Our inclusive language liturgies generally set the structure and theme of Sunday morning worship. Since announcements are an integral part of our life together, we offer some guidelines for those who make announcements towards the end of worship.
Pentecost 2011
REFLECTION
We are the vessels of God’s voice, her words blowing through us, bidding us to tell the tales that only we can speak.
Jan L. Richardson, In Wisdom’s Path
Easter 2011 – Becoming the Body
REFLECTION
The story begins when God puts on flesh and comes to walk among us. It ends, or perhaps it just begins again, when God’s spirit is uncaged by death, when the one who walked among us dies an individual and is born again as a community.
Rob Eller-Isaacs (from a sermon)
Quoted in inward/outward, April 9, 2007
Lent 2011 – Where Will Our Help Come From?
REFLECTION
If you listen
not to the pages or preachers
but to the smallest flower
growing from a crack in your heart,
you will hear a great song
moving across a wide ocean…
connecting the islands
of the universe together…
you will feel it
touching you…
embracing you
with light.
John Squadra, This Ecstasy
quoted in inward/outward July 28, 2008
Epiphany 2011 – Foolish Hope
REFLECTION
If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter…The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get, and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world’s sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks we can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.
Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life
Quoted in inward/outward April 9, 2009
Advent 2010 – Looking for the Good News
REFLECTION
And when we learn to read
the landscape of our fears,
and when we come to know
the terrain of every sorrow,
then will we turn
our fences into bridges
and our borders
into paths of peace.
Jan Richardson, Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas, Pilgrim Press, page 47.