Community Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Jefferson City, Missouri

06/15/2026

Follow up to the message from this past Sunday.

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06/15/2026

Friends,
Join us for worship on Sunday, June 21, 2026, at 9:30 a.m. either in person or on Facebook Live. Our Scriptures this week are Psalm 86:1 - 10, 16 - 17 and Genesis 21:8 - 21. The message is entitled God Who Sees, Hears and Delivers. Worship is always followed by fellowship and Sunday School for all ages. We have a spot reserved just for you!

06/15/2026

Richard Rohr's meditation for today. Can I get an AMEN?

Being the Body of Christ
Monday, June 15, 2026

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Father Richard describes the influence of the apostle Paul on the formation of the first Christian churches:

The apostle Paul knew that the gospel message must have concrete embodiment, so he set about founding what he called “churches.” Jesus’s first vision of church is so simple we could miss it: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:20). This is surely why Jesus insists that the message be communicated not by a lone evangelist but by sending the disciples out “two by two” (Mark 6:7). The individual alone is not a fitting communicator of the core message.

During Paul’s lifetime, the Christian church was not yet an institution or a centrally organized set of common practices and beliefs. It was a living organism that communicated the gospel primarily through relationships. Paul’s brilliant metaphor for this living, organic, concrete embodiment is “the body of Christ”: “Just as a human body, though it is made up of many parts, is a single unit, because all those parts make up a single body, so it is with Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12). At the heart of this body, providing the energy that enlivens the whole community, although each in different ways, is “the love of God that has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5).

This Spirit is itself the foundational energy of the universe, the Ground of All Being, described in the first lines of the Bible (Genesis 1:2). Union is not just pious rambling, but the very concrete work of God. It’s how God makes love to what God created. Paul writes that it is precisely “in your togetherness that you are Christ’s Body” (1 Corinthians 12:27). By remaining—against all trials and resistance—inside this luminous web of relationship, this vibrational state of love, we experience a very honest and healthy notion of communal salvation.

The churches or communities Paul founded are his audiovisual aids that he can point to inside of a debauched empire (where human dignity was never upheld as inherent) to give credibility to his message. To people who asked, “Why should we believe there’s a new or different life possible?” Paul could say, “Look at these people. They’re different. This is a different social order.” In Christ, “there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). This is not just a religious idea, but a socioeconomic message that began to change the world—and still can.

For Jesus, teachings such as forgiveness, healing, and justice work are the real evidence of a new and shared life. If we do not see this happening in churches and spiritual communities, religion is “all in the head” and largely an illusion. Peacemaking, forgiveness, and reconciliation are not some kind of ticket to heaven later. They are the price of peoplehood—the signature of heaven—now.

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06/14/2026

6/14/226

06/14/2026

**Due to unforeseen technical issues, CCC will not be having a Live feed for service this morning. We will be posting the entire service at a later time. Thank you for your understanding.

06/11/2026

Richard Rohr's meditation for today.

The Laborers in the Vineyard

Thursday, June 11, 2026
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In The Divine Exchange course, Cynthia Bourgeault explores the parable of the laborers in the vineyard:
The parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16) is a beautiful and much misunderstood story. There was a vineyard owner who wanted people working in his vineyard to get his crops harvested. He went out and contracted with laborers at sunrise for the usual daily wage. He went out again at nine and at noon. At three in the afternoon, he saw a bunch of guys hanging around and asked, “Why aren’t you working, for God’s sake?” and they responded, “Because nobody asked us.” He says, “Well, you go into the vineyard as well.” Finally, when it came time to settle accounts, he gave everybody the same amount of money.
This just drives the egoic consciousness nuts! It’s not fair, everybody screeches, and it won’t be, as long as we’re using the egoic mind that operates out of separation and scarcity. It’s going to tell us that the ones that got there first got a bum deal. This parable only “works” when we understand that it’s not about the vineyard owner getting his crops harvested. The vineyard, as it tends to be throughout Jesus’s teaching, is a symbol of the relational field, the dynamic interactiveness of the kingdom of God.
Whatever reason we may project onto the vineyard owner for bringing people in, what he actually states is that he’s bringing people in because he can’t stand to see them isolated and just sitting around on their own: “You too go into the vineyard.” The real fruit of this day is not a bunch of grapes getting harvested. It is human beings working together, doing something that’s dignified. You can imagine the songs, the work, and all the things that happen when you’re participating and engaged jointly in an activity. The idea of paying them the same simply invites people to put their attention on what the real proportions are. When “more and less” are introduced into the equation at the end of the parable, we’re just scattering our attention.
The bottom line is that everybody has enough. The ones that came in early thought the usual daily wage was fair. That’s taken care of. The real fruit being generated, just like grapes turn into wine, was the work together. In these circumstances, it’s fermented and transformed into some fragrance of human interactivity and abundance that doesn’t exist otherwise.
Reading this parable against the backdrop of a relational field rather than individual competition, entirely different elements jump out. Without that relational field, you simply can’t see where Jesus is going. Trying to understand it with your mind, you’ll never get it because your mind will keep coming back to “more and less” and “it’s not fair.” It’s not until you begin from the fullness of love, and the order and coherence that arise from it, that you can recognize what’s being said and how radical it is.
We get the invitation to go into the vineyard, but it’s only in stepping up, saying yes, and trusting the relational field that we’re going to actually be participants in the kingdom of God.

