We are going to meet up at the Newland casa at 5:00 pm on the 17th. Andrew and Bryany have a gas grill, so we can continue our tradition of outdoor cooking then, and it looks like Fajitas are the fare!

Here’s a map to help get you there:

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As of today, it looks like we will discuss the ending of Love Wins and/or how to be a loving community while relying on so much technological communication to keep us in one anothers’ lives. Check out our Facebook group for more information.

See you Sunday!

There is evidently nothing we Mosaic–ites enjoy more than a Sunday evening at the park. And if you think there was a second of theology discussed, you are terribly, terribly mistaken. A good time was had by all!

At times, the weekly discussion at Mosaic is almost too cerebral, delving deeper and deeper into relatively complex theological questions. Other times, like last Sunday evening, the time is completely used for fellowship and play. I don’t know which use of time best characterizes our little church, but I think it is both. The idea that we can live our lives alongside one another, sharing good and bad, questioning and playing, is at the core of who we are.

Colossians 2: 8-15

⁸See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.⁹For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, ¹⁰and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority. ¹¹In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, ¹²having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.

¹³When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, ¹⁴having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

This is the scripture we read through this week. Commentary to follow.

At last Sunday’s gathering, we looked closely at Colossians 1:15-20. These verses are some of Paul’s most poetic, and feature his equation of Jesus with God the father before time. The translation below is from the Message:

15-18 We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body.

18-20 He was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the end. From beginning to end he’s there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.