Advent is a season of endings and beginnings. As the calendar year comes to a close, a new church year begins. Christ’s birth ushers us into new ways of living and loving; and yet, the world as we know it spins madly on. In many ways, pregnant Mary was surrounded by endings—large and small, personal and political. But Mary proclaimed hope in a God who was and is making all things new. Christ’s birth offered a beautiful new beginning for shepherds and Magi alike—all the while, King Herod tried to bring Christ’s story to an end. When we ourselves navigate seasons filled with endings and beginnings, we need reminders. We need words that can feel like steady ground, like a path for our feet to find as we step forward into the unknown.

This week we’re starting a new series here at Fredericktown United Methodist Church called “I have some questions.” Because there are questions that we all have about God and our faith. Sometimes we might be consciously asking them and other times we might not be actively thinking them, but they’re still kinda rolling around in our heads with this sense of uncertainty where we’d like a little more information even if we don’t realize it. But there are a lot of people out there in the world today asking questions about God and about Christianity… now more than any time ever before besides the beginning of the faith itself.

Because there are a whole lot of different churches out there with different beliefs and different ways of handling things or addressing questions that people have… if they even let people ask questions at all. And a lot of the time, the experiences that people have had when they’ve asked questions haven’t been positive. Sometimes they’re looked down on and judged if they dare ask a question about the faith and other times it’s like churches expect people to just know everything right off the bat the moment they walk through the doors of the church because everyone there already knows everything and so they don’t bother explaining anything and seem aggravated when you don’t know.

So, over the next few weeks, we’re going to be taking a look at some questions that folks who are new to the faith might have and that folks who have been a part of the church for a long while might have as well because they’ve just never been asked… or maybe not thought about in these ways… and we’ll be seeing how we might answer them together.

Have you ever asked this question: Why am I here? Trying to discover the purpose of our lives can lead to a lot of questions: Who am I? Do I have a “calling”? What am I supposed to do with my life? What does purposeful living look like? Often, the world is all too ready to give us answers to these questions: promising that finding the perfect job or achieving the next milestone will make us happy. But in this series, we will embrace these questions as an invitation to discover what it is that God wants to do with the story of our lives right now.

God wants to be in relationship with us and showed us the power of unconditional love by coming to be with us. To be us. God was so determined to be in relationship with us that only God becoming human through Jesus would accomplish the wholeness, restoration and redemption the world so desperately needs. Over the next four weeks, we’ll explore our personal faith stories, begin to see others who are longing for an experience with God, learn to live in such a way that our very lives become an expression of Christ, and then practice inviting others to encounter the unconditional love of God.

For the next several weeks, we’re going to be spending a lot of time in John 6. Throughout this chapter, there are reminders, again and again about the “Bread of Life” that Jesus is calling people to. Now, if all we did over these weeks together is find ways to see bread as a metaphor for Jesus, things might get a little stale (pun intended). But through all these examples, Jesus is pointing people away from an intellectual exercise in trying to understand what he was bringing to them towards a physical, lived out, flesh and blood, experience. So, we’re going to skip over trying to explain away everything that’s happening in this chapter intellectually, to connect to what they’re all teaching us about a lived experience of life in Christ.

Our new series that begins this week is called "All Things New" and it reminds us that church isn't just a place that we go to, but something we do. It's also a verb, not just a noun. We're changed when we have an encounter with the resurrected Jesus, who doesn't just transform us for a moment, but into something new forever. And our newness isn't something that we keep only to ourselves, but something that's shared as a part of a community, a family of faith and humanity, that is held together and sent out into the world by the Spirit. So, how will be this new thing that the resurrection of Jesus has called us to be as we "do church?" Let's look at how we can be a part of making "all things new."

This Lent and Easter, we are focusing on the life and faith of one of Jesus’ most famous disciples. In Peter, we see a person who is both steadfast and unsteady, a dear friend and a betrayer, a follower and a wanderer. In Peter, we often see ourselves. Peter's journey is an imperfect one, but one that keeps him with Jesus all the same. By following Peter’s journey, we watch the story of Jesus unfold through the eyes of a very normal human trying to figure it all out, just like us.

We have a month between the end of Christmas and the beginning of Lent, and sometimes this time of year gets lost between recovering from one holiday and getting ready for the next. It might even seem like God takes a break and we don’t hear from the Divine during this downtime. However, our Creator doesn’t take a break and is still speaking to us. So, for the next few weeks together, our theme is listening. Listening and action feed each other as grace forms us into the people of God. We’ll be looking for ways to create space for listening that connects with the call to act justly and kindly.

In our previous message series, we looked at how rejoicing is a large part of living into God's love for us. Now, as God's love comes to be with and for us as Jesus, we're going to be journeying through the story of Jesus' birth in Luke where we see example after example of rejoicing being a part of Jesus' life from the very beginning. We remember the lyrics to that classic Christmas hymn 'O Holy Night' where we sing "a thrill of hope the weary world rejoices" and look for the places in this world that allow us to be rooted in rejoicing as we celebrate the birth of God With Us: Emmanuel.

This week, we'll be kicking off a new series called "Marathon." We're in this time where summer is over, school has started, and the holidays are still a couple months away. It's a time where things can begin to feel kinda like a drag. And we can start to feel that way about our own faith as well. In between the big events in the life of the church, these ordinary days can feel so very boring and it's easy for us to slip out of our faith into a sense of complacency. And this is where we are reminded that our faith, and life in general, is a marathon, not a sprint. No matter how much we might want to run to the "next big thing" we can't. Things will happen in their time, and we have to find ways to maintain our faith throughout the entire journey, not just at the high points. So, we'll be journeying through Exodus and the people who were heading to the promised land. They, too, were eager to get to their destination and started to get worn down during the time between "the great escape" and the "promised land." What can we learn from what they went through, to help us continue to sustain our faith and not let it slip in the down times?