Worship Words-Psalm 4 as a Confession

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Today’s call to confession, prayer of confession, and assurance of God’s forgiveness come mostly from Psalm 4. I am putting the words of Psalm for in italics and words that I have added are not.

Let us be called to a time of confession-Answer me when I call, O God of my right! You gave me room when I was in distress. Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer.

How long, you people, shall my honor suffer shame? How long will you love vain words, and seek after lies? God, too often, we say the wrong thing and spend our time on things that do not honor you. Forgive us, we ask.

But know that the Lord has set apart the faithful for himself; the Lord hears when I call to him. We take great comfort in knowing that you hear the honest prayers of hearts.

When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent. The psalmist is right that we need more silence in this world. For all the times when we said too much and should have listened, we ask for forgiveness. And now we come to you in a time of silent prayer listening for your voice. (time of silence).

Offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord. There are many who say, “O that we might see some good! Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord!”


Our time of confession gives us the opportunity to place a priority on our relationships with God and each other. Even though our confession has ended and we are about to hear a reminder of God’s unfailing love, keep these words of confession in your hearts so we may all see each other as loved and worthy of forgiveness. You have put gladness in my heart more than when their grain and wine abound. I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety. Amen.

Book Review-Carry On Warrior


photo 2-30Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed
Glennon Doyle Melton

Emotional Response-4

Scholarly Response-3

 

This book came highly recommended from a number of my colleagues, and it did not disappoint me. Her honesty and her faith shine through on each page. She has wrestled with faith and that comes out not because she knows all the answers but because she is living in the questions. This book was easy to read not because she wrote about easy things-it was easy to read because I liked her and was rooting for her. This book will make you laugh and cry. Maybe don’t read it on an airplane like I did. If you enjoy stories, give this book a try.

I love books that help me see things better-books that clarify through a story or explanation. This book brought God a little more into focus for me. Without explaining God, she made God seem a little closer and more involved in my life. And I am thankful for that gift she gave me.

As I said, I was impressed by her honesty.  It is refreshing because it seems so rare despite all the books that claim to tell all. You’ll quickly realize that there is much more to this woman than you expect or guess. In one story, she tells about her inability to volunteer because she has a criminal record. It saddens me that she couldn’t volunteer because of her record. I’m wondering how do we keep people safe while still allowing people to share their gifts?

In the story, Smelly Coughy Guy, she ponders peace. And this made me wonder what is peace? What does peace look like in my life? Am I so busy looking for a perfect version of peace that I miss peace as it exists within me?

So who needs to read this book? I needed to read it. Maybe you do too. If you need some inspiration and encouragement to see God in the everyday, you should read this book. If you appreciate honesty, you should read this book. If you enjoy short chapters, you should read this book. If you like books where you are invited to journey alongside someone else for awhile, then you should read this book.

“It hit me that maybe the battles of life are best fought without armor and without weapons. That maybe life gets real, good, and interesting when we remove all of the layers of protection we’ve built around our hearts and walk out onto the battlefield of life naked” (4).

“I like to compare God’s love to the sunrise. That sun shows up every morning, no matter how bad you’ve been the night before. It shines without judgment. It never withholds. It warms the sinners, the saints, the druggies, the cheerleaders–the saved and the heathens alike. You can hide from the sun, but it won’t take it personally. It’ll never, ever punish you for hiding. You can stay in the dark for years or decades, and when you finally step outside, it’ll be there. It was there the whole time, shining and shining. It’ll still be there steady and bright as ever, just waiting for you to notice, to come out, to be warmed. All those years, I thought of God and light and the sun as judgmental, but they weren’t. The sunrise was my daily invitation from God to come back to life” (19).

“Maybe because other people are the closest we get to God on this side. So when we use them to find God in each other, we become holy” (21).

She made me wonder-what God-given gifts have you been hiding that need to be shared with the world? She said, “If you feel something calling you to dance or write or paint or sing, please refuse to worry about whether you’re good enough. Just do it. Be generous. Offer a gift to the world that no one else can offer: yourself” (25).

“Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They’re sacred. They are part of each person’s journey” (49).

