a community creating for the relentless return of Sunday
God, you have given us each of us gifts to use as members of the body of Christ. Here are our gifts – the work of our hands, our hearts, and our lives. We pray that they may help to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to our world, today and always, here and everywhere. Amen.
Submitted by Rev. Daniel Hayward, Trinity Ingleside and Newington United Churches (The United Church of Canada), South Stormont ON.
Loving God, we will hear how long ago the people told Ezra to read the Scriptures to them. As we listen to your Word today, may we find it as moving as they did, as we are filled with the light of your love and opened to your call which sends us to live your message. Amen.
Submitted by Rev. Daniel Hayward, Trinity Ingleside and Newington United Churches (The United Church of Canada), South Stormont ON.
You have knit us together, your body,
and we confess that sometimes we are busy pulling out the stitches,
trying to go our own way, heedless of the needs of other members.
You have made us one through your Spirit,
and we confess that we sometimes value our individualism over your call.
You remind us that if we were all the same, there could be no body,
and we confess that might be easier for us, even if it is not your will.
You call us to work together, suffer together, rejoice together, and to follow your most excellent way.
But the way of love is hard work. Cleanse us of our selfish desires and our arrogance, and fill us with your vision of justice, peace, and harmony, for we, though many, are one body. We ask this in the power of your one Spirit. Amen.
God does not call us to wallow in our brokenness—instead, we confess and know God’s healing, then move forward into God’s call. Each of our bodies, as well as Christ’s body, the Church, is a place we can experience God’s grace and power. Friends, believe and live this good news: In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven. Thanks be to God! Amen.
Submitted by Rev. Teri Peterson, the Presbyterian Church of Palatine, IL.
Your law is perfect, oh LORD, but we are not. Rather than understanding the ways your will for us would revive us, make us wise and bring us joy, we bristle at the thought of submission. We pretend that we know better, that our desires and motives are pure. In our pride, we lose our awe, our fear of your majesty and power.
Give us hearts that know the value of keeping your commandments and minds that desire understanding of your will more than the purest gold or the sweetest honey. Grant us humility; clear us from our hidden faults. Help us to be the people you made each of us to be, so that together we might the body you call us to be.
Assurance of Pardon
The truth of God’s love is this: before we knew God, before we knew love and before we understood the depth of our sin, the reconciling work of Christ was done. Through the Holy Spirit, we reach out the one who lived, died and rose again to reveal God’s resurrection power to us and for us. Hear and believe the good news: In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven.
Submitted by Laura Viau.
Often when the lectionary cuts out verses of a passage, it’s to avoid something uncomfortable. This week, it cuts out our discomfort with hearing lay liturgists try to pronounce 26 beauties of old Hebrew names, though I confess there is a small part of me that thinks it would be amusing to schedule someone to be liturgist and hand them the list: “Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah…” I mean, I’d never do it, of course, but a little daydreaming never hurt anybody.
Once you read around all those names, you find actually a touching story of a community hearing the word of the Lord, read and proclaimed, and finding all the mixture of emotion and knowledge that comes with a real encounter with the living word.
Perhaps you’ll be contemplating how the creation proclaims the word–while many of us in the north are experiencing something like the dead of winter, and others farther south wondering if winter will ever appear (or dealing with record heat in southern hemisphere summer), it’s easy to forget that human language isn’t the only way to experience God’s goodness. The psalm reminds me of the Celtic understanding of the big and little book. The written scripture is of course crucial (as the psalmist says), but it’s the little book–we can also read of God’s grace in the big book of creation.
The two New Testament readings lend themselves, in my opinion, beautifully to annual meeting season. When we reflect on who God calls us to be as a community, and how we have lived that out in the past year and how we might do so in the coming year, what better place to begin than with Jesus’ mission statement? Or with Paul’s vision for the church? So often we are captivated by the mission and vision statements we write in committees, only to be forgotten until the next annual meeting. How do we live out this vision and mission passed down to us in scripture? Both would make stellar prayers of confession, I think–so often we pursue our own self-interest rather than that of the whole body, so often we sanitize the mission of Jesus into nice healing and teaching and bleeding and rising. What does it mean to be the body of a Christ who says he is here to be with the poor, captive, blind, oppressed?
What are you contemplating this week? Do you have any ideas for visually enhancing the worship space this week? For calling us to generosity in the offering? For assuring us of forgiveness in the midst of our brokenness? For calling us together to worship? Affirming our faith?
No matter how formed or unformed your idea, stop in to the comments for conversation and inspiration!
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