Liz Cooledge Jenkins

Tag: community

  • Super chill book review: Bittersweet (Susan Cain)

    I tore through Susan Cain’s new book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Can Make Us Whole (Crown 2022) pretty quickly. And I may have done so while referring to it as “my emo book” for short.  “Delightful” may seem an odd word for a book that’s all about being sad, but I really did find…

  • Switch those seats (reflections on Luke 14:1,7-14)

    On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely. When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do…

  • The unbound woman (reflections on Luke 13:10-17)

    Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set…

  • Super chill book review: Sand Talk (Tyson Yunkaporta)

    I read Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperOne, 2020) a couple months ago in the midst of a several-days-long cat crisis. (Kitty is doing well now, thank you). So I may have been a bit distracted. So maybe take everything I say with an extra large grain of salt.…

  • The body of Christ as spiritual fellowship

    This is sermon part 3 of 3! In it I offer some thoughts on spiritual fellowship. (Here are the first two parts, on shelter and nurture.) There are also a few brief general reflections at the end.  __ I don’t know if the words “spiritual fellowship” are words that most of us say on a…

  • The body of Christ as nurture

    This is part 2 of a sermon split into 3 parts. (The first one is here if you missed it.) The scripture passage is 1 Corinthians 12:12-31, and the theme is “shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the people of God.” This is the part reflecting on nurture: I think nurture, like shelter, can also be kind of a weird…

  • The body of Christ as shelter

    Two Sundays ago I got to preach at my church, Lake B, for the first time in person. The video is here if you’re interested in watching rather than reading it. I was struck by how different it is to preach in person as opposed to recording a sermon online. Among a supportive community, it’s…

  • Lament Wall Prayer

    At the beginning of Lent, a team of people from my church put up an amazing “Lament Wall” in the courtyard. People were invited to write down prayers and laments on pieces of paper and stick them in the cracks of the wall. Prayers written during church services were stuck in there, joined later by…

  • A prayer for 2022

    I wrote this new year prayer for my church community and thought I’d share it with you all as well. (Hopefully six days in isn’t too late to still feel like it’s a very very new year.) I also have two links to offer. The first is a piece on Trumpism and some of Jesus’…

  • Why do you worry?

    And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin… -Jesus (Matthew 6:28, NRSV) Here’s another angle on Jesus’ words about worry: What if Jesus’ question why do you worry? isn’t a purely rhetorical question? What if it’s an actual invitation to ask ourselves:…