Repentance is a fancy word used often in Christian circles. I don’t use fancy religious words, because I don’t think they explain themselves well. Also, fancy language tends to make in people feel more in and out  people feel more out, and I don’t think that’s how words are best used. Words are best used to describe specific feelings, ideas, and hearts as clearly as possible–to make the speaker and the listener, or the writer and the reader, feel less alone and more hopeful” (85).

“I don’t believe in advice. Everybody has the answers right inside her, since we’re all made up of the same amount of God. So when a friend says, I need some advice, I switch it to, I need some love, and I try to offer that. Offering love usually looks like being quiet, listening hard, and letting my friend talk until she discovers that she already has the answer” (117).

She shared how she takes time each night to talk with her child about any sadness or worries he had during the day. “I think this worry talk is a ritual worth keeping. Because if we empty our hearts every night, they won’t get too heavy or cluttered. Our hearts will stay light and open with lots of room for good new things to come” (135).

“Much of the Bible is confusing, but the most important parts aren’t. Sometimes I wonder if folks keep arguing about the confusing parts so they don’t have to get started doing the simple parts” (141).

“Being a child of God is a free pass to be brave and bold and take great risks and spin around in circles with joy. If and when I fall, who cares? He will always be there to pick me up. That’s his job. He’s my Father. So if I seem noncompetitive, if I seem as if I don’t care if I’m the “best” parent or housekeeper or dresser or whathaveyou, it’s not because I don’t care about being important. It’s because I believe I am the most important thing on earth. Why would I care about competing in any other category when I am already a child of God?” (175).

“So many of us spend our time trying to find God in books, but maybe the simplest way to God is directly through the hearts of his children” (189).

Even if you never read this book, I do hope you’ll always remember-  “Be confident because you are a child of God. Be humble because everyone else is too” (176).

 

Pomegranate White Tea

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I am ready to switch from my winter teas to my summer teas. Today’s weather is rainy and chilly, so I went with a fun tea that I drink year round. This is another tea from Trader Joe’s. It is their Pomegranate White Tea. I like that you can taste the pomegranate in this tea. For me, it is an all seasons tea because it isn’t too heavy nor too sweet. I’m enjoying a cup of this today in the midst of this Spring-time rainy day.

Worship Words-Call to Worship

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One- Peace be with you!

All-Peace be with you!

One-Blessed are those who have not seen and believe.

All-Blessed are those who have seen and believe.

One-Blessed are you when your belief in God is strong.

All-Blessed are you when all seems lost and you have nothing left but to believe.

One-Blessed are you in your doubts, fears, and certainties.

All-Peace be with you!

One-Peace be with you!

This call to worship was inspired by Sunday’s gospel reading from John.

Worship Words from Martin Luther King, Jr.

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend some time in San Diego. I highly recommend everyone take a trip to San Diego. The weather was wonderful. It is a very walkable city. It is also a heartbreaking city with so many homeless sleeping on the sidewalks and asking for money. While I was there a tour I took and a friend I met up with both recommended that I stroll down the Martin Luther King Jr. Promenade. After taking this walk, I recommend this to anyone who visits San Diego.

Along the sides of the paved walkway are quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

photo 3-25“I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life’s blueprint. Number one…should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth, and your own somebodiness…always feel that you count. always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.”

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“As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich…As long as diseases are rampant…I can never be totally healthy…I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”

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 “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”

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“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgement. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?”

 

And my favorite part (a huge thank you to my friends for sharing the secrets of this place with me) is the labyrinth. Although the city calls it a hedge maze, there is only one way to enter and one way to exit which means I’ll be calling it a labyrinth. If you look closely as you walk through the labyrinth, you’ll see suggestions for changes you might make in your life. You’ll be asked to shed the cloak of things that are hurting yourself and other, and you’ll be asked to don the cloak of behaviors and attitudes that remind us to love each other. I will include these words at the end of the post as a closing prayer or benediction. As you reach the sculpture in the center, you’ll see beautiful shininess inside of the sculpture placed there. Be sure to spend a few minutes looks for the words hidden on the sculpture. And then you can go back the way you came in. Hopefully, you’ll remember to shed what needs to be shed and don what needs to be donned.

 

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Shedding the cloak of oppression and Donning the cloak of recognition.

Shedding the cloak of fear and Donning the cloak of trust.

Shedding the cloak of prejudice and Donning the cloak of respect.