06/09/2026

Friends, we look forward to seeing you this Sunday, June 14, 2026, for worship at 9:30 a.m. Our Scriptures this week are Psalm 100 and Matthew 9:35 - 10:4. The message is entitled "Help Wanted for the Harvest." We will be having a congregational meeting immediately following worship to approve the budget and slate of officers for our new fiscal year. Fellowship will follow and Sunday School for all ages. And we will be having a Baptism during worship this Sunday. Praise God! Come join us.

06/09/2026

Richard Rohr's meditation for today. Abiding with God.

Mutual Interabiding

Tuesday, June 9, 2026
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CAC faculty emerita Cynthia Bourgeault highlights that the primary quality of the kingdom of God is an experience of interabiding—one with God and with one another.
The hallmark of this [kingdom] awareness is that it sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. And these are indeed Jesus’s two core teachings, underlying everything he says and does.
No separation between God and humans. When Jesus talks about this Oneness, he is not speaking in an Eastern sense about an equivalency of being, such that I am in and of myself divine. What he more has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling: I am in God, God is in you, you are in God, we are in each other. His most beautiful symbol for this is … where he says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Abide in me as I in you” [see John 15:4–5]. A few verses later he says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love” [John 15:9]. While he does indeed claim that “the Father and I are one” (John 10:30) … he does not see this as an exclusive privilege but as something shared by all human beings. There is no separation between humans and God because of this mutual interabiding that expresses the indivisible reality of divine love. We flow into God—and God into us—because it is the nature of love to flow. And as we give ourselves into one another in this fashion, the vine gives life and coherence to the branch while the branch makes visible what the vine is…. The whole and the part live together in mutual, loving reciprocity, each belonging to the other and dependent on the other to show forth the fullness of love. That’s Jesus’s vision of no separation between human and Divine.
No separation between human and human is an equally powerful notion—and equally challenging. One of the most familiar of Jesus’s teachings is “Love your neighbor as yourself” [Mark 12:31; Matthew 22:39]. But we almost always hear that wrong. We hear “Love your neighbor as much as yourself.”… If you listen closely to Jesus’s teaching however, there is no “as much as” in there. It’s just “Love your neighbor as yourself”—as a continuation of your very own being. It’s a complete seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals out there, one seeking to better herself at the price of the other, or to extend charity to the other; there are simply two cells of the one great Life. Each of them is equally precious and necessary. And as these two cells flow into one another, experiencing that one Life from the inside, they discover that “laying down one’s life for another” [John 15:13] is not a loss of one’s self but a vast expansion of it—because the indivisible reality of love is the only True Self.

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06/08/2026

Richard Rohr's meditation for today. God is Love!

A Positive Relationship

Monday, June 8, 2026
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Father Richard describes relationship as the nature of God and reality:
The Christian belief in the Trinity says that God is absolute relatedness. God is our word for the ultimate ecosystem that holds all things in positive relationship (see Colossians 1:17). As long as we’re in honest and loving relationship with what is right in front of us, the Spirit can keep working in us, through us, and for us.
Jesus comes as a naked, vulnerable baby, totally dependent upon relationship with others. Naked vulnerability means that we allow otherness to influence and change us. When we think that otherness can’t change us or teach us anything, we don’t give other people any power over our lives. When we block them by thinking we can stand alone, we are spiritually dead. It’s true that nothing stands alone! We are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in an absolute relatedness. We call this love.
We really were made for love, and outside of love we die very quickly. If we are going to start with Trinity, then loving relationship is the universal pattern, the nature of our being. When we start with a philosophical concept of being and then try to convince everyone that this being is, in fact, love, we don’t have a lot of success. I’ve been a priest for over fifty years and can say that more Christians seem to be afraid of God than in love with God. Sadly, Christians aren’t more loving than anyone else; sometimes, we’re even less loving than other people! In some ways, that’s inevitable if we’re basically relating to God out of fear, if we haven’t been drawn into the love between the Father and the Son by the Spirit.
In some ways the Spirit is the hardest to describe. Jesus says, “The Spirit blows where it will” (John 3:8). Jesus’s message to us is clear: Don’t try to control the Spirit; don’t try to say where it comes from, where it goes, or who has it. It’s group narcissism to believe that only our group has the Spirit or the truth. At less mature levels, every group will try to put God in their own pocket and say God only loves their group, but such a belief has nothing to do with the love of God. It isn’t a search for Truth or Holy Mystery, but a search for control. It’s the search of the small self, the search to make myself feel superior and to stand alone.
I’m not in control or in charge of this Holy Mystery. I don’t presume to understand it; all I know is that I’m forever being drawn through everything. Each manifestation or epiphany of God calls for surrender, communion, and intimacy.

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06/07/2026

Breath in the grace; breath out the love.