On All Saints Sunday, Rev. Derek van Gulden asks who the saints in your life have been, known and unknown, still here or gone before, and offers a meditation on the great cloud of witnesses whose love still surrounds us.

A member of the congregation, a retired attorney and longtime advocate for Palestinian rights, tells the stories of three students detained this year over their advocacy, and of the court rulings that released them on First Amendment grounds.

In the creation justice series, Rev. Derek van Gulden turns to water: the waters of Genesis that all life comes from, a dry year of water bans and brown maples, and a six-kilometer walk for water in Kenya. And then the living water Jesus offers the woman at the well, which, like the other kind, is meant to be shared.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Sunday, Rev. Derek van Gulden tells of the Pawtucket people who lived on Cape Ann, the Doctrine of Discovery that was used to take their land, and the hardships that continue on reservations. Seeing the image of God in everyone means listening to those who know how to live in harmony with creation.

On World Communion Sunday, Rev. Derek van Gulden remembers a physician in El Salvador who took communion every day through months of earthquake aftershocks, and finds three things at the table: connection, reconciliation, and creation itself, since there’s no bread without the whole world God called good.

On Blessing of the Animals Sunday, Rev. Derek van Gulden plays a chickadee’s call and asks whether we have the humility to learn from other creatures: birds that bring peace, pets that notice first when we’re unwell, a granddaughter training a calf to ride. Creation is one ecosystem, and we are part of it.

Opening a fall series on creation justice, Rev. Derek van Gulden starts with humanity’s call to care for creation and the storms already arriving: rising seas, from Bearskin Neck to a Louisiana tribe forced to move its whole community. The way to weather them is one of faith’s oldest virtues, hospitality, perhaps even rethinking how the church’s own buildings are used.

The peace of God that passes all understanding is the scripture people ask Rev. Derek van Gulden for most, and two members who found it near the end of their lives taught what it means: it’s all about love. Peace also takes work, the sermon says: forgiving, visiting, feeding, and speaking up for those who have no voice.

Rev. Derek van Gulden calls the Samaritan woman at the well one of his favorite people in scripture: an outcast to whom Jesus first says plainly who he is, and who brings her whole town to meet him. A nursing-home nurse who asked how God could allow so much suffering hears that much of it is humanity’s doing, and comes back to see how faith and prayer work.

When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind, and you will be blessed. Rev. Derek van Gulden tells of the first scripture he ever understood: a 1976 dinner at a Newport hotel, given by two British officers for wounded veterans and young Navy corpsmen, whose hosts insisted the real host was Jesus. It’s our work now, done because it’s what we’re called to do.