Preamble:

When prophets speak truth to frightened power, they are often buried before they are believed. Jeremiah’s faith lands him waist-deep in a cistern of mud, while Abram’s obedience sends him walking into a wilderness without coordinates. One sinks downward, one steps outward—but the same Spirit moves between them, hovering like breath over clay.

This story meets us in a haunted season—when the air itself remembers. The world calls it Halloween, others call it All Saints, some call it the Day of the Dead. But heaven calls it remembrance. These are the days when the veil thins and we feel our ancestors leaning in, whispering through the cracks of time: “Keep moving. Keep believing. Even in the dark, God still works.”

Jeremiah stands in the pit, knee-deep in despair, yet the word within him refuses to drown. Abram leaves the comfort of certainty, trusting a voice with no map, no guarantee—only promise. Between mud and migration, faith becomes motion, and obedience becomes resurrection.

In our generation, many know this same ache: trapped in cisterns of delay, bureaucracy, or fear—yet called to walk toward a land unseen. And here lies the quiet gospel truth: God often hides His mercy in movement. The immigrant, the refugee, the outsider—they are not threats to holiness but mirrors of it. When Abram crossed borders and Ebed-melech crossed class lines, Heaven smiled. The kingdom of God does not fear the traveler—it travels with them.

In the AME Zion rhythm, this is perseverance that sings. It’s the sound of faith that won’t rot in the mud. It’s the hum of hope that keeps walking through famine. It’s the testimony of those who have seen both grave and grace and still choose to rise.

Preamble:

When the waters rose in Noah’s day, the world was baptized into new possibility. The flood was not the end of creation but its trembling inhale before renewal — the moment between breath and snow. What was once written on stone tablets and covenant scrolls is, in Jeremiah’s vision, rewritten upon the human heart. The flood was not merely destruction — it was erasure, making room for divine handwriting.

And as the first flakes of a new season threaten to fall, we too feel that quiet ache of change — the snow-anxiety of transition, when warmth and uncertainty share the same air. Inside the ark, community had to learn to live with noise, odor, and one another — the long obedience of confinement that births covenant.

Both narratives speak of inscription: first upon the earth’s surface, then upon the soul’s surface. In the hush between flood and snowfall, we hear it — God rewriting creation through patience, proximity, and promise.

In the AME Zion rhythm, this is the difference between revival and re-creation — between shouting over sin and being rewritten from within, between surviving the storm and accepting the season that follows.

Preamble:

The story of the Rechabites unfolds like a living parable in the echoing halls of Jerusalem. Jeremiah offers them the cup — a test of covenant fidelity — and they decline, quietly, steadfastly. Their ancestor Jehonadab had taught them another way: no vineyards, no houses, no wine; dwell in tents and trust the Lord who moves. Their holiness is not carved in stone walls but carried in obedient breath.

And somewhere far from Jerusalem, that same breath still moves over the waters. The Triune God — Father speaking, Word forming, Spirit hovering — communes through creation like a tide within itself. Before there were prophets or priests, there was a conversation between heaven and earth. A mist rose upward; the earth exhaled; and God answered with rain. That was worship before worship — the first liturgy of intimacy.

Now the coastlines of our own land tremble beneath swollen seas and relentless wind. The waters rise again, testing the strength of our foundations. Yet even here, amid flood and storm, the covenant holds: the same God who breathed mist from the soil can steady us in the deluge.

Both texts — Jeremiah’s vow and Genesis’s mist — remind us that holiness begins where we consent to limit ourselves. The world will tempt us to consume, to build without measure, to drink without discernment. But the Spirit whispers through the storm: Be still. Rise like mist. Let your vow breathe for you until the rain returns.

Preamble: The Sound Before the Snow

The first cold wind slides down the Chugach range, and the birch leaves begin their slow benediction—turning gold, then letting go. Autumn in Alaska is the earth rehearsing Genesis. Creation does not collapse; it contracts, preparing for revelation.

Before there was form, there was sound. Before there was church, there was voice.
God spoke into the ungoverned deep, and meaning began to rise from motion.
The sages say the Torah existed two thousand years before the world—a scroll of fire written in breath—God’s architecture of intention waiting to be spoken.

So Bereshit is not primitive cosmology; it is divine psychology. It tells us how order emerges from imagination, how structure is born from Spirit. Every creator, every leader, every believer stands again at that edge where chaos hums and the Word waits to be uttered.

And sometimes, the first creative act is withdrawal. The mystics call it tzimtzum—the holy contraction by which the Infinite makes room for the finite. Before there can be light, there must be space for it to shine. Before the ministry can expand, the self must step aside.

