worshipping an infinite God
who delights in
Their diverse children
This is the archive of all liturgy pieces published to my wordpress feed; I’ll update this page regularly.
I welcome you to make use of any content shared here in worship services, classes or presentations, or other public settings. Please credit Avery Arden and link to binarybreakingworship.com (and remember that my pronouns are they/them!).
I love to hear about how my work is being used! It’s not necessary, but if you want to let me know you’ve used one of my pieces, email me at queerlychristian36@gmail.com.
My work is also completely free, but if you’d like to send a few bucks my way in thanks, you can do so at https://ko-fi.com/averyarden.
Table of Contents
Full liturgy for themed services
“Liturgy for a Service Exploring God’s Place in Our Suffering”
- These pieces were written for a service centered around Job 38 and Mark 4:35-41, with themes of God’s bigness and God’s co-suffering with us.
- Includes: Call to worship, opening prayer, Psalm-based prayer, confession & pardon, and affirmation of faith.
- I wrote this liturgy for a service centered around Ezekiel 17:22-24, a parallel text offered for Mark 4:26-34 (the parable of the mustard seed). In the Ezekiel text, God proclaims that Xe makes low the high tree, and makes the dry tree flourish — an upturning of expectations, indeed!
- Includes: Call to worship, opening prayer, prayer of confession, and affirmation of faith.
- “God calls us to gather as one grove,
to spread our roots deep in a foundation of justice and love,
to bear fruit that lasts.
But our roots are often disconnected, shallow, easily uprooted.
Often the soil we settle into is poisonous,
toxic to ourselves and the whole community…”
- I wrote this liturgy for an Easter season service centered around Acts 8:26-40’s story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, also tying in John 15:9-17’s instructions to love one another as Jesus loved us.
- Includes: Call to worship, opening prayer, Confession and pardon, affirmation of faith, pastoral prayer, invitation to the offering, invitation to the table, prayer after communion, charge and benediction
- “We believe in the irresistible Spirit who pervades the world
and abides with whomever Xe choses
with no regard for the boxes and boundaries
that humankind constructs.
To the dismay of worldly powers, this Spirit bestows special care
upon the most reviled and despised,
those deemed weak and worthless in human eyes…”
Liturgy for the Ascension: Joining the Cloud of Witnesses
- Includes: call to worship, opening prayer, psalm-based prayer, confession and pardon, and affirmation of faith.
- “God in whose image we all are made,
God who pervades all time and space,
when you died and rose again you drew all people to yourself.
We in this congregation, we in this denomination,
we who live in this small point in time
are not the only ones whom you have gathered
to sing your praise and delve into deeper relationship
with neighbor, with stranger, and with you…”
More Ascension Liturgy: Acts 1, Luke 24, Jesus’s wounds
- Includes: Call to worship, opening prayer, confession, reflection, benediction
- “The Risen One is here among us, here and now.
Jesus calls to us, not to look toward the sky,
but into the faces of those who surround us –
to listen to them; to commune with them;
to live peaceably with them whenever possible
and to disrupt injustice wherever necessary…”
Pentecost Liturgy: Spirit of breath & flame, howling gale & still small voice
- I wrote this liturgy for Pentecost, May 2021 that centered around Ezekiel 37’s valley of dry bones, but much of it would fit well in any service focused on the Holy Spirit.
- Includes: Call to worship, two opening prayers, confession and pardon, affirmation of faith.
- “God’s breath that divinizes all flesh,
God’s Spirit who whirls through communities
of all kinds of cultures and creeds,
God’s flame that burns and builds anew
knits all of humanity into one Body.
Liturgy for Christmastide: God of the manger, God of the stranger
- Includes: Opening prayer, pastoral prayer, invitation to the table, and benediction
- I wrote these pieces for the First Sunday of Christmastide, centered around the story of the Presentation at the Temple as told in Luke 2:22-40. There are also some references to Isaiah 61.
- “You who choose interdependence over self-reliance,
society’s outcasts over mighty kings,
abundance for every creature over excess for the few,
You are indeed worthy of our praise!…”
Call to Worship & Opening Prayer
“Queer God with Diverse Children”
- “Each of us — with our bodies of diverse shapes, sizes, and abilities — is an integral part of your magnificent spectrum. You call us Good, you call us whole and holy, just as we are…”
Opening prayer: “Strange God, wisdom for fools”
- O World’s Restorer, Status quo’s Demise,
you look into our minds, survey our assumptions and our plans
and you throw back your head and laugh.
