Happy Pentecost Sunday! At REC, our practice is to accept new members into the church in the Sundays surrounding Pentecost, which means our sermons are replaced by stories from new members' lives—which we do not record.

Thus, for the podcast, today we are continuing our re-uploads of 2022's "Four Faces of the Prodigal Son" series, this time Aaron interprets the parable in a more medieval, Christological way, tracing the journey of the prodigal as the journey of Christ.

For the next several Sundays at River East—due to Table Sundays, new member testimonies, and the annual church picnic—we won't have new sermons to upload to our podcast. Thus, for the next month, we'll instead be uploading an old, 4-part series that Aaron preached in late 2022, entitled "Four Faces of the Prodigal Son."

Each week, Aaron examined the famous parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) from a completely different angle, offering a completely different interpretation. Rather than seeing this as a problem, Aaron suggests that this surplus of meaning is is a feature worth exploring in any sacred text.

On May 25, Aaron took a look at the political turmoil behind the letter to the Galatians, and the emotions it seems to be stirring up in the Apostle Paul. What does love look like when our understanding of God's story clashes with other people's... especially people we care for?

On May 18, Charlotte used the image of a quilt as a way to enter the text of Acts 15:1-18—how both the early church and us today are being woven and re-woven into God's tapestry.

On May 11, Aaron stretched the metaphor of "Love makes the world go 'round" to include Newtonian physics, and then mapped it onto the story of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8:26-39.

On May 4, 2025, we were pleased to welcome Niigaan Sinclair to speak with us on Acts 6:1-7:2a, and 44-60. Niigaan is an Anishinaabe writer, editor, and activist in Winnipeg and heads the Department of Native Studies at University.

Stay tuned for our next upload, which will feature Niigaan's Cross Training session with us.

On April 27, Mary Anne kicked off our exploration into Love this Eastertide—one of the Christian names for God, as well as one of the Seven Sacred Teachings of the Plains First Nations. Here we see how the theme of sight is intertwined with story of the Emmaus Road from Luke 24:13-15.

On Easter Sunday, Mary Anne reflected on the ways that collective 'ruptures' affect our public life together. Be it the bombing of Hiroshima, 9/11, or the discovery of the residential school graves here in Canada, these 'ruptures' almost ialways involve violence of some kind. But Easter is a rupture of an entirely different sort... How will we let it shape us today?