Putting flowers in church are one way to join in the celebration of New Life on Easter. For Easter, extra flowers will be put on the main altar and the peace chapel altar. We also will put Easter lilies and other spring flowers around the baptismal font. What a change this will be from the spare greens we've been using during Lent! 

You can donate flowers in memory or in honor of someone. Suggested donations for spring flowers are $12 and for the altar flowers is $25 to $50. However, any donation is welcome.

A long standing tradition will be continued on Friday, April 3rd as Grace Church will again host the COLLEGE HILL COMMUNITY GOOD FRIDAY SERVICE at 12 Noon.

The whole community will meet to reflect on the meaning the crucifixion of Jesus as we prepare ourselves for Easter.

The service is sponsored by the College Hill Ministerium--a group of ministers from many of the College Hill churches.  The theme of the service is the "Seven last words of Christ," and will feature seven pastors from seven different churches.  Each pastor will preach on one of the words of Jesus.

Please join for the service which always proves to be a moving experience for all who are present. The service is expected to last about two hours.

Thanks to Roger Perna for organizing this important worship experience.

Dear Lord, Grace church has been your Presence on the Hill for almost 150 years.  Let us remember the past but also give us guidance to lay the groundwork for the next 150 years.  Amen.

Your editor shared the following with several people at Grace and got such a positive response that he's sharing it here as well.  The bottom line:  "We all need to know that God does not love us because we are good; God loves us because God is good. Nothing humans can do will ever decrease or increase God's eternal eagerness to love."

The common Christian reading of the Bible is that Jesus "died for our sins"--either to pay a debt to the devil (common in the first millennium) or to pay a debt to God the Father (proposed by Anselm of Canterbury, 1033-1109). Anselm's infamous Cur Deus Homo has been called "the most unfortunately successful piece of theology ever written." My hero, Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), agreed with neither of these understandings. Scotus was not guided by the Temple language of debt, atonement, or blood sacrifice (understandably used in the Gospels and by Paul). He was inspired by the high level cosmic hymns in the first chapters of Colossians and Ephesians and the first chapter of John's Gospel.

After Anselm, Christians have paid a huge price for what theologians called "substitutionary atonement theory"--the strange idea that before God could love us God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for our sin-drenched humanity. With that view, salvation depends upon a problem instead of a divine proclamation about the core nature of reality. As if God could need payment, and even a very violent transaction, to be able to love and accept "his" own children--a message that those with an angry, distant, absent, or abusive father were already far too programmed to believe.

For Scotus, the incarnation of God and the redemption of the world could never be a mere mop-up exercise in response to human sinfulness, but the proactive work of God from the very beginning. We were "chosen in Christ before the world was made," as the hymn in Ephesians puts it (1:4). Our sin could not possibly be the motive for the divine incarnation, but only perfect love and divine self-revelation! For Scotus, God never merely reacts, but always supremely and freely acts, and always acts totally out of love. Scotus was very Trinitarian.

The best way I can summarize how Scotus tried to change the old notion of retributive justice is this: Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God. God in Jesus moved people beyond the counting, weighing, and punishing model, that the ego prefers, to the utterly new world that Jesus offered, where God's abundance has made any economy of merit, sacrifice, reparation, or atonement both unhelpful and unnecessary. Jesus undid "once and for all" (Hebrews 7:27; 9:12; 10:10) all notions of human and animal sacrifice and replaced them with his new economy of grace, which is the very heart of the gospel revolution. Jesus was meant to be a game changer for the human psyche and for religion itself. When we begin negatively, or focused on the problem, we never get out of the hamster wheel. To this day we begin with and continue to focus on sin, when the crucified one was pointing us toward a primal solidarity with the very suffering of God and all of creation. This changes everything. Change the starting point, change the trajectory!

We all need to know that God does not love us because we are good; God loves us because God is good. Nothing humans can do will ever decrease or increase God's eternal eagerness to love.

Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, by Fr. Richard Rohr.

Altar flowers on March 15 were donated by John Thayer in loving memory of his mother Helaine and his sister Christine.

Altar flowers on March 29 are donated by Virginia and Calvin Chapel in celebration of 26 years of marriage.

Altar flowers on April 19 are donated by Rhonda Partin Sharp in loving memory of her father Estil Partin on his heavenly birthday.

Altar flowers on April 26 are donated by Rhonda Partin Sharp in loving memory of her father Estil Partin on his April 27 birthday.

If you would like to donate for altar flowers on any Sunday, please sign the Flower Sheet by the Belmont door or call the church office or email spikelyon@gmail.com or donate online at gracecollegehill.org.