“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” These five elements of the Apostle’s Creed form what we know about the Holy Spirit’s activity in the Church and in our lives – these five elements will also form the last five weeks of this Church year as we finish considering how “we are the Body” together, what that means for us now as well as forevermore. 
We will take the 5 statements of the 3rd article of the Creed in order – starting with talking somewhat ironically about the ‘catholic’ Church on Reformation Sunday, then the communion of saints on All Saints, and finishing with “the life everlasting” on Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the Church Year.
This is also a good time to look back and where we have been with our sermons this year. We started this church year by combining Advent and Christmas into one series called “Incarnate” where we talked about what it meant that Jesus took on our flesh, but also that we took on the mystery of being His Body incarnated for those around us. After that in Epiphany, we considered what things of Jesus’ “Genome” we take on as being a part of His Body – that as the Church we take on His prophetic, apostolic, evangelistic, teaching, and shepherding identities for our neighbors and for others in the Church. In Lent we talked about how we were “Wounded” as He was wounded, looking at the ways in which the Church suffers for the world just as Christ did. We 
celebrated Easter by looking at the “Signs of Life” that we demonstrate as the Church. After we looked at signs of life, we considered how that new life comes about in us as we went through the “Hello My Name is Baptized” series. We spent some time going through the Epistle to the Ephesians in the “In One Body” series. Most recently, we took a dive into what “Trust” means and how that trust brings “US” together in the middle of that word.
The goal of all of these sermon series and of much of our programming and endeavors this year have been to “draw people into the mystery of the Church as the Body of Christ.” As we finish this church year and annual focus, it is my hope and prayer that we have been drawn together in at least some small way as we have considered how we share in our Lord’s identity, function, and relationships as His Body.
Soon you will hear about our next annual focus and the direction that we are seeking to lead University Lutheran to live into and act into in the coming year, but for the next five weeks, we still are celebrating the work of the Holy Spirit who brings us together as the Body of Christ. We are the Body. Amen.