You are welcome to use this liturgy in your online worship services and distribute it to your congregation. It is free for worship use. Please credit Roger Gench of the Presbyterian Outlook. Download the PDF of the full order worship: Liturgy 02-28-21 … [Read more...]
Spiritual friendship
Spiritual direction saved my ministry! In the early 1990s, I “hit the wall” and entered a program in spiritual direction through Oasis Ministries in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, because I was burning out and needed to learn how to pray again. In the years since, I have benefited greatly from spiritual direction; I also have found a yearning for it in congregations I have served, with people on a journey of discernment or in search of healing or liberation. I became a devotee of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius and have shared this dynamic process of spiritual discernment with as many individuals and groups as I can — with anyone who expresses even the slightest interest. I describe spiritual direction (or spiritual friendship, as I like to call it) as walking along with someone as they discern the movement of God in their life and as they describe their spiritual forest, oasis, desert or wilderness — the vulnerable spaces where God seeks to bring resurrection out of the … [Read more...]
1st Sunday in Lent — February 21, 2021
Genesis 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15 Lent 1B Increasingly, Christians have sought ways to include animals in the liturgical life of the church. Our Catholic and Anglican friends customarily observe a “blessing of the animals” in their worship life every October on the Feast Day of St. Francis. Many Presbyterian congregations have begun to include animal blessings among their annual rituals in order to honor relationships with beloved pets whose lives are closely linked with our own. This past October, even in the midst of pandemic lockdown, some of my friends found a way to bless their dear pets online. For those who missed this in October, the first Sunday of Lent provides another occasion for reflection on human relationships with other creatures, for two of the texts featured in the lectionary explicitly mention them. The first lesson for this Sunday (Genesis 9:8-17) narrates God’s eternal covenant promise to all living things. The Genesis narrative began with divine blessing … [Read more...]
Order of worship — February 21, 2021
You are welcome to use this liturgy in your online worship services and distribute it to your congregation. It is free for worship use. Please credit Roger Gench of the Presbyterian Outlook. Download the PDF of the full order worship: Liturgy 02-21-21 … [Read more...]
Transfiguration of the Lord — February 14, 2021
Mark 9:2-9 In the Presbyterian liturgical year, Transfiguration Sunday marks the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday. However, it is well worth noting that our Roman Catholic friends celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration on August 6, which results in a haunting juxtaposition for August 6 also happens to be Hiroshima Remembrance Day — a day commemorating a very different kind of “transfiguration.” Seventy-five years ago, on that fateful day, the Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, took off from a military base on Tinian Island and dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. I was stunned to learn of this connection, and so the last time I found myself preaching on Transfiguration Sunday, I placed Mark’s story of Jesus’ transfiguration side by side with remembrance of Hiroshima, inviting reflection on the nonviolence of Jesus and the bombing of Hiroshima. Reactions to the sermon surprised me. It seems that decades after our nation’s fateful … [Read more...]
Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience
M. Shawn Copeland Orbis Books, 160 pages This book by a prominent womanist theologian could not be more timely for our present moment of racial and political reckoning. For Shawn Copeland, the connection between the cross of Jesus and the suffering of our world is deep and broad. She argues that theology must help us “work out the relation between the murderous crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and the murderous crucifixion of countless poor, excluded, and despised children, women, and men whom we have impoverished, marginalized, and excluded through our power privilege, and position.” Indeed, the cross of Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of neutrality or innocence with respect to the suffering of countless people on account of racism, economic exploitation and homophobia in our communities and world. The social disorders that create oppression are not someone else’s disorder or oppression, they are ours. As she puts it, it is “our consciousness, not someone else’s, that is permeated … [Read more...]
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