Paul intuited this same rhythm when he wrote:

“Live in a way that pleases God… control your own vessel in holiness and honor.” (1 Th 4:1–4)

Genesis builds the world; Thessalonians builds the soul. Both reveal one continuum—
Word divides chaos, Spirit hovers, light appears, and creation becomes holy.

So as this new church season dawns, and as the world outside trembles between decay and renewal, we choose the Creator’s posture:
to listen before we lead,
to make space before we speak,
and to let the first command echo once more through our own becoming—


“Let there be light.”

Preamble: Fire in the Courtyard

In the days of Jeremiah it was the early reign of Jehoiakim; in our own it is another season of turmoil.

Then as now, God sent a sermon, not a sword. The prophet was told to stand in the courtyard where worship and commerce mixed, where people came to pray and to profit in the same breath, and warn them that even the temple could fall if the people mistook religion for righteousness.

We, too, live in a courtyard age—when the air trembles with headlines: wars flare in the Holy Land, governments wobble under greed and pride, leaders rage and threaten shutdowns while the sick wonder how they’ll pay to stay alive. The ground shakes not only from bombs and storms but from the moral fault lines of a world that no longer fears deceit.

Yet the same God who once hovered over the wilderness nest (Deut 32:11) still hovers over nations in crisis. His wings are spread in warning and in mercy. The question for our generation is whether we will hear the sermon before the sword.

Preamble

Moses told Israel that every seven years, the whole community had to stop and gather—men and women, children and even the strangers at the gate—to hear the Word of God read aloud. That gathering wasn’t just ceremony; it was covenant renewal. It was a way of saying, we belong to God together, across every generation.

Centuries later, the prophet Micah closed his book with a song that sounds like a prayer for the Day of Atonement: “Who is a God like You—who pardons iniquity, who passes over transgression, who casts our sins into the sea?” It is a song of covering, a song of mercy.

This week it hits me personally, because my own birthday often falls on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. That collision of life and atonement reminds me that every year, every breath, is already grace. To be born on the day of covering is to know that we live not by our merit but by God’s mercy.

So these two texts form a mirror for us: Moses shows us the necessity of gathering to hear God’s Word, and Micah assures us that the God we hear is merciful and steadfast, casting away sins and restoring His people in love.

Preamble

There are moments when strength wears the face of silence. I feel it when I mark the day my brother left this world — the ache of absence louder than any shout. Isaiah tells us the true Servant does not come to break what’s already bruised or to snuff out the faintest ember. He steadies reeds bent low by the wind. He guards wicks that barely glow until they burn again.

Deuteronomy carries the same promise: after exile, after scattering, God gathers His people back — not with thunder, but with tenderness. He whispers renewal into hearts long torn, He carves love into the very core of our being.

So we learn redemption is more than return. It is renewal. Not in the clamor of power, but in the nearness of God. And even in our grief, even in the shadows of death-dates we wish we could erase, love becomes the covenant’s center — the strength that steadies us, the flame that will not go out.

Preamble:

Every covenant hangs on love.
Not the brittle love of lips alone,
but the fierce devotion of heart, soul, and mind.

The Pharisees asked for a statute.
They wanted law in ink —
Jesus gave them law in blood:
Love the Lord your God,
love your neighbor as yourself.
On these two, He said,
the universe of Scripture swings
like a heavy door on living hinges.

Moses spoke the same in the wilderness:
Walk with your whole heart,
cling with your whole soul,
and the Holy One will raise you
as His treasured people.

But look at our own age —
where fear grips quicker than faith,
and bullets answer questions no heart dared to ask.
Our streets bleed with the ache of covenant broken,
our air hums with the silence of voices cut short.
Violence preaches its false gospel:
that despair is stronger than hope,
that hardness can shield the heart.

Yet Psalm 19 rises like morning prayer:
“Let the words of my mouth,
and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in Your sight.”
Love becomes more than command —
it becomes breath, it becomes bread,
it becomes the song that keeps a people standing.

Love is the liturgy that heals a neighbor,
and love is the covenant that heals a nation.

There are two kinds of belonging.
One is claimed with the lips — membership by declaration, ritual, or tradition.
The other is inscribed on the heart, carried in silence, known only in the hidden chambers where God searches.

Isaiah speaks to a people who sang the right songs but lived the wrong lives, who built temples yet withheld their trust, who honored God with their mouths while their hearts went wandering.

