Tag: relationship

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Affirmation of Faith Holy Days Liturgy

Affirmation of Faith: Trinity whose very existence is relationship, you have made us for relationship

Leader:

As one, let us affirm the faith that ties us together
while lifting up the wisdom of some of our fellow witnesses.

All:

We believe in the Triune God
whose very existence is relationship.

Although this Trinity is the one Being 
who could be fully self-sufficient
They chose instead to let Their love flow out 
into the formless void
and explode emptiness into life.

The dance of planets around stars, 
stars around galaxies,
each body’s gravity tying it to 
the bodies spiraling all around,
exemplifies the truth of all created things:
that we are bound to one another.

It is as God proclaimed
after  fashioning the first human from the earth:
“It is not good for the human to be alone.”

Leader:

And that is why, trans Jewish Bible scholar Liam Hooper says, God took the lonely first human and split them into two humans who would depend upon each other:

“This earthling now is two. … So everything is exploded, and re-formed, and re-shaped, and re-imagined for the sole purpose of relationship. …God is telling us that self-sufficiency, and self-reliance, and self-care alone isn’t enough — ….that we need to be in full authentic relationship with each other in order to be in full relationship with God.”

All:

We believe that this Creator God 
so loved and desired relationship with the world They’d made
that They squeezed their infinity into finite flesh
to live among us, share our joy and grief, pleasure and pain.

This miracle relied upon the yes
of one poor Jewish teenager in Rome-occupied Palestine.
Ever respectful of our free will,
The Sustainer of the Universe asked Mary
if she would sustain Them with her own body,
conceiving and birthing and nursing her own Creator.

Mary’s daring yes was not the only yes in this story!
She would rely on her bonds with others —
Elizabeth and Joseph, Simeon and Anna, 
Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Disciple — 
to live into God’s call.

We believe that these are the kinds of bonds
that tie all of us together,
and that the Body of Christ is not whole
until all voices are honored, all gifts celebrated.

Leader:

As Christian writer Rachel Held Evans once wrote,

“My theology is only as rich as the diversity of the people who have contributed to it, and it is a poor theology indeed that considers only the perspectives of those who look, think, and live just like me.”

All:

We believe that God’s gift to us through Jesus 
is the restoration of all relationships.
We strive towards that restoration 
here and now wherever possible,
and look forward to enjoying it in full 
in the world to come.

I wrote this liturgy for a Trinity Sunday service that focused 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.

The quotation from Liam Hooper comes from an episode of his Bible Bash podcast.

The quotation from Rachel Held Evans comes from a Facebook post she wrote in 2014.

Categories
Confession and Pardon Liturgy

Confession and pardon: trauma, isolation, scarcity and individualism

God With Us, as one we confess our failings:

In times of trauma and hardship,
you call us to lean on one another and on you.
But we retreat into ourselves instead,
to wallow in our own troubles alone.  
We imagine ourselves to be burdens,
or accuse others of being dead weight. 

In a world whose resources we have poisoned,
a society divided into the haves and the have-nots,
your promise of abundance is just about impossible to believe.

And so we fall prey to myths of scarcity and individualism
that transform friends into enemies,
comrades into competitors.

When we deny our place in the network of your Creation,
when we reject the protests of those who thirst for justice,
when we fail to question authority,

Challenge us. Teach us. Restore us to your Way. 

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 liberated to seek new ways of being together. 

I wrote this for a virtual service centered around trauma and community’s role in the journey to recovery; an affirmation of protest is also woven throughout the liturgy. My sermon was based around Exodus 17:1-7, looking at the wilderness wandering through a lens of generational trauma and applying it to the collective and individual traumas we are facing today, from those caused by pandemic and police violence to personal struggles.

Watch or read my sermon here.

Categories
Affirmation of Faith Liturgy

Affirmation of Faith: Creator God-with-us, whose existence is relationship

We believe in the Triune God whose very existence is relationship,
a dance of mutual love that overflows into Their creation.

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.

We believe in Jesus Christ, the surest example of God-with-us,
of God-for-us, of a God whose power is not dominance and control
but rather a love that empowers, liberates, and invites us into partnership. 

We believe in the Holy Spirit
who brooded over the deep until She birthed the universe,

who is the breath that animates us,
the air that whispers to seeds till they sprout and bloom,

the wind that stirs up stagnance,
the flame that burns up deadness to make a way for new life.

We believe that this Triune God invites us to join Them 
in sowing a Kin(g)dom of equity and justice here on earth

where God’s blessings are shared fairly and there is plenty for all.

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.