You do not reveal your Wisdom
to the ones the world calls wise.
(They would not know what to make of it, anyway.)…”
“Draw the Circle Wide: God gathers us in our diversity”
- Reading: Isaiah 56:1-8
- “God the Weaver of our many threads into a colorful whole —
In which no color drowns out any other, and all have their role in the tapestry — Open us to your presence today, now!…”
A call to worship that welcomes non-Christians
- “The Being worshipped in this space
is vaster than walls can contain or religions can claim…”
“God calls the oppressed — and the oppressor”
- Reading: Genesis 21 — the abuse of Hagar
- Themes: oppression, patriarchy, and white supremacy
- “God who died and rose again,
You look upon barrenness and unkindness and hopelessness
and say, “I can work with this.” …”
Called to do justice, love kindness, walk humbly
- Reading: Micah 6:8
- “You promised us that your yoke is easy and your burden light —not because the path you lead us down is never hard, but because you bear every burden with us…”
“God the Sower who invites our parternship”
- Reading: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, the Parable of the Sower
- Theme: Imagination
- “You are the Wind that stirs our stagnation,
who takes us by the hands and pulls us into action,
inviting us to be co-laborers in the hard harvest work
as your Kin(g)dom takes root, grows, and blossoms across the world…”
A call to worship for Easter Sunday
For the Second Sunday of Easter: “Jesus of the Wounds”
- Reading: John 20
- “Today, we worship Jesus of the Scars.
Today, we reach out to touch his side –
by reaching out to those who are struggling around us.
We come with our own small victories.
We come with our own wounds –
some scarred over, some still bruising…”
- Reading: Exodus 17:1-7, looking at the wilderness wandering through a lens of generational trauma
- “We come as a community on a journey
Still learning how to show up for each other
And how to live into God’s Kin(g)dom.
We come with minds buzzing with questions,
or burdened by mental illness…”
Confession & Pardon
“We rush to cheap grace, cry ‘peace’ when there is no peace”
- Readings: Jeremiah 6:14, Micah 6
- Written for a service centered around themes of oppression, patriarchy, and white supremacy; it explored how our world shapes each of us based on our various identities and what kind of reconciliation is possible between oppressors and the ones who oppress.
- “We cry “peace!” when we mean “compliance!”
We cry “peace!” when we mean “complacency!”
We cry “peace!” when there is no peace… “
“Learning to Face Hard Truths with the Prophet Amos”
- Reading: Amos 7 with its metaphor of the plumbline
- Themes: Acknowledging harm done to Indigenous peoples, Black communities, the earth via climate change, & against others in our personal lives.
- “You alone, O God, can teach us how to do right.
Open our hearts. Help us lower our defenses.
We will face the harm we have done
so that we can move forward.”
“Our siblings and God’s world are suffocating”
- I wrote this piece for Pentecost Sunday, but it would work well for any service emphasizing the work of the Spirit or the breath of God.
- “Only in acknowledging our complicity
can we join in God’s restorative work. …”
“Harming Creation, exploiting our siblings”
- Reading: Genesis 25:19-34 (reconciliation between Jacob and Esau)
- Theme: imagination — how God’s gift of imagination can help us envision and enact a better world, a world liberated from oppressive binary and hierarchical structures like cishetero-patriarchy and white supremacy.
- “We disregard the holiness of Creation, exploiting it for our own gain. …
We rob our siblings of their autonomy and dignity;
we force them to live in fear and poverty,
and use their very bodies to fuel our own prosperity…”
“Wisdom’s presence where we fail to look”
- Reading: Proverbs 8
- “Wisdom whispers Her secrets to those the world rejects,
but we do not hear Her echo in their voices,
for we are too busy ignoring, exploiting, or shaming them…”
Sins of uniformity, oppression, passivity, self-loathing
- Written for a service that centered around themes of reconciliation and interdependence.
- Reading: Genesis 45:1-15, exploring Joseph’s gender nonconformity as a source for the brothers’ violence against Joseph.
- “Under the guise of seeking unity, we force uniformity
and reject all those who are just too different from us to fit in.