Shedding the cloak of malice and Donning the cloak of compassion.

Shedding the cloak of bitterness and Donning the cloak of forgiveness.

Shedding the cloak of despair and Donning the cloak of hope.

Shedding the cloak of weariness and Donning the cloak of courage.

Shedding the cloak of ignorance and Donning the cloak of wisdom.

Shedding the cloak of darkness and Donning the cloak of light.

Worship Words-A Sermon on Psalm 13

My best friend died of colon cancer three years ago today. She was 39 years old. Each year I make an extra effort to honor her memory on her birthday and the anniversary of her death. Today for the  worship words I am sharing the sermon I preached about my reaction to her diagnosis and the gift of lament found in the Psalms. This sermon was originally preached on June 26, 2011 at St. Giles Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, North Carolina and is shared today in loving memory of my buddy, Kristi.

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 Remember Me

To the leader. A Psalm of David.
1 How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I bear pain* in my soul,
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
3 Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
4 and my enemy will say, ‘I have prevailed’;
my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.
5 But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.

How do we pray when our hearts are broken? Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel recounts this incident from his experience at Auschwitz: “Inside the kingdom of night I witnessed a strange trial. Three rabbis, all erudite and pious men, indict God for having allowed his children to be massacred. An awesome conclave, particularly in view of the fact that it was held in a concentration camp. But what happened next is to me even more awesome still. After the trial at which God had been found guilty as charged, one of the rabbis looked at the watch which he had somehow managed to preserve in the kingdom of night and said, ‘Ah, it is time for prayers.’ And with that the three rabbis, all erudite and pious men, all bowed their heads and prayed.”

How do we pray when our hearts are breaking? When I got a call last month that my dear friend, Rev. Kristi Foster, had stage 4 colon cancer at the age of 38, I prayed and cried and questioned God. This has been especially hard for me because Kristi devotes her life to helping others, does whatever she can to stay healthy-exercise, vegetarian, etc-and should be in better healthy than most of us. In the following weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time praying while gardening. This isn’t new for me. What has changed is the tone of my prayer. Somedays I pray why Kristi and God how could you let this happen. Woe, to the weeds in my garden on those days. And other days, I’m able to pray for her healing, thank God for her life and mine, and feel blessed by the trips we’ve taken together and the adventures we’ve had and am hopeful that we might have more time together.

I share my story not because it is unique. I share it because we have all had pain in our lives. We have all had the opportunity to pray while our hearts are breaking. We have all had tragedy, loss, sadness-times where we ask God, how long? [Read more…]

Well Rested Herbal Tea

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Normally, I am not a huge fan of sleepy teas. They often taste “good for me” and make me feel like I am being forced to go to sleep. I feel the opposite about this tea. I enjoy drinking it. It makes me feel calm (without being pushy about it!). It is a mixture of so many different ingredients (chamomile flowers, lemon grass, spearmint leaves, tilia flowers, peppermint leaves, passionflower leaves, blackberry leaves, orange blossoms, hawthorn berries, and rosebuds) that surprising work well together. If you enjoy a cup of tea before bed, I would highly recommend giving this tea a try.

Worship Words-Benediction for Palm Sunday

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As I was writing, I keep moving from a joyful Palm Sunday benediction to a benediction that attempted to convey the variety of emotions present on Passion Sunday. I wanted to stay with Palm Sunday and focus on the gospel lesson. On Palm Sunday, I like to wave a palm, join in a procession of palm brach wavers, and be joyful. I am not against Passion Sunday where the whole Holy Week story is read. It just wasn’t what I wanted as the focus for this benediction.

This is a responsive benediction with palm waving!

One-Blessed in the One who comes in the name of the Lord!

All-Hosanna! (wave palms).

One-Blessed are all God’s children.

All-Hosanna! (wave palms).

One-Blessed are we to hear God’s word and share God’s love with each other.

All-Hosanna! (wave palms).

One-Blessed are we as we journey through Holy Week.

All-Hosanna! (wave palms).

One-Feel and know the love of God this week as we walk with Jesus and experience the Holy Spirit moving among us.

All-Hosanna! (wave palms).

One-Amen!

