Worship | Voices Together and the worlds worship creates | October 3
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Sermon – Voices Together and the Worlds Worship Creates
Speakers: Joel Miller and Katie Graber
Texts: Isaiah 42:10-11 (VT 106); Revelation 7:9-12 (VT 110)
Joel – For a while now we’ve wanted to have a worship series featuring our new hymnal. For a while now, conditions have been less than ideal for a full communal experience of these new, familiar, and thoughtfully reworded, songs and liturgies.
After several postponed attempts, we’re going for it.
Our last hymnal, the blue one, Hymnal a Worship Book, served the church well for the last 28 years. If you want to get dramatic and deep time about it, we could say the last hymnal, since its publication in 1992, brought us through the end of the 20th century, into the new millennium. And now Voices Together has been conceived in that new millennium, born in the pandemic, with an expected life span similar to the previous one. So imagine yourself a quarter century older, holding a well-worn purple hymnal from which you’ve sung through all the joys and hardships between now and then.
Hymnals create a shared field of language and song where we meet one another and God.
These seven weeks will be a chance for us to not only go deeper into the new hymnal, but to take a wide angle view of what worship is in the first place. And thus the title of this series and this sermon: “Voices Together and the worlds worship creates.”
Katie – We each bring our own worlds to worship – we bring the lives we live, and we bring the week we’ve had. We might come to receive or to…
Worship | Soul Work and the Great Work: Transitions and Ritual | September 26
The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.
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Order of Worship | September 26
Prelude
Welcome
Names and Naming
Land Acknowledgement
Call to Worship
Come, let us gather for worship.
From every corner and all the myriad paths we find ourselves on,
Let us gather now to praise the God who walks among us.
God of every season, guide our steps.
Come those from the West,
where sunsets mark the close of day, the transition into rest,
and a letting go of all the good that could not be done.
God of every season, guide our steps.
Come those from the North,
where stars point the way through uncertain paths,
darkness offers space for contemplation,
God of every season, guide our steps.
Come those from the East,
where dawn’s rays surprise us, the light of promise shines bright,
and first steps feel alive with potential.
God of every season, guide our steps.
Come those from the South,
where heat rises both around us and within,
the day burns bright and true, and passion makes good work feel light.
God of every season, guide our steps.
From every corner, every path, and every season
we come now to worship.
God of every season, guide our steps.
Peace Candle
VT 10 | Here in This Place
Children’s Time
Offering/Dedication Prayer
VT 191 | Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown
Scripture | Genesis 32:22-32; John 20:11-16
Meditations on Soul Work and the Great Work
Introduction
Mirror Walk
Symbolic Objects
Song | Soul Work
Mirror Walk
Letter To My Present Self
Song | Soul Work
Silent Reflection
VT 42 | Could It…
Worship | September 19
The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.
Sermon Manuscript | First fruits and last fruits
Text: Leviticus 23:9-14;22
Speaker: Joel Miller
Anytime the primary reading of the day comes from Leviticus, you know you’re in for a treat.
Much of what’s written there doesn’t exactly have direct application for the present day. Parts of today’s reading are no exception, involving the particularities of priestly duties – an offering of a year-old lamb;, a grain offering measuring two-tenths of an ephah, mixed with oil; a drink offering of wine measuring ¼ of a hin. They don’t teach that in seminary anymore.
But Leviticus is also the source of one of two teachings Jesus cites when asked about the greatest commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Leviticus 19:18. Upon this teaching, Jesus said, hang all the law and prophets. With this, Jesus was affirming what other rabbis like the great Hillel, had already taught. That same chapter goes even further. Leviticus 19:34 – “You shall love the stranger, the sojourner, the foreign born resident, as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
The reading we just heard comes soon after this. We have moved from more general ethical commands to the appointed festivals and holy occasions. One of these is the first fruits offering.
From Leviticus 23:10 – “When you enter the land that I am giving you and you reap its harvest, you shall bring the sheaf of the first fruits of your harvest to the priest.”
In other words, since barley was the earliest grain crop, each year, rather than getting right into the harvest, landowners were to bring the first…
Worship | Christian Formation Sunday | September 12
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Sermon Manuscript: A Story of Embodiment
Speaker: Sarah Werner
Good morning. It’s nice to be with you all this morning, near and far. It’s also nice to preach to actual humans instead of to the emptiness of my computer screen.
This passage from 1 Kings is one of my favorites in the Bible because it’s one of the relatively few times that God is depicted as walking on the earth. God doesn’t make very many in-person appearances outside of Genesis and Exodus. After the Israelites are done wandering in the wilderness it seems like God isn’t as visibly present to humans. But here is Elijah, having fled to the wilderness after killing the prophets of a rival god, Baal, and Jezebel is hunting for him. He asks God to kill him because he’s as good as dead. But the Word of the Lord tells him to eat and drink, feed his body. The Word of the Lord is used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to the embodied aspect of God that interacts with humans, like an intermediary angel. After he eats and drinks, he travels forty days to Mt. Horeb, further into the wilderness of the Sinai Desert, where he takes refuge in a cave. The word of the Lord comes to him again and tells him that God is about to pass by on the mountainside. Horeb is God’s holy mountain, the place where Moses received the ten commandments, the other name for Mt. Sinai. There is a great wind, an earthquake, and a fire. But it is only after these, with the sound of sheer silence,…
Worship | Soul Work and the Great Work | September 5
CMC Worship Service 9-5-21 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.
The video above includes the full service, except for the time for sharing.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained through One License with license A-727859.
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Sermon | The next circle outward
Speaker: Joel Miller
To hear the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman is to witness a transition in the making.
One of the pulls for me toward focusing on transitions this summer was personal. Maybe it had to do with turning 40 a few years ago. Or maybe it had to do with the realization that our oldest daughters are now closer in proximity to young adulthood than I am – they approaching the front door, me having exited the back door – whenever that was. Maybe it has to do with an evolving inner sense of time, more aware than ever of how this life I call my own extends back well before my birth through ancestors and geological time, and forward past my own death.
One of the responses from people I’ve talked with about this theme is that we’re always in transition. It never stops. Which is undeniably true, which, I think, makes it all the more valuable to look at the larger picture.
Frameworks. Metaphors.
Am I riding the hinge between the first half and second half of life? Or is it better thought of in thirds, in which case I am now solidly middle age, which could also be split into thirds making me early middle age?
In ancient Hindu philosophy I would be in the second of four life stages, known as the householder, focused on obligations to home, family, and community. Next up would be forest dweller, less focused on material stability. More focused on spiritual…
