division – 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.

Confession and Pardon: harming Creation, exploiting our siblings

God of justice, God of mercy, as one we confess our failings:

Though you conceived all the cosmos and called it Good,
We disregard the holiness of Creation, exploiting it for our own gain.

Though you gave birth to one human race
bestowing your image and your blessing on every human being,
We deny that image in those we mark as Other,
as if there were only enough blessing for some of us.

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.

And when we are the ones oppressed, our exhaustion and fear poison us,
warping our ability to trust, causing us to lash out at those we love.

In this dog-eat-dog world, this zero-sum game of divide-and-conquer,
We become too wrapped up in our own survival
to lift up our siblings drowning alongside us.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

Friends, our remorse is a sign of God’s grace already at work within us. Assured of God’s mercy, we are free to seek new ways of being together.

God’s Word forgives and redeems us. God’s Breath revitalizes us for the journey. Emboldened by this good news, let us share God’s love with one another.

I wrote this for a service with a central theme of imagination, and 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. My sermon’s text was Genesis 25:19-34 and explored the relationship between Jacob – with his marginalizing identities who assimilates into patriarchy – and Esau with his privilege who eventually seeks out reconciliation with his brother. You can read or watch the sermon here.

While the Genesis text was my sermon focus, I wanted to fit the lectionary’s Gospel reading into my liturgy. That reading was Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, the Parable of the Sower.