Declaration
of What Ails Us
I imagine what it would be like if someone
came to this church for the first time in their life and wondered what this
specific time, traditionally entitled as the Prayer of Confession and
Assurance, is for. How do you think you could explain it to them if they didn’t
understand the meaning of words we use commonly during this time? What is sin?
How do we understand it?
This quote is from Ludwig Bemelman’s classic
story, Madeline;
In
the middle of the night, Miss Clavell turned on her light and said, “Something
is not right!”
Something is not right.
Something has gone wrong.
There is something “wrong” with us.
There is something “wrong” with us and also
with how we, as a community, as a society, as a world deal with situations that
affect others’ lives seriously – human suffering through injustices that our
own complacencies may perpetuate - something wrong with our own brokenness,
indifference, apathy, or wrong choices.
Something is not right. Something has gone wrong.
We are lost.
– This sense of disconnection, this sense of
being lost, is what leads us into reflection and confession, for today, on the
foot of the cross.
We are invited to see the ‘stuff’ of our
lives through faith, meaning ‘a way of seeing the whole.’
In this part of the service, we are invited
to see our personal and communal predicaments through faith, from a
perspective of the whole.
This perspective is what leads us into wonder
and longing – longing to make things right, longing to return home from the
place where we are lost, exiled, cut off.
This morning, we gather at the foot of the
cross not to praise and give our eulogy for Christ. (He’s already risen and has
risen!). Rather we gather together one more time to ask God, who is the
wholeness of love, to be with us, as we address our concerns about our lives,
our human conditions – our deepest concerns about the things that ail us so
much.
I invite us to a time to name what
ails us most and to ask God to be present with us as we seek God’s
understanding of our predicament, accepting us as we are, and empowering us to
transform even as we are transformed.
God’s Promises to Us
Singing Hallelujah takes a journey. Singing
Hallelujah takes courage. It is our personal and communal way to find our home,
a journey of return, a courage to “Go beyond the mind that we have now.”
May the Risen Christ who is ever-present
provide us with wholeness, forgiveness, renewal, and freedom. May Christ, who
was faithful unto death on the cross carry us to see beyond the edges, and go
before us and lead us to live the fullness of life, the fullest potential of our
lives. Amen.
Readings
Silent
Reflection & Closing Prayer
As a post-Easter community of Christ, we know that this
is not the end of the story; yet we hear from Jesus, “it is finished.”
Our
God is God of new beginnings, new tomorrows, yet is also God of Endings,
God of Darkness, God of the Tomb, God of dark days and loss, carrying the grief
of the lost, the heartbroken, the bereft.
Let
us open our hearts as we pray together;
Jesus, you have
come to us in many stories that point to the way of salvation – wholeness and
our healing. You are;
Light in our
darkness,
Sight to our
blindness,
Liberation (for
captives.)
Return (from exile.)
The healing (of our
infirmities.)
Food and Drink.
Our vine: the
source of life.
This service is not
a eulogy for you or just another chance to praise you - who you are and what
you have sacrificed for us; we also gather to remind ourselves who we can be
and how we should live in order to help your saving love flow and touch the
face of the earth and humanity along with it – our lives and the lives of
others.
We pray for all
those on earth who suffer from the dominions of power, violence, and
oppression. Especially we continue to pray for people in Ukraine. And we ask
you to remember the students and their families who suffer from the human
tragedy that happened this week on the sea, at the edge of Korean peninsula.
God thank you for being with us in
this wondering moment
where we stand poised between life
and death,
filled to the brim with sorrow,
filled with thoughts of what has
been
and what lies before us.
Comfort us even as we are shaken by
the horror of these last hours.
God of Endings, God of Darkness,
God of the tomb, God of dark days
and great loss
Be with us now as we wait with
Jesus, carrying the grief of the lost, the heartbroken, the bereft.
Benediction
May God bless you and keep you,
May the very face of God shine upon
you, and be gracious to you,
May God’s presence embrace you and
give you eternal peace.
Amen.
Unsaid
words
Sin and forgiveness, these correlative
images, … correlated “realities” – sin as a human problem and forgiveness as
God’s solution, however, is one way to understand our Christian vision of life.
It is one way we talk about our
problem and understand how God’s grace works through us to transform our lives.
Marcus Borg, the well-known author of Meeting
Jesus Again For the First Time and Reading the Bible Again for the First
Time, says that for example, we may pray “Forgive us our blindness” but if
we are blind, we don’t need forgiveness as much as we need to see. If we
are lost, what we need is a way of return. If we are in bondage, slavery,
captivity – as realities as well as metaphors that point to our own individual
and collective experiences, what we need is liberation, more than forgiveness.
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