Deuteronomy reminds us that chosenness is not about possession, but about relinquishing possession. The Levites had no land, no share of spoils — because their inheritance was the LORD Himself. To be chosen is to stand empty-handed, to live off memory and presence, to know that the truest portion is not what you hold but Who holds you.

And sometimes, the truth is made sharp in a room where the body lies still but the soul is already gone. The form remains — lips, hands, frame of clay — but the breath has returned to its Maker. In that absence you learn that belonging is not in the vessel alone, but in the life that filled it.

God does not measure by outward recitation but by inward transformation. He is the Potter; we are the clay. To be chosen is to be shaped — sometimes pressed, sometimes broken, sometimes remade. And in that shaping, what we once carried only on our lips becomes written deep within the heart.

We build safety with whatever materials are at hand—
 some stack bricks of deception,

 others sew quilts of self-reliance.

But there comes a night when the bed we made is too short,

 the blanket too narrow,

and the storm too strong for what we trusted to hold.



Judah made alliances like bad mortgages,

trusting the fine print to shield them from the flood.

God tore up the contract—not to leave them uncovered,

 but to lay down a Cornerstone that could bear the weight.

Preamble: The Tear That Heals

There is a kind of sound that lives only between breaths—

 not the shofar’s blast, not the clanging cymbal,

 but the soft breaking of the heart.

It is the sound God leans in to hear.



Israel stood with a covenant in hand but rebellion in the blood.

Jerusalem stood with a Temple on the hill but tears on the altar.

We stand, too, between the memory of our stubbornness

 and the mercy of the One who refuses to walk away.



Before walls are rebuilt,

before nations come streaming to Zion,

there must first be the fast—

 not the one that starves the body alone,

 but the one that empties the soul of its pride.

Preamble: When the Work Piles Up

There’s a silence that waits for you when you come back —
not the kind that rests you,
but the kind that stares you down.

Dust has a way of telling the truth.
Hinges talk in groans.
Corners hide what no one wanted to face.
It’s not one great failure that ruins a house,
just a slow drip of “I’ll get to it later”
until the floor buckles underfoot.

The temple of the body doesn’t collapse in a single night.
It shifts,
warps,
and before you notice,
a room’s been rented out to something that never belonged there.

Paul doesn’t stroll into Corinth with soft suggestions.
He speaks like a man holding the deed in his hand.
“You’re not your own,” he says.
“You were bought — and the price was blood.”
The Spirit that raised Jesus is no part-time tenant.
He takes the whole house.
Every wall.
Every key.

Moses is standing right there beside him in spirit —
another watchman on the same wall:
Guard what’s been given.
Don’t trade the nearness of God for something shiny that can’t last.
Freedom doesn’t keep itself.
It has to be guarded,
worked,
and if needed, fought for.

So we clear out what defiles.
We reset the frame to plumb.
We make the house ready —
because the Owner is coming,
and when He steps inside,
He’ll either find it in order
or set it right Himself.

Preamble: When the Threshold Speaks

There are places where the line between here and after shimmers—
 not quite sea, not yet shore.
Where time forgets to hurry,
and something deep remembers the path your bones have always known.

They stood on the edge of promise—
 not yet arrived,
 not fully released.
The land ahead was spoken into them long before they saw it,
and the one called to lead—
weathered like driftwood, carrying both mantle and memory—
cried out: This weight is too much for one pair of hands.

But maybe it was never meant to be carried alone.

Before inheritance, there is always arrangement.
Before conquest, counsel.
Before the land is claimed, the people must become something that won’t collapse under blessing.
It takes more than strength.
It takes wisdom that’s older than maps,
the kind passed in silence,
the kind braided into breath.

So too in Corinth—
a people with gifts but no grounding,
calling names instead of making names holy.
They forgot that the altar is not built with applause,
and the temple does not belong to the preacher—
it is the people, stacked like stones, mortared by mercy.

You are not the visitor in God’s sanctuary.
You are its weight-bearing beam.
You are the stone that remembers the fire,
not as punishment—
but as purification.

Because some legacies are passed through words.
And some are passed through heat.

Preamble: The Sacred Work of Tearing Down

The wind does not ask permission—
 it carves the coast with memory.
Each wave a lesson in letting go,
 each dune a monument to what doesn’t last.

He walked the ridge where land meets longing,
 feet firm in shifting sand,
 speaking of stones that would fall,
 and birth pains yet to come.

They showed him sacred buildings,
but he saw the bones of old obedience—
 hollowed by ritual,
 echoing with absence.

Far across another river,
a people once stood with promise in their mouths.
They were told:
“Drive out what does not belong.
Destroy what cannot remain.
Possess what has already been given.”