Convict us. Embolden us. Teach us the long repentance road. …”
Trauma, Isolation, Scarcity, Individualism
- Reading: Exodus 17:1-7, looking at the wilderness wandering through a lens of generational trauma
- “…we fall prey to myths of scarcity and individualism
that transform friends into enemies, comrades into competitors…”
Confession & Pardon during a Queer Wedding service
- “Creator, you fashioned us with care and called us Good.
Yet we point fingers at one another, calling each other broken, evil, wrong…”
Pastoral Prayer / Intercessions
“Praying for All Who Know the Heart of the Stranger”
- A pastoral prayer designed for Immigration Sunday
- Prayers for Indigenous peoples, Palestinians, immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, those subject to double consciousness & the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype
- “Our God is the Ultimate Other; Xe knows firsthand what it is
to be the one who does not fit, whose ways are not ‘our ways’
and whose thoughts are not ‘our thoughts’…”
“We do not yet ‘lack nothing'”
- “The psalmist proclaims that since God is their shepherd, “I shall lack nothing.”
Yet in our here and now, we lack much; we want much.
We pray for the future in which all will be satisfied…”
Intercessory prayers for victims of xenophobia
- I wrote this pastoral prayer for a Lenten service centered around Jeremiah 31:31-34 and John 12:20-33. How do we say yes to solidarity with those experiencing police brutality and hate crimes?
- “For every victim of a hate crime,
of white supremacy and white nationalism,
of fetishization, criminalization, and xenophobia, we pray…”
“For those who struggle to love neighbor and self”
- Written for a Lenten service centered around John 3:14-21 and particularly what it means for God to “so love the world.”
- “For those who struggle both to love their neighbor and themselves
after being burned one too many times…
for those who have experienced so much trauma or abuse
that they’re not sure what love looks like
outside of manipulation and humiliation…
for those who fear the vulnerability that love requires…
For those who have been made to feel unloveable…
For those who have been taught that love is something they earn…”
“For those desperate to be named, known, loved”
- Written for a Lenten service centered around Genesis 17:1-16 and Mark 8:27-38, with themes of God who names Themself and others; who seeks to be known by us just as She knows us.
- “My siblings in Jesus who earnestly asked his friends, “Who do you say that I am?”, I invite you to pray with me for all those made in this God’s image who are desperate to be known, to be named, to be respected and remembered.
Let us pray: For the Black lives stomped out by police brutality and white supremacy, for whom we shout “Say their name!”…
For the trans person whose chosen name, whose true name, is rejected by the ones they love the most…
For the children crying out their parents’ names in ICE’s cells…”
- Written for a Lenten service centered around Exodus 20:1-17 and John 2:13-22.
- “For those who engage in the long and thankless labor
of stripping tables of their unjust trappings:
who drag folding chairs into the rooms where decisions get made
and refuse to shut up until every voice is heard —
for the ministers, teachers, advocates
calling for reparation and constant reform, we pray….”
“Holy Week Intercessions: Praying for Jesus & for all unjustly blamed”
- “O God who hears the cries
- of those unjustly blamed,
those dehumanized and shamed,
those whose names are eradicated from recorded history
and who replies by becoming one of them,
by entering into ultimate solidarity on a Roman cross,
and by exposing the violence of worldly powers for the evil it is,
Thank you.”
“Easter Intercessions: Gratitude for what already is; dissatisfaction with what is not yet”
- “…already Jesus has drawn us to himself and holds us close;
already we have the promise that in death as in life, we belong to God…
[but] may our dissatisfaction with how much is yet broken fuel our drive to make your Kin(g)dom Come, your will be done…”
Affirmation of Faith
“Affirmation of Faith in a Queer God”
- I wrote this affirmation for a More Light Sunday service, which is celebrated by the PC(USA) every October on the Sunday nearest to National Coming Out Day.
- “To try to define the Divine in human words is a fool’s errand –
but luckily for us, God delights in making the foolish wise…
We believe that in the Person of Jesus Christ,
that same God – despite being beyond human constructs
like class and ethnicity and gender –
entered an impoverished household, entered a Jewish Palestinian body,
became one with that same oppressed and colonized people
with whom Xe had for so long persevered in relationship,
and was assigned male at birth…”
“Queer God who came out to Moses…and other biblical coming out stories”
- Written for my church’s More Light Sunday service, an LGBTQA/queer-focused service that occurs near National Coming Out Day.
- Themes: learning how to love ourselves, our neighbors, and our God; reclaiming scripture from those who have weaponized it; and the power of story.
