June 7, 2024
Dear church,
This Sunday we are going to be starting our summer series, entitled “The Good Book: Meeting Our Ancestors in Faith, One Story at a Time.” This series is based on the book, A is for Alabaster by Anna Carter Florence. In this book, Florence picks one Bible story for every letter in the alphabet and she intentionally picks stories that are often overlooked or unknown. Every Sunday this summer, we will pick a different Bible story to read and preach on. Most of them will come from the Hebrew Bible, as those are the stories and characters we don’t typically spend as much time on. Pr. Reed and I are so excited to dig into these stories with you!
Why did we pick this for our summer series? Lots of reasons! Here are some:
We know that there are barriers to picking up and reading the Bible, even amongst people who go to church. It’s large, intimidating, and confusing! Many of us are wary to read it because we carry bruises from our upbringing or simply don’t have enough information for the stories to make any sense. We think this series will help make the Bible more accessible and relatable!
We are excited to explore passages that aren’t included in the Revised Common Lectionary (which means the assigned readings for each Sunday.) The RCL covers a lot of stories and passages in the bible, but it also leaves a lot of stories out!
We are intentionally exploring the stories of the Hebrew Bible because they are often less familiar to many of us, and because of that, it can be easy to jump to conclusions about the content and meaning of these stories (and of Judaism) that are not necessarily fair to the text.
To help us draw connections between these ancient stories of scripture and the lives we are living today.
I’m including here the list and schedule of the stories we are going to cover this month. We’ll publish this each month so you can follow along! If you’d like to pick up the book and read the chapters for each week, or if you want to find the stories in your Bible, this gives you an idea of what to look for!
June 9 – Luke 2 (Kickoff to Summer Series)
June 16 – Genesis 50 (J is for Joseph)
June 23 – Genesis 32 (I is for Israel)
June 30 – Genesis 19 (S is for Salt)
Let’s have some fun with this! See you in church!
Pr. Sarah
Every Friday, we send an email to the congregation and any others who would like to learn more about the Grace community. The last four Friday emails are posted below.