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.
Recommitment 2007 – Incarnate Hope
September 9 – October 21, 2007
REFLECTION
The days are surely coming, God says, when I will make a new covenant with my people. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand out of the land of Egypt…I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other "Know God" for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
-Jeremiah 31:33-34
Green Season 2007 – Prophetic Hope
July 22 – September 2, 2007
REFLECTION
The hope-filled language of prophecy, in cutting through … despair and hopelessness, is the language of amazement. It is a language that engages the community in new discernments and celebrations just when it had nearly given up and had nothing to celebrate. The language of amazement is against the despair just as the language of grief is against the numbness.
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, pp 67-68
Trinity 2007 – The Faces of God
May 27 – July 15, 2007
REFLECTION
Because a trinitarian divinity unleashes much power in our imaginations, it can heal or redeem us in this critical time of the planet’s life…Classical Christian theology… is guided by three basic articles of faith: creation, redemption, and sanctification. In many respects these articles parallel the persons of the Trinity: the Creator, parent God; Jesus the Liberator; the Holy Spirit who sanctifies.
Creation Spirituality, Matthew Fox, p. 55
Easter 2007 – The Light of Christ
April 8 – May 20, 2007
REFLECTION
Now is the time when the blessed light of Christ sheds its rays; the pure rays of the pure Spirit rise and the heavenly treasures of divine are opened up. Night’s darkness and obscurity have been swallowed up, and the dense blackness dispersed in the light of day; crabbed death has been totally eclipsed. Life has been extended to every creature and all things are diffused in brightness. The dawn of dawn ascends over the earth, and he who was before the morning star and before the other stars, the mighty Christ, immortal and mighty, sheds light brighter than the sun on the universe.
– Psuedo-Hippolytus (ca 170 – 235 CE), quoted in "A Triduum Sourcebook,"
Liturgy Training Publications, pg 419
Lent 2007 – Darkness in an Age of Glare
February 21 – April 1, 2007
REFLECTION
"Not to flood darkness with light so that the darkness is destroyed, but to enter into darkness, mystery, so that it is experienced."
–Denise Levertov