One year after deadly floods devastated the Hill Country of Texas, First Presbyterian Church of Kerrville, Texas, gathered for worship Sunday to lament and to hope. Watch the moving 96-minute service here.
“We can hold both lament and hope together, especially as we remember the tragic events that shaped our community a year ago,” said the Rev. Jasiel Hernandez Garcia, FPC’s senior pastor and head of staff. “We remember the fear and uncertainty of those days. We remember the lives lost and the devastation in our community. We remember neighbors helping each other. We remember volunteers arriving even before they were asked.”
“We remember prayers spoken through tears,” he said. “We gather here because remembrance is holy work. Scripture repeatedly tells us that God calls people to remember — not so we remain trapped in the past, but so that we may discover God’s faithfulness in the midst of it.”
“So today, let us remember with hope that God is with us,” he told those gathered in the sanctuary. “Let us worship God.”
Those in worship joined in a Litany of Remembrance “for the 139 beloved people we lost that day. For family members, friends and neighbors — especially our beloved friend, Jane Ragsdale — we remember. For those who still grieve, whose sorrow and lament still overwhelm, we remember. … For our church, First Presbyterian Church of Kerrville, and our faith partners in our community, we remember.”
Hernandez Garcia led a ritual called Thanksgiving Over the Water: “Holy and Merciful God, you are the river of life. You are the everlasting wellspring … Your waters are below us, around us and above us. Our life is born in you. You are the fountain of resurrection.”
“So friends, make these waters of baptism a water of redemption and rebirth this day, to equip each and every one of us for the work of faithfulness.”
“Friends, this is the good news of God’s grace, proclaimed in the world and Word and sealed upon our hearts,” said the Rev. Susan Shaw-Meadow, the church’s pastor for faith formation. “Our only comfort in life and in death is that we are not our own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to our beautiful Savior, Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God.”
The Rev. Bobby Musengwa, transitional general presbyter for Mission Presbytery, offered a Prayer of Illumination and read Lamentations 3:19-26. “We seek you in your Word, O God, as though we are searching for water in a dry and weary land,” Musengwa prayed. “By the power of your Holy Spirit, may this Word be to us a rich feast, satisfying to the soul. Then, with our mouth we will praise you, and with our lives we will bless you, our host and our hope. Amen.”
The Rev. Kathy Lee-Cornell, Associate for National Disaster Response for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, read from Matthew’s gospel, the lectionary passage for Sunday, found here and here. It then fell to Lee-Cornell to offer a sermon, which she called “The Freedom to Find Rest.”
Lee-Cornell opened with a Rolling Stone interview with the singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, who’s set to release an album called “Good Grief.”
“What I realized is grief must be witnessed,” Bareilles told Rolling Stone. “You must share it. It doesn’t heal on its own. The alchemy of it doesn’t change unless you share it with other people.”
Lee-Cornell enumerated some of the losses the Kerrville community has suffered: beloved family and friends and neighbors, a “sense of normalcy and safety that is so critical to our human flourishing,” the “ability to send your children to camp or vacation with your family on the river without an ounce of worry or fear,” even “the ability to give yourself fully to joy and leisure and play, especially along the edges of the Guadalupe River, a river with whom your relationship will never be the same again.”
It’s not uncommon, she said, “for the weight of grief and the demands of life after a sudden and unthinkable loss to collapse the scaffolding upholding your relationships, your families, your trust in your community, and even your trust in your own sense of self and your desire to keep going.”
“You have suffered and endured more than any one person, more than any one congregation, ought to have suffered and endured over this past year,” she told those in worship.
Earlier in the week, Hernandez Garcia shared with Lee-Cornell details about the congregation’s flood relief and recovery work over the past year. “What I witnessed in this report — and what I witnessed through Jasiel’s testimony of your heart and your passion — is that you too, like Jesus, are eager to bring relief to those who need it the most,” she said. Church members and friends:
- Helped reunite families of campers and staff at Camp La Junta
- Welcomed teams from Crisis Response International, the Small Business Administration and the American Red Cross into the church space
- Teamed with the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country to support four case managers who resourced 157 households
- Provided households and individuals with funds for repairs and unmet needs “to those that no other groups or agencies are willing to cover”
- Supported communitywide mental health and well-being initiatives
- Helped with much-needed infrastructure projects at Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly and Camp La Junta.
“The truth in all of this is from the moment you woke up on July 4, 2025, you have not stopped changing this world through one act of mercy at a time,” Lee-Cornell told the congregation. “You have joined Christ in bringing relief to those who needed it most.”
That tally doesn’t include “the small but profound acts of mercy you show every day in small moments — the hugs you give, the check-ins you make with one another, delivering coffees and casseroles —just showing up, offering a knowing glance, holding each other in your arms and in your prayers,” she said.
Lee-Cornell noted that in May, Aaron Parsley, a senior editor with Texas Monthly, released a podcast series called “Where the River Took Us.” “The series has allowed listeners like myself to bear witness to the grief that Aaron and his family and so many others have endured this year,” Lee-Cornell said. One of the people Parsley interviewed was his sister, Alissa, “who shares beautifully and openly about her son Clay, who was only 20 months old last year” when he perished in the flood. In the podcast, Alissa tells her brother about what she calls “glimmers”: small joys that she and her close friends notice throughout the day and share with one another in a text group “as a way to keep each other in the present, in the here and now,” Lee-Cornell said.
A friend in San Francisco has a four-year-old daughter who kisses a photo of Clay on her way out the door each day. “Part of the weird thing about Clay’s death is how rich other relations have become,” Alissa told her brother. “How can the worst thing that ever happened to me also lead to such beautiful things?”
“Not that I wouldn’t do anything to have him back,” Alissa says, “but oh, the glimmers!”
On Saturday, pastors and staff at First Presbyterian Church of Kerrville led what Lee-Cornell called “a poignant service of prayer along the river. I felt like we were pilgrims together, walking along a sacred path, seeing God’s presence and comfort and peace.”
After lunch, the PDA team walked over to the pavilion on the river, where the scene was different than what they’d experienced that morning.
A live band played country tunes. “People were floating and fishing on the water,” she said. “Kids were plopping into the water from their rope swing. The sight of people relaxed, celebrating and enjoying themselves on the river loosened a tightness in my shoulders I didn’t know I was holding.”
“Christ invites us to trust that we can breathe deeply again,” she said. “Jesus invites us to find the freedom to rest in his divine wisdom.”
Paradoxically, “that freedom to rest is found in embracing the yoke he offers us.” Christ’s yoke “is a gift and an opportunity to draw ever closer to God, who will carry us forward in God’s ministry — in the beauty, in the privilege and in the honor of loving and caring for our neighbors, of bearing witness to one another in our griefs and our celebrations.”
“First Presbyterian Church of Kerrville, I thank God,” Lee-Cornell said. “I thank God for your courage in the face of chaos, for your unwavering compassion in light of so much suffering. I thank God for your commitment to lovingly holding your community together when it seemed like the whole world was unraveling before your eyes.”
“I thank God for you. May the walk we shared together [on Saturday] along the river, may the walk we continue to take embolden you for the journey ahead,” she said. “For it is in taking Christ’s yoke and in bearing witness to one another’s grief and in the full contours of our lives that we will find rest for our souls. And there, in that blessed rest, you will begin to catch them again — glimmers of hope and joy, shimmering like light on the waters of the Guadalupe River. To God be the glory. Amen.”
By Mike Ferguson, Presbyterian News Service