But inheritance is not given to hands full of idols.
It belongs to those who have made room—
who demolish not to desecrate,
but to dwell in holiness.

The sea knows this rhythm.
So do the cedars,
bending but not breaking.
Even the sand understands:
sometimes, to keep a promise,
you must scatter everything that came before.

Preamble: When Holiness Asserts Its Rights

Coins clinked on stone floors, animals jostled under the pull of merchants’ ropes, and the Temple—meant to be a house of prayer—buzzed with barter. Then came the Servant King, whip in hand, heart ablaze for His Father’s house. Coins flew, tables tumbled, zeal roared like lions through holy courts.

Far off on Midian’s plains, Phinehas lifted trumpets over swords, bearing the sacred articles of a covenant people who would not share their inheritance with seduction or idolatry.

In both scenes, holiness laid claim to its rightful ground. Tables overturned, cities burned, so that something purer might stand in their place.

Yet the truest Temple was not of wood or stone—it was the Servant King’s own body, destined to be torn down and raised up again. And now we are called to be living sanctuaries, where zeal is yoked with compassion, and holiness is more than rules—it’s a resting place for the Almighty Himself.

Preamble: The Zeal and the Census: When Covenant Shapes the Camp

They stood in rows, tribe by tribe,
names called out under desert sun,
fathers and failures all woven into the roll.
The census ticked forward like a slow drum,
counting breath, counting bones,
measuring who would cross the Jordan.

And somewhere centuries later,
feet brushed through grain on a Sabbath morning,
hands reached to pluck life from the stalk,
while watchers kept tally
of law and line,
marking infractions in ink sharper than mercy.

Pinchas’ spear once stilled a plague,
zeal turned wrath into reprieve.
But here, in this quiet field,
zeal wears another face—
compassion stoops low,
and the Son of Man, Lord even of the Sabbath,
measures holiness by hungry hands and open hearts.

He does not unwrite the census.
He fulfills it,
counts again with gentler ink,
inscribes our names not by tribe or sin,
but by mercy.

So let us stand to be counted—
not only in ranks for inheritance,
but in rows of wheat swaying under breath of God,
where zeal bends toward grace
and every law finds its true completion
in love.

Preamble: The Boy Who Stayed Behind

He did not run,
He lingered—
in shadows of stone, where silence held breath
and questions stretched like tzitzit[a] in wind.

Twelve years grown, but ancient in gaze,
he sat among scribes who danced with the law,
unfolding Torah like a tent over hearts
not yet ready to know who was asking.

They had left—but he remained.
Not lost, but located.
Not defiant, but drawn
to the hush where the Father’s voice still echoes.

And when they found him,
they found themselves undone—
for the child had not wandered,
he had waited
in the place where wisdom grows like almond blossoms in temple courts.

Let the curious sit.
Let the obedient rise.
Let the house become home again.
Wisdom is not a place we reach—
it is the path we walk
back toward the questions
we were once too old to ask.

_{[a.] Tzitzit (צִיצִית) Tzitzit are the fringes or tassels attached to the four corners of a tallit (prayer shawl) or a four-cornered garment, worn as a physical reminder of the commandments of the Torah.}

Preamble: The Stone That Waited

There was no sanctuary, only open air.
No choir, only dreams.
No preacher, only angels stepping between here and holy.

The pillow was hard, the night unfamiliar.
But God came anyway.
Not to a king, but to a fugitive.
Not in Jerusalem, but in the wilderness.

He did not climb the ladder—
He laid beneath it.
And heaven opened above the earth that had once felt so far.

Preamble: The Soil Still Remembers

We come from wells we did not dig,
and we drink from promises made before our names were spoken.
The dust beneath our feet carries the memory
of fathers who walked forward in faith
and mothers who poured out prayers like water in dry places.

Isaac was not the first to be rejected,
but he may have been the first to answer with peace.

When driven out,
he did not curse the ground or crush the seed.
He kept digging.
He kept building altars.
He kept waiting for water.

This week,
we gather in the echo of his patience,
in a world still drawing lines, claiming land,
fencing in blessings and rationing favor.

Yet here comes God,
not in a whirlwind of fire,
but in the night, whispering:
“Do not be afraid. I am with you.”

And here come the very ones who cast us out—
now watching the fruit they could not stop,
the peace they did not plant,
the wells they once filled with sand
now springing back to life.

This story is not just about Isaac.
It is about us—
how we respond when wronged,
how we host when hurt,
how we make room at the table for those who once turned us away.

The soil still remembers those who made peace
not by power,
but by perseverance.