer, to watch and see what unexpected things will happen next. Trees are wise teachers. They remind us that new life appears in seemingly barren places. When viewed from the perspective of a tree, hope is the most sensible thing in the universe.
Trees teach us about hope, and so does the Bible. “Can these bones live?” God asked Ezekiel once in a vision.
Can we find hope, and even faith, when we are sitting in a valley of dry bones? When we are lost within a copse of winter trees? When we are grieving over something loved, something lost? Fear can make it hard to hope. What if we are disappointed again? Paired with this question, hope can feel like a dangerous thing. Cynicism can make it hard to hope. What if it’s all a pile of wishful thinking? Paired to this question, hope can feel like a foolish thing.
Yet Ezekiel's dry bones and winter’s barren trees remind us that things are not always as they seem. In the midst of damage, violence, decay, death, and barrenness, might God, the Lord of Life itself, be growing something from within the barrenness that we cannot yet conceive of or imagine?
Today's story, on the surface, is about a blind man healed by Jesus with a bit of mud and spit. But the passage is long, and peppered with questions. It seems as though the questions themselves, as well as theological assumptions and certitudes, blind people to the beauty of the healing. Here we find a second story of blindness within the story of blindness. The transforming question within this text is not "why is there suffering?", or "who sinned?", but "how is the glory of God being manifest in Jesus, in this moment?"
Starting with the woman at the well encountering Jesus (John 4:5-42), we move into a conversation with Scott Chapman, representing Lifewater Canada, and discussing how Southpoint will partner with them to support Stada Kenya. Led by Kenyan women, Stada (Stawisha Dada) recognizes that access to clean water is a women's rights issue.
What are the thresholds of your life? What must you do to keep yourself safe?
Pastor Anne explores that longing for a new way to be human.
Abraham, Nicodemus, Jesus… you.
The weather has brought us a surprising change of plans! With heavy snow in the forecast we will NOT meet together for our Outdoor Church All Out Service : ( But Pastor Anne has prepared a new recording so you can listen and experience the pleasure of this walk near your own home on Sunday morning. Stay safe and enjoy the unseasonally late snow!
Some Southpointers share how their Vision of God has expanded through lived experience, particularly in times of disillusionment and personal challenge.
Guest speaker Angela Henzes asks us: Can you identify with longing to feel safe? With wanting to be seen, known, and loved with perfect love? With longing to be cared for in the exact ways that you need? In this meditation, she suggests that visualizing and experiencing God as Mother may invite you to tender places inside of yourself that need healing. It can expand, ever wider, your view of God, and help you draw closer to the mystery of who God is. It can be a powerful part of your sacred journey with God.
We’re still widening our vision of who God is. Parts 3 & 4 took place in experience-based intergenerational community times. You can read the blog posts on our website to catch up. Back with a meditation this week, Pastor Anne examines how God shows up for those who are oppressed, cast out, hungry, thirsty, poor, on the margins … over and over again.
Why?
What does that mean to you?
Where are the places in which you've had that hint of something beyond yourself—places that made you wake up and whisper, “Maybe God really is here, and I just didn’t know it?”
Makom in Hebrew = place = God as Makom =God in a particular place, and also: God homing and holding all placesso that everywhere we are, we are within God.
In our moments of greatest moral failure, greatest grief, we are "sheltered in place”.
All those exiled parts of us, all those abandoned parts of us, all those longing parts of us—all those are re-homed with God. We are within God just as the whole universe is homed within God. God envelopes all, and every place we are may be God’s chosen place of revelation.
This season, from Epiphany all the way until Lent, our theme is "Under the Sweet Stars, Expanding our Vision of God". And that expansion begins with longing—that same longing that compelled the magi to set out under the stars and set out into the desert...
NB: "Under the sweet stars" is from Thomas Merton's work Hagia Sophia published in Emblems of a Season of Fury (1963).
New Year's day, 2023. Join us as Pastor Anne unpacks Psalm 34, with special emphasis on verse 8.
It’s right there, in the very beginning of the gospel: Kinship. The kingdom is kinship...
Perhaps we can subtitle this one Joseph's "Yes".
"The offering of your life is a beautiful gift to your family tree. You are enough.
"I celebrate the ways you that choose to show up with resolve, with courage, compassion, with love and kindness in the midst of circumstances that are not maybe what you had chosen. I celebrate the way provide refuge. In these moments in your life the holy is getting worked into the world." — Pastor Anne
We have a high and holy invitation to make safe spaces where people can know God's radical, unconditional love. That can become incarnate in our midst and we can be that safe space for each other. We have that same calling to be safe space for our youth, this next generation who are going to be carrying a really heavy load as they inherit a world that has a lot of challenges...
We could think of this meditation as an exploration of Mary's "Yes".
There was the safe, cautious middle way—turning away from the angel and towards the life allotted her by her society as Joseph's wife—or, this strange new way: the heights and depths of saying “yes" to something as absurdly beautiful as bearing the Christ child. It was a “yes" to joy and sorrow: the sweetness of Jesus’ little hand curled around her thumb as a baby, and the outright terror of watching those same hands stretched taut and bloody, pinned to wood.
Maybe you can see this in your own life? The "yes" you have made to the movement of God in your life have brought both beauty and sorrow, joy and terror. Not a happily-ever-after kind of story. Just a love story, with all its complexity.
Like Mary's "yes", what if our personal and intimate "yes" to God has cosmic implications that we may never see, things that will ripple through generations?
Once a month we have an intergenerational worship service in which all the folk at Southpoint stay together for the meditation and activities. We call it being "All In" together. The meditation is often shorter, and is crafted so younger ears understand the context of the talk. This week Advent 2022 begins and Pastor Anne introduces the theme of Advent's four Sundays this year: From Generation to Generation. We're drawing this year on liturgical and art offerings from "A Sanctified Art". This week reflects on the people whose stories—of endurance, of adaptability, of mistakes, of "showing up", of being human—we know now as the lineage of Jesus. There's room for all of our stories in God's story.
Once a month we have an intergenerational worship service in which all the folk at Southpoint stay together for the meditation and activities. We call it being "All In". The meditation is often shorter, and is crafted so younger ears understand the context of the talk. Today's meditation occurs during an All In.
Mirroring the season of Advent in its brevity and focus, the season of Creation is part of the liturgical season Ordinary Time. Caring for all that has been made is in the DNA of The Church at Southpoint. In these four meditations Pastor Anne provides a compelling critical explanation of why we do it.