“At the center of the Christmas story is hope…hope which comes to us in the form of a vulnerable, poor baby. A child, not a king, changes the world. God appears to us as a marginalized, Afro-Semitic, Jewish child from Nazareth in Palestine. A child who grows up to teach us to welcome the stranger. How would our world be different if we loved our neighbors as ourselves?” asks the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church.
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PENTECOST Here’s a call to worship, rooted in the Christian past, but open to the global voices, and celebrating an Earth-based liturgy. Three voices scattered in the worship space, perhaps one at the Table, another at …
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After searching for an opening Easter Acclamation that is progressive and cosmic in nature, and finding nothing that went where I’d like to take the congregation, I decided I’d just have to write one.
This acclamation/invocation draws on themes found in the Gospel of Thomas, Meister Eckhart, Hildegard von Bingen, Teilhard de Chardin, and Thomas Berry. I also hope is has some of the poetic flare of that great earth mystic, Saint John (Muir) of the Mountains.
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Reinhold Niebuhr’s brother, H. Richard, argued for faithfulness to the example of Jesus’s nonviolence, while Reinhold believed this was naive and unrealistic in an imperfect world. H. Richard was the purist to the Christian faith, believing that following the Golden Rule, no matter the consequences, is what Jesus and God called us to do — the success of the mission being in God’s hands rather than our own. Reinhold, however, looked at the more practical side of things, substituting his or the world’s idea of what was possible and changing his ethics accordingly. H. Richard thus trusted more in the providential moral arc of history as M.L. King, Jr. , would call it rather than a realist’s version of what humans believe is attainable given their corrupt nature. In essence, H. Richard focused on the power of God’s grace to transform our spirits and the world for the better, while Reinhold accepted a more cynical view of our ability to be radically changed as a specie.
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The butterfly lives in a seamless realm, a matrix, poetically in the palm of God/dess’s hand, not alien or estranged. Is it possible for us to find that kind of confidence, or trust in the nature of the Universe itself? Let’s take a moment or two to think about Wisdom, and our place in the Universe. What kind of liturgy, or worship experience, would celebrate the kind of inclusive, nurturing community the butterfly knows without thinking about it?
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Drawn by God’s presence. . .
. . .we gather
Inspired by God’s spirit. . .
. . .we worship
Hungry for meaning?
Welcome home.
Thirsty for purpose?
Welcome home.
When Jesus prayed, he found a sense of sacred oneness, when Buddha meditated, he became awake to deeper levels of awareness. No one truly knows the effectiveness of prayer, but one thing is for sure- when we take the time to be still, to slow down, to go inward, we almost always discover something about ourselves and the potential awareness that we are not alone.
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Come to us, God of peace.
Come with your healing and your reconciling power.
Come, that fear may be cast out by love;
In this New Year, let us lift our vision of what we can do and what we can achieve:
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Full of God, full to birthing,
Mary howls: head back, hair tossed,
Hands skyward with joy
That wrongs are about to be righted,
Salvation’s about to be sighted.
“you who delight me” is in two parts:
poems of love—secular and spirited writing about people, places and events; and
words of spirit and faith—inclusive language, contemporary liturgies for individual contemplation and progressive faith communities.
Born to a poor uneducated carpenter and his partner
All: Jesus was one with oppressed humankind
In Advent, we build the framework of Christmas
together we put up scaffolding
signalling something’s being renovated
something new is being created.
Gracious life-giving God, you call us to live out our faith in ways that honor you and bless our neighbors, and we recognize that worship is an essential part of our faith journey.
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God in our distant places
Draw us closer
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
In the beginning was the Word …
It all started with an act of divine self-expression.
and the Word was with God …
It all comes from the center of God.
