Weddings – Binary-Breaking Worship

Confession and Pardon for a queer wedding

CALL TO CONFESSION

God desires that all Creation might be one,
that love be central to human life;
and that all beings might dwell together in right relationship.

Trusting in God’s mercy, let us come to God and acknowledge
all that separates us from love’s source, all that wounds creation.
Let us pray:

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

Creator, you fashioned us with care and called us Good.
Yet we point fingers at one another,
calling each other broken, evil, wrong.

Liberator, you freed us from the captivity of our own limitations and fears, teaching us your Truth,
yet we continue to subject one another to yokes of falsehood, cruelty, and shame.

Mischievous Spirit, you flow wherever you will, breathing fresh life into long-dead things and blowing down the walls we build –
yet we lean into death and division, tearing your Creation apart.
We construct national borders and gender and race
to hold all that is different from us at arm’s length.

Forgive us. Nourish and invigorate us.
Empower us to love bigger, seek deeper –
teach us how to join you in healing the world where we can.

ASSURING OF PARDON

Hear God’s words of grace for us, for you:
“And I, once I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

This is the new thing God has done and is doing:
She has freed us from suffering and injustice
so that we might live into the goodness we were made to inhabit.

Let this truth liberate you and bring you peace: you are forgiven.
Let us share the peace of Jesus with one another – especially with those strangers who today become our family.

(passing of the peace)

Friends new and old, we have been freed from sin and suffering –
and freed for joy and love.

It is one iteration of that God-given love
that brings us together today:

The love uniting [name] and [name].

This is the liturgy I wrote for the wedding between me and Leah. Some of the sins I bring to this confession are ones inflicted particularly against LGBTQA+ persons. God calls us to a world of joy and justice, where such hatred is no more, so that we all might live and serve together.

A call to worship that welcomes non-Christian participants

The Being worshipped in this space
is vaster than walls can contain or religions can claim.

All true loves have this Being as their source,
and so the love we celebrate today
transcends gender and bloodlines and state borders.

Here we are united
in all our diversity:

welcome, you with faith and you with doubts,
you from the North and you from the South,
welcome with all your joys and pains, fears and hopes.

We invite you to join us in praising the One
who fashioned human beings to experience all sorts of love.

Here in this space,
Love grafts us together.

This is the call to worship that I wrote for my wedding back in May 2019. Because many of the attendees were not Christian, I wanted to explicitly welcome them into worship too.

The language of this call to worship is rather specific to the context (for instance, the reference to North and South is because most of my relatives hail from the Northern portion of the United States, while most of my wife’s hail from the South; plus all the “love” stuff is clearly because it was for a queer wedding), so feel free to edit this piece to suit your own context.