“God’s Binary-Breaking Chosen Family”
- Readings: Mark 3:20-35, the famous “house divided” passage; Isaiah 56:1-8
- Theme: Jesus redefines family in a way that defies any human-created definition of superiority, and in that definition, Jesus renounces the behaviors from within the community that threaten the people he gathers.
- “We believe in a God who gathers more and still more people
into Her own family, a family that breaks human binaries
of blood ties and national borders, demographics and doctrines…”
“God of Oppressor and Oppressed”
- Reading: Genesis 21:8-21 — the abuse of Hagar
- Themes: oppression, patriarchy, and white supremacy
- We believe in the God of Sarah and Abraham
who does not let injustice go unchecked,
but who also does not abandon us in our sin.
We believe in the God of Hagar and Ishmael
who sees the outcast, who hears the cry of the oppressed,
and responds with compassion and blessing.
“Self-Emptying God who knows our trauma”
- Readings: Exodus 17:1-7, looking at the wilderness wandering through a lens of generational trauma; Philippians 2:1-13
- “We believe in Jesus Christ, who opens his arms to our unbelief
for he knew what it was to be human, to experience fear, grief, and pain —
even the trauma of the cross…”
“Creator God-with-us, whose existence is relationship”
- Central theme: imagination that envisions & enacts a better world
- Readings: Genesis 25:19-34 (Jacob & Esau); Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 (Parable of the Sower)
- “As beings made in the image of this relational God,
we are most human when we live outside of hierarchy and individualism
and live into community with God, with each other, and with all creation…”
“Faith in the Wounded God who calls us Good”
- Reading: John 20:19-30’s account of Jesus inviting Thomas to touch his wounds; also draws from Genesis 1
- Makes use of disability theology
“Trinity whose very existence is relationship, you have made us for relationship”
- Designed for Trinity Sunday.
- Centered on Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth, connecting our relationships with one another to our relationship to God and God’s own self-relationship in the Trinity.
“Creator God who pulls open every shut door”
- Readings: Genesis 1, Isaiah 56:1-8
- “In that Beginning shared in Genesis,
She brooded over watery darkness, as in the womb,
and gave birth to Creation in all its remarkable diversity —
including the day and night,
and the various shades of dawn and dusk between…
[Her] Spirit breathes life back into parched lands and withered hearts,
and pulls open every door we would keep shut,
sweeps away every line we draw in the sand.”
Eucharistic Liturgy
Invitation: “Let no one be led to believe, ‘I have no place here'”
- Readings: Isaiah 56:1-8; Genesis 45:1-15
- “Let no one say, “God has cut me off from the Body.”
Let no one be led to believe, “I have no place here.”
For Jesus stands, and beckons, and says,
“Come! Yes, you! Come, and be fed.””
Invitation: “If the world tells you you’re unworthy…”
- For a More Light Sunday service — an LGBTQA/queer-focused service.
- Themes: learning how to love ourselves, our neighbors, and our God; reclaiming scripture from those who have weaponized it; and the power of story.
Invitation: “Outcasts welcome; bring your struggles and guilt”
- Reading: Genesis 21 — the abuse of Hagar
- “When we are shunned, shamed, called unloveable,
Jesus sets a place for us.
When we are the ones doing the shunning and shaming,
Jesus sets a place for us, too, inviting us into a better way. …”
Invitation to the Table, Prayer after Communion: “Come with your doubts”
- Themes: trauma and community’s role in the journey to recovery
- Reading: Exodus 17:1-7, the wilderness wandering
- “Jesus truly does welcome us — welcomes you! — to his table just as you are, with your doubts and your dread, your trauma and your pain.
So come, sit with us, and be fed by the One who loves you dearly.”
Invitation to the Table, Prayers after Communion: “No gatekeeping”
- “this table is not ours to guard or gatekeep,
and there is no shortage of blessing here…”
Invitations to the Offering, Prayers of Dedication
- “O God who gathers more, and still more, people to your table —
a table that is not contained by our one church, but extends
across varied worship spaces, across diverse cultures and communities —
bless the gifts that each of us brings today…”
Benediction / Charge & Blessing
General benedictions: thanksgiving, joy, solidarity, lament
- Comrades in Christ,
Here we have received good reason to believe
that the God of the Oppressed is with us in solidarity
– not only when we are content or joyful
but also when we are grieving, when we are enraged,
when we feel disappointed in God, when we cannot feel God…”
A benediction for Easter Sunday
- “the God who Creates, Redeems, and Sustains us
works alongside us, empowering us
to roll back the stones on every tomb.”
