Beloved... you are enough

"And a voice came from the heavens, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

Mark 1:11

You are my beloved!  Let it speak to you.  You are not alone.  Through the gift of baptism you are enough!  

With endings there are new beginnings.  When you stand where the land meets the water and take that step into the water, you know you can't step in the same water twice.  As it flows, so does life.  And while it might not become easier, it can become truer by taking the step.  It may be muddied - but it will be magnificent.

Because you are beloved.  You are enough.  Take the next step.

Happy Thanksgiving! Let Appreciation Ripple into your Everyday Life

If we postpone Thanksgiving until Monday, we risk turning it into little more than a calendar entry, rather than the heart-changing occasion it could be.

Relatives will pour in: grown children pulling into their parents’ driveway, university students trying to decide whether to shave off their mustaches to avoid teasing, and new in‑laws wondering if they’ve wandered into an English literature seminar instead of the calculus course they studied for. Conversation will be a minefield - warnings from the front seat (“Don’t bring up you‑know‑what around Grandpa and Grandma”), bargaining in the back (“Try the green stuff and we’ll swing by McDonald’s”), and a few half‑truths and inside jokes tossed like confetti (“We know not to let Linda carve the turkey—ha!”). The poor new son‑in‑law smiles politely, clueless.

Even kitchens change for the occasion: houses that subsisted on ham sandwiches and microwave dinners suddenly produce elaborate meals,  Still, all this effort doesn’t guarantee that Thanksgiving actually happens. Many people will be relieved to have food and family, but relief is not the same as gratitude. It is easier to rehearse what we want next than to savour what we have already been given. For many of us, accumulation has not bred appreciation.

Henri Nouwen put it plainly in a letter to his young, prosperous nephew: greater wealth hasn’t made people friendlier or more communal. Instead, success can isolate - reducing informal gatherings and the simple pleasures of being together, and making it harder to sing, pray, and celebrate in a spirit of true thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving should not be confined to one day on the calendar. It is an invitation to shape a life of gratitude - starting now. Make the shift from a holiday of habits to a life marked by thankfulness: listen more deeply at the table, name the gifts you often overlook, and let appreciation ripple into how you live every day.

See you in church,
Pastor Tuula

Zero-sum thinking: impoverishing in our spiritual lives

Zero-sum thinking — the belief that someone’s gain must come at someone else’s expense — is a poor philosophy for life, politics, or faith. It turns relationships into scorecards and turns ordinary choices into battles of power and loss. There is nothing beautiful in imagining that my joy requires another’s sorrow, or that my children’s success depends on other children’s failure. Love, gratitude, and the flourishing of a community are not measured by who falls behind so that others can surge ahead.

That same false logic corrodes our public life. When every policy, budget, or election is treated as a winner-take-all contest, the polity breaks down. Each side retreats into rigid defense, suspicious that any gain for the other side must be their loss. Even the language of “full” nations or “closed” communities can be used to suggest that compassion necessarily deprives those already here — as if hospitality, support, and welcome are a finite supply. But societies thrive when we remember that humane policy and common purpose enlarge the common good rather than diminish it.

Zero-sum thinking is especially impoverishing in our spiritual lives. Some Christians wonder whether heaven’s joy would be diminished if God were to save all people. That suspicion imagines God’s love as scarce, as though the divine table could run out. The Gospel tells a different story. When the rich young man walks away burdened by the cost of following Jesus, the disciples voice their fear too: “We have left everything to follow you; what then will we have?” Jesus answers not in scarcity but in abundance: you will receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life. God’s economy is not subtraction; it is multiplication.

We are invited into a different practice: to give without counting losses, to rejoice when others are blessed, to build communities where generosity creates more life, not less. Gratitude expands us; service enlarges us; faith reorients us away from fear and toward trust. Dignity does not depend on another’s diminishment; politics should aim for the flourishing of all and our worship declare that God’s love is inexhaustible. In doing so we discover the comforting truth at the heart of the Gospel: abundance, not scarcity, is God’s promise. May we live and love in that promise.

See you in church,
Pastor Tuula

Living in Hope

I was in a meeting this week when one person - soft-spoken but convinced - named the latest political trend and painted it in dark colours. The conversation, which had begun with a dozen small, ordinary voices, shifted. Words tightened. A gray weight settled over the room. Before long, the air tasted of worry: lists of grievances, quick judgments, the kind of talk that pulls people into the same small, anxious orbit. Then someone asked about the weather, and it broke the spell. The moment reminded me how easily despair can swell - and how easily it can be softened when we choose otherwise.

There is another way to live in anxious, divided times: we can live with hope. 

At St. Philip’s, that’s not just a slogan. It’s the ground we stand on and the story we intend to tell. To be for something - to say yes to generosity, to healing, to neighbourliness - feels far more faithful and fruitful than standing forever against the things that frighten us.

One of the great gifts God gives us is freedom of choice. Those choices shape who we become, and they shape who we become together. A congregation that chooses hope makes a different kind of sound in the world: not naive, not indifferent to hardship, but steady, creative, and engaged.

Negativity rarely builds anything worth keeping. Complaints and cynicism provide cover - an easy retreat where it feels safe to judge instead of to act. Poet Christian Wiman says, “cynicism is a small refuge of superiority, a way to avoid responsibility”. 

Apostle Paul reminds us of another truth: “In [Jesus Christ] every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes’” (2 Cor. 1:20). That “Yes” is the kernel of hope - the force that creates, repairs, and makes a future.

Hope is not pretending everything is fine. It is choosing to walk toward the future we want and to help build it with the people around us. At St. Philip’s, we want to do that with you.

Please join us for a Lunch and Learn on September 28 after worship to hear how we plan to build a hopeful future and how you can be part of it. Your presence and support help keep our community a place that says “Yes” to life, to love, and to what’s possible. 

Thank you for walking toward that future with us.

What's in a name?

Your name may be your most important possession. As a Christian, I believe my baptism is even more critical to my identity than my name. But we never baptize anonymously. We baptize individual human beings with real names.

When my siblings and I were children, our mother used to mark our coats by sewing little name tapes into the collar, each hand-stitched with our full names. I doubt she went to this effort just to ensure the return of the coats if they were lost. My guess is that she wanted us to know, every time we put the coat on, that we were precious in her sight. Sewing our name into the collar by hand meant her love went with us wherever we went.

Rabbi Shai Held offers a fascinating interpretation of the Tower of Babel narrative. According to him, God dispersed the people because they were content to speak the same language and use the same words. They were not scattered because of their crazy ambition to undertake a tower project. It was because they had ignored their God-given uniqueness and lost their names in the process.

Plenty of 19th-century American slave stories remind us of people who sought to escape not only physical bondage but also the bondage of anonymity. “My name was Isabella,” Sojouner Truth said. “But when I left the house of bondage . . . I wasn’t goin’ to keep nothin’ of Egypt on me, an’ so I went to the Lord an’ asked Him to give me a new name. And the Lord gave me Sojourner, because I was to travel up an’ down the land, showing the people their sins, an’ bein’ a sign unto them. Afterwards I told the Lord I wanted another name, ’cause everybody else had two names; and the Lord gave me Truth.”

Each of us is blessed with our own name and corresponding significance. Faith calls us not only to celebrate the uniqueness of our own lives but also to delight in the diversity and value of all whom we meet.

See you in church!
Pastor Tuula