Gimme a Break | Exod. 20:8-11; Deut. 5:12-15 | 4.19.26

Faces of our Faith | Shiphrah & Puah

What happens when the commands of the world collide with the commands of the God of life? This week, we continue our summer sermon series, Faces of our Faith, by diving into the opening chapter of Exodus. While Pharaoh—the most powerful man in the ancient world—is left nameless in the text, history immortalizes two brave Hebrew midwives: Shiphrah and Puah. Ordered by the empire to participate in systemic violence, these ordinary women chose a different path. Pastor Chad connects their ancient act of creative, nonviolent civil disobedience to our own backyard here in Tennessee—from the training grounds of the Highlander Folk School to the disciplined Knoxville lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Through their story, we are challenged to examine our own everyday lives: Will our hands, our voices, and our silence be used to participate in harm, or to resist it? Pop in your headphones (and maybe queue up the Prince of Egypt soundtrack) to discover how a deep reverence for God can completely reorganize our loyalties today. Scripture Focus: Exodus 1:8-21 The Hebrew Concept of Yirat Elohim: Why "fearing God" actually means shifting your ultimate allegiance away from worldly empires. The Myth of Spontaneous Change: How Rosa Parks and local Knoxville civil rights activists relied on deep, intentional, and practiced spiritual discipline rather than mere reactivity. The Modern Challenge: Recognizing the subtle ways we are invited to participate in division and scapegoating in our neighborhoods, schools, and online spaces.

Faces of Our Faith: Adam & Eve | Genesis 2:4-7, 15-23 | 6.7.26

We think we know this story. But do we? Before there was Adam and Eve, there was ha-adam and ha-adamah — the human and the humus, the groundling and the ground. In this opening sermon of our summer series Faces of Our Faith, Pastor Chad revisits one of Scripture’s most familiar stories and finds it stranger, richer, and more surprising than our childhood impressions let on. What does it mean that God got on both knees in the dirt to make us? Why did God bring the animals first — and what does that strange, almost comic parade tell us about what God was actually looking for? And what is tsela — really — and why does it matter that the human wasn’t split into a copy, but into a counterpart? This isn’t a story about romance or moral failure. It’s a story about what humanity actually is: a community of difference, animated by the same breath, made from the same dirt, and wonderfully — necessarily — not the same. Because the cure for loneliness was never sameness. It was each other. *Faces of Our Faith is a 16-week summer worship series from A Sanctified Art exploring misunderstood and lesser known characters from scripture.

Relationship, Discipleship, & Trinity | Matthew 28:16-20 | 5.31.26

What if the Trinity isn't the spare tire of Christian faith — tucked in the trunk, mostly forgotten — but the very chassis that holds everything together? On Trinity Sunday, Pastor Chad reflects on the ancient doctrine of perichoresis — the divine dance in which Father, Son, and Spirit make room for one another in mutual, self-giving love — and asks what it would look like for that same love to spill out of our sanctuaries and into our neighborhoods. Along the way, he revisits the Great Commission with fresh eyes: the center of gravity in Matthew 28 isn't "go" or "baptize" or even "teach" — it's a single Greek verb, mathēteusate. To disciple. Not to convert or conquer, but to walk with. To share the dust. To enter relationships the way Jesus entered ours. And for anyone carrying doubts? You're in good company. The very first disciples were standing on that mountain worshipping and doubting — and Jesus met them there anyway, saying: "I myself will be with you every day, until the end of the present age."

Fire, Water, Wind, Heart | Acts 2:1-21 | 5.24.26

What does it mean to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit?  On this Pentecost Sunday, Pastor Chad explores the chaos and wonder of Acts 2 - wind, fire, a hundred and twenty voices, and a crowd of strangers hearing God's love called out in their own language. The Spirit's first act wasn't to create uniformity. It was to create comprehension. Drawing on the image of a truly great gift-giver, this sermon invites us to consider where we are being called to translate — to do the slow, costly, unglamorous work of moving toward people we don't yet understand. Because the same Spirit who met each of us in our own tongue, in our own particularity, is the Spirit who sends us out toward the crowd - toward confusion, difference, and the neighbor we haven't bothered to know yet. The Church was born in the chaos of comprehension. We’re still being born that way today.

God is Smarter Than I Am! | Luke 22:39-42 | 5.17.26

What does it mean to trust that God's ways really our higher than our ways?  This week, Pastor Rick McIntee invites us to acknowledge that there are many different ways to be smart, and many different things we can believe. But knowledge doesn't become trust until we put it to work in the world.  Inspired by Christ's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, let's remember that even when things look like they're at their worst, we serve a God who refuses to give up on us, and who can turn our worst days into our most beautiful.