About 25 years after graduating college, I was invited to a luncheon on campus where one of my small group of friends was being honored. Living in Mississippi, I was the farthest away, and this was the first time I’d seen them all in the same room in decades, and I experienced a small revelation. As some dean was speaking, I looked around the table, and it dawned on me that I finally understood my first assignment in college.

I wonder where they were when he found them?

As Geoff mentioned in the welcome and many of you already know, this has been quite a week since we were last in this room. I’m grateful for so many within our congregation for the ways you have enabled us to open our spaces to our friends from Beth Israel this weekend. As many of us have said over the past two days, while we of course grieve the event that has caused Beth Israel to be displaced, we are honored that they are here with us and look forward to the ways our common life will unfold in the coming months.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr tells the story of Marie-Laure, a French girl, and Werner, a German boy, whose lives and worlds collide amid the calamity of World War II.

Note: Due to technical issues we are only able to post part of the worship service