Liturgies
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.
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ENTRANCE REFLECTION If one goes into one’s own heart, one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else, and everyone else, as well as oneself, in the heart of Ultimate Mystery.. — From The Contemplative Outreach Newsletter, vol 25–June 2010 in The Thomas Keating Reader
ENTRANCE REFLECTION Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless. — Abraham Joshua Heschel,
ENTRANCE REFLECTION Maybe you will not be called – Laura Martin
ENTRANCE REFLECTION Christ climbed down Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from A Coney Island of the Mind
ENTRANCE REFLECTION Hope is an orientation of the heart… The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is… [Without hope] it is impossible to live in dignity and meaning much less find the will for the ‘hopeless enterprise’ which stands at the beginning of most good things. Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, pp. 181-1822023 Easter Liturgy: So That We May Be One
2023 Lent: It Depends on Faith
God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, p. 32023 Epiphany: Showing the Way
With the coal held to your lips,
The rush of wings of
Ambitious angels
Covering you. …
But maybe you will be called by
Fallen mustard seeds and
Open-eyed dreams.
Maybe you will be called by
The ordinary and the striking,
The places where your heart catches
More than once. …
Maybe you will know that
Your call is no less real
Because it comes with
Seeds in your hand
And the taste of fruit in your mouth,
With a sound so soft
It could have just been the breeze,
But wasn’t.
Associate Pastor
Rock Spring Congregational UCC, Arlington, VA2022 Advent: Sleepers Wake
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings2022 Jubilee: Deep Hope