In this message, Associate Minister Carl Garrison unpacks the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15) not as a comfortable story about a wayward child coming home, but as a scandalous portrait of a father who runs, bears public shame to reach his son, and leaves his own celebration to plead with his resentful older brother as well—challenging us to ask whether our commitment to fairness has quietly become resistance to grace, and whether we can learn not just to receive God's extravagant mercy, but to rejoice when it's given to someone we don't think deserves it.

Continuing the sermon series Soaring with the Promise of God, Angel Reyes preaches on Galatians 3:15-29, speaking on how the promises Jesus makes in the New Testament supersede the laws made in the Old Testament. Because if Jesus's words are followed: love the lord your god with all your heart (etc.), and love thy neighbor as thyself, then people will not want to kill, cheat on their partner, lie, steal; but instead if they believe, they can be secure in God's promise and will inherit the kingdom of God.

Peter had already been eating at the same table as Gentile believers until certain people showed up, and fear did what theology couldn't, pulling him back into old lines Paul thought had already been erased. Paul answers that fear by retelling an old family story: Ishmael, born of Sarah's own anxious effort to secure the promise herself, versus Isaac, a belonging neither she nor Abraham could manufacture. This is not just freedom from the old markers, but freedom from the need to secure an identity that was never ours to earn in the first place.