Book Review-Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

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Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis Lauren f. Winner

Emotional Response-4

Scholarly Response-5

This is not a book everyone will love. I believe we are made up of our stories, and for me to know someone else I must know her stories. This book is some of the stories of how Lauren Winner found God (again) after her divorce and other events in her life. Although this is her story, you will find yourself in her stories. Your details may be different but the struggle to find God, to remain in relationship with God is not unique to her. I invite you to give this book a try as a companion on your journey when life is a struggle or as a reminder of where you have been if all is well in your world currently.

So what is this book? It is part spiritual memoir, part church history lesson (in a good way), lots of Scriptural interpretations, and so much more. The author describes it in this way, “this book is about the time when the things you thought you knew about the spiritual life turn out not to suffice for the life you are actually living. This books wants to know about that time, and then about the new ways you find, the new glory road that might not be a glory road after all but just an ordinary gravel byway” (xvi-xvii). She often refers to this part of life as not a beginning or an ending but a middle. What are the middles in our lives? How do we live through them?

Here are just some of the places I found her story and my story intersecting…

I love when I learn new ideas in books that I’d like to make happen in my life. She discusses the concept of “dislocated exegesis” (136). Basically this is the idea that you can be very influenced by where you read the Bible. One example she shares is her reading of Isaiah’s text of being on eagles’ wings while flying in a plane. I’d like to see this as a challenge to modify where I read to see how it influences my reading. If this works well, I’ll let you know how it changes my readings.

I was fascinated about her story in the chapter, Visits to My Mother’s Grace, about her singing to her mother. It made me ponder what is it I want my dead loved ones to know? What would I say/do if I visited their graves (if they all had one)? How do our stories today honor those who stories used to intersect with ours?

She shares the prayer of a Hassidic rabbi, “Until such time as I can pour out my heart like water before You, let me at least pour out my words” (51). And this made me wonder what can I pour out for God today?

In multiple places in this book, she makes the words of the desert fathers and mother come alive in ways that are applicable to us today. I appreciated this so much. “These desert people, Christians, left the cities after Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. The desert people knew that the faith’s new fashionableness was every bit as dangerous as the persecuting emperors of old, so they held the cities and the temptations of ease, to find God in the rigors of the desert” (55).

In her chapter, “Busyness during Lent”, she equates the sin of sloth with busyness. What if people remain so busy because they are scared of rest? I think this idea of sloth is everywhere in our overly scheduled world. And thankfully this chapter ends with the reassurance of an unnamed 14th century monk who said, “You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God” (108). So no matter how overscheduled our lives become, we all have time for God.

Purim is the Jewish holiday where the book of Esther is read. It is a lively celebration of life. Her are some important words from a rabbi on this holy day, “This may be the only book where God is not named, but God’s hiddenness is in fact shot all throughout the Torah. All throughout the Torah, we find people looking for God, and not finding God, because God doesn’t often conform to our expectations. God is somewhere other than the place we think to look. And our sages show that you can respond to God’s hiddenness in many different ways. You can, like the writer of Lamentations, respond to God’s hiddenness by mourning. Or, like the writer of Ecclesiastes, instead of asking where the God you thought you were looking for had gone, ask what God is like now. Or you can respond to God’s hiddenness by being like Esther: if God is hiding, then you must act on God’s behalf. If you look around the world and wonder where God has gone, why God isn’t intervening on behalf of just and righteous causes, your very wondering may be a nudge to work in God’s stead” (114-115).

Possibly only interesting to me is the fact that the hymn, “I Come to the Garden Alone”, was written by a pharmacist. His name was C. Austin Mills (45). (Just a personal shout out to the pharmacists in the world!).

I’d like to end this review with these words which I found humbling and inspirational. “I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God” (194).

Worship Words-A Prayer using Psalm 51

This prayer uses our Psalm for this Sunday, Psalm 51.  The words in italics are from the Psalm and the other words are mine. Pray with me.

Loving God, when we cannot find the right words to say, it is okay to say what others have said. The psalmist provides us with words that work no matter what we are feeling. We are thankful for the words of the psalmist and we turn to you with these ancient words. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment. Forgiving God, there are days when we are overwhelmed with our lives. It seems like we cannot make a good decision. We cannot love others as you love us. We cannot find the good in your world as we only see sadness and grief and greed. In these moments, we cry out to you asking for forgiveness for ourselves and for all your children. [Read more…]