O Singer, your song is welcome and holiness,
healing and trust.
Teach us a new song to sing your praise,
and tune our ears to melodies we have never heard,
that we may add our voices to the harmony
uniting all creation as one
in adoration and thanksgiving of you,
through Christ, your all-embracing song. Amen.
(prayer from here)
healing and trust.
Teach us a new song to sing your praise,
and tune our ears to melodies we have never heard,
that we may add our voices to the harmony
uniting all creation as one
in adoration and thanksgiving of you,
through Christ, your all-embracing song. Amen.
(prayer from here)
AS we move into the first Sunday of Ordinary Time, what are you doing for worship over this long season? Are you striking out on your own with a summer sermon series (or maybe a series of series)? Staying on Lectionary? Choosing to follow one strand of the Lectionary readings and ignoring the others?
Does worship become more relaxed between now and September and the restart of the program year? OR maybe you keep going full tilt all summer long? Some places in vacation country are actually busier in the next few months than during the winter...
At any rate, the RCL readings for this week (Proper 4c, 2nd After Pentecost) are here
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| I remember books like this... |
I see we have Elijah's odd approach to firestarting. But you know, whatever works for you.
Or as an alternate we could visit the dedication of Solomon's temple.
Or we could hear the Psalmist exhorting us to sing a new song. Because we know that church folk are always so excited about singing new songs. Right??? No???????
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| ANd another book! |
Turning to the Christian Scriptures...
WE find a piece from Galatians where Paul pushes that the Gospel he shares is from God. But apparently the gospel shared by Joe down the road has problems.....
OR Luke tells us about the healing of a centurion's slave. And maybe it is just my anti-authoritarian streak but is the centurion's faith pretty similar to giving orders?
Wherever you find yourself leaning, or falling, or being led/pulled this week share your wisdom, queries, frustrations in the comments....
And now I see lightning flashing and hear thunder rumbling. Guess I should turn off the computer (and won't get the garden in tonight...)
Using an idea generated via the FB group (there is a note on the FB page with some great ideas).
ReplyDeleteWith vacation and study leave I will be preaching 12 Sundays...therefore...The Twelve Sunday's of Summer which will be a parody on the 12 Days of Christmas.
This Sunday is "12 Stones" using Joshua 4 where the Israelites are crossing the Jordan and instructed to bring 12 stones...with the invitation to tell your children what these represent.
Pairing that text with Luke 2 where Jesus is 12 years old and is learning from those around him.
Right now I am toying with the idea of having a 3 x 5 card in the bulletin and have them jot down what they want to share with their children and grandchildren about God.
As I just posted on FB, I have a 250-word ending for my sermon, so I know where it's going. I just hope a beginning shows up sometime this week.
ReplyDelete"Graced Servanthood" -- The Judaizers to whom Paul refers, the Jewish elders who approach Jesus, the centurion himself -- all trapped by ideas -- legalities, trade-offs, and hierarchies -- of grace and service that bespeak limitation rather than freedom.
I had a horribly grief-laded afternoon yesterday and I think the sermon must be coming from my own sense of burdened limitation.
I'm doing a summer series called "the Faith We Sing"--I asked people to submit their three favorite hymns (along with why they're favorites) and I'm compiling those into a series that explores the theology, history, and scriptural (and maybe non-scriptural) imagery that we sing. I'm also hoping that I'll be able to pair a newer hymn with similar themes with some of those older faves, as a subtle reminder that theology and worship continue after the 1800s...but we'll see. That's proving a tad bit more difficult than I anticipated, because some of those old favorites have such narrow theological views. So we'll see how that goes.
ReplyDeleteOf course, all of that sort of needs to get done today so I can actually plan worship, so I'm feeling a tiny bit panicked. LOL.
Teri, can you maybe pair those unpairables with something in the same general area and use that as way in to talk about that continual growth in theology and even ask why we don't sing/write that way anymore?
DeleteGord, that's sort of what I'm doing with things like "I Come to the Garden" and "The Old Rugged Cross"...kind of. I finally got it down to 14 sundays of 3-4 hymns each. it's going to be a miracle if that all makes sense.
DeleteFOr myself, I was struck by the first line in the Psalm about singing a new song. SO I found other passages to support that idea and am going to talk about why we sing and why we sing what we sing. My early thoughts are here
ReplyDeleteJust now looking at these texts, and I'm preaching twice this Sunday (same sermon, thankfully). It's hard to resist Elijah and the fire. Perhaps that's my inner middle school boy talking, but it's a good story. No real thought on a direction yet. Must get bulletin information done tomorrow, so the Spirit better get cracking.
ReplyDeleteI'm pulling together the part of Solomon's prayer focusing on foreigners, Jesus & outsiders and strangers, and the Biblical tradition of welcoming the stranger. Asking what that looks like in our context--Pope Francis' homily on redemption of Atheists, the Vatican's quick denial about Atheists welcome into heaven, a school in Albuquerque denying a transgendered boy the right to graduate in the black gowns the boys were wearing. Just in the first thoughts.
ReplyDeleteAs a Lay-Worship-Leader-in-training, I usually have a few weeks notice when I am going to be preaching; and so my sermon is finished (minus a bit of polishing), and I e-mailed the liturgy to the person preparing the bulletin last night. I'm going with Luke. Jesus was amazed. What can we see in the world around us that would amaze Jesus? The Centurion was able to see beyond barriers of class and race and religion - how can we do the same?
ReplyDeleteI'm doing a sermon series on Elijah, more of a Bible Study than a sermon. I had themes for each week, that explored what prophets do, but didn't write them down. If I remember, I'll post them here.
ReplyDelete