For the Second Sunday of Easter
- Reading: John 20
- “Though wounded ourselves, we join you in healing your wounded…”
- “As you, Irresistible Wind, push us out into the world,
let us remember that unity is not uniformity,
that we may rejoice in your diverse gifts,
that we may share your richness with one another
whatever our gifts, whatever our creeds…”
- Reading: Luke 14’s banquet parable; Song of Songs
- “In the woman of the Song of Songs, we learn that passion and pleasure can unite us and lead us to God.
We are ready to go out to learn to delight in our own bodies,
and to grow closer to one another, your people…”
Prayerful Reflections
“Fighting Damaging Silence, Honoring Formative Silence”
- A reflection / short sermon for a Coming Out Day service
- “Listen. I know how your heart speeds up when you try to speak up on your own behalf or another’s — my heart does too. I know the lump that forms in your throat and when you speak anyway, maybe people will be mad. Maybe you’ll have to fight. Maybe you’ll even lose. But speak anyway. …”
“A queer reflection on the Agony in the Garden”
- For Holy Thursday / Maundy Thursday.
- “O God, set our hearts on fire with a fierce compassion for your oppressed children, so that we cannot sleep when they cry out…”
“A queer prayer for foot washing”
- For Holy Thursday / Maundy Thursday
- “I also do not know if I could take the feet of my betrayers, my deniers –
those who declare my identity a falsehood or a phase,
those who sentence me to suffering by their hate,
those who wield you against me…”
“Waiting with Mary Magdalene — lament that wrestles God”
- For Holy Saturday or Easter Sunday.
- Readings: John 20 and Isaiah 56
- “As Mary Magdalene sits alone in the predawn stillness, she weeps — but her tears are not only grief: they are tears of frustration. Tears with questions. Tears that demand something of Divinity. Mary is not passive in her weeping: she is wrestling the divine…”
“Advent: a time to embrace the Divine in us”
- “Divinity embraces mortality;
God entered our world and fused the physical with the Divine
so inextricably that we can declare
that every cell of us pulses with Splendor, despite the infection of sin…”
- Mary’s yes to God (see Luke 1:26-55), freely and triumphantly given, was no passive yes: she said yes to interdependence with her God.
- “The time for us to take notice of one whom this world deliberately ignores –
a woman of color, a poor woman, a teen mom, a refugee.
Was Mary meek and mild? Not if those words are about
unquestioning submission, fearful passivity…”
Communion meditation for Christmastide: “Jesus of the House of Bread”
- “Two thousand years ago, Divinity entered the world in the form of an infant born in Bethlehem — a town whose name means “House of Bread”!
He was swaddled by parents poor in the eyes of the world, but rich in love, and laid in a manger — a food trough for cattle!
Thus it is that from the very moment of his birth, Jesus made known his intention to feed the hungry world with his very being…”
“God’s vastness, fearsome and comforting”
- I wrote this for a Advent worship service some years ago; it was our pageant day, when the children enact the nativity and we sing songs of how the divine Word became human flesh, how the great became small so that the small might become great, how each of us has a gift to offer God.
- “When I sit with God in quiet moments, I feel so small. Sometimes, this is a beautiful thing: I become a little child in the lap of their mother…
But other times God’s vastness in the face of my own littleness becomes overwhelming: then I am an ant under God’s magnifying glass, I am one atom in the face of the ever-expanding universe that is God…”
- “God our Beloved, you hold out your hands
with the wounds that mark your solidarity with us,
to accept us into your arms as one spouse takes another…”
Hymns
“For Everyone Born” revised to be more fully inclusive
- “For woman and man, a place at the table —
and all those between, beyond, and besides;
expanding our world, dismantling power,
each valued for what their voice can provide. …”
Combatting Antisemitism on Good Friday: An alternative to the Solemn Reproaches of the Cross
- My intention is to encourage Christians to examine our antisemitism during this week, rather than fueling it with language that blames the Jewish people past and present for Jesus’s death.
- “My covenant with them is eternal;
My Torah instructs them well on how to love me
by loving the stranger, the Other, the defenseless –
Yet you claim your relationship with me negates theirs!
You call their testament “old,”
and claim the God you find there
is bloodthirsty, barbaric, not the same God…”
Binary-Breaking Worship 