Revised Lyrics: God of Grace and God of Glory

instrumental with synth playing vocal melody

Restorative Justice - CRC Office of Social Justice

Easter (which we recently celebrated) is not only about Christ’s resurrection but also about renewal and redemption.

Federal laws crack down hard on persons with felonies by banning them from receiving SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), student financial aid, public housing, driver’s licenses, and professional licenses, putting these people and their families at serious risk of hunger and recidivism.

Learn more about Bread for the World’s campaign to end unjust policies and hunger among those made vulnerable by a criminal record.

The United States contains 4 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated people.

Watch this insightful 3-minute video that points to the injustices in our criminal justice system and the barriers convicted men and women face when released.

Don't Sell Us A Product - Rachel Held Evans

Call To Worship: God The Creative Spark (based on Genesis 1:31)

God is the creative spark of new life. We will seek God in this new day. What God creates is good,
so we will rejoice and be glad.

God, architect of life and wholeness, open our eyes to your ever-surrounding presence.

Spirit, creator of awe and beauty, open our souls to your stirring.

Jesus, through whom everything came into existence, open our hearts to your grace and love.

Earth Day Weekend Benediction: Designed For Harmony

based on No One But Us

As we go from here … may we care for each other, bring life to one another, and value all that God indwells.  May we live in harmony with each other and the earth, just as God designed us to.

Earth Day Weekend Responsive Call To Worship

based on piece by Greg Klimovitz

Reader: God, let us listen ...
All: … so we may hear your voice all around us 
in the universe you called “good.”

Reader: God, open our minds ...
All: … so we may love one another and the earth 
you told us to care for and protect.

Reader: God, open our eyes to see ...
All: … your fingerprints in the wonder of all that surrounds us. 
May our lives be worship to you.

Confronting Systems That Cause Poverty - Henri J.Nouwen

Teach Them To Long - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Living Into God's Story - by Eugene Peterson

Story doesn't just tell us something and leave it there; story invites our participation. A good storyteller gathers us into the story.

The Bible is basically and overall a narrative, an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative. Stories hold pride of place in revealing God and God's way to us. It follows that storytellers in our Christian community carry a major responsibility for keeping us alert to these stories and the way they work.

There is a reason for the appropriateness of story as a major means of bringing us God's Word. Story doesn't just tell us something and leave it there; story invites our participation. A good storyteller gathers us into the story.

Of course, not all stories are good; some lack honesty. There are sentimentalizing stories that seduce us into escaping form life; there are propagandistic stories that attempt to enlist us in a cause or bully us into stereotyping responses; there are trivializing stories that represent life as merely cute or diverting.

The Bible's honest stories respect our freedom; they don't manipulate us, don't force us, don't distract us from life. They show us a spacious world in which God creates and saves and blesses. They invite us in an participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, in something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions.

We don't live our lives by information. We live them in relationships in the context of a community of men and women - each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire, and of personal God, who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation.

When we lose touch with our lives, our souls - our moral and spiritual, our God-personal lives - story is the best way of getting us back in touch again.

Maybe it is because Scripture comes to us so authoritatively, "God's Word," that we think all we can do is submit and obey. Submission and obedience are part of it, but first we have to listen. And listening requires hearing the way it is said (form) as well as what is said (content). Stories suffer misinterpretation when we don't submit to them simply as stories.

Spiritual theology, using Scripture as text, does not so much present us with a moral code and tell us, "Live up to this," nor does it set out a system of doctrine and say, "Think like this." The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us, "Live into this - this is what it looks like to be human in this God-made and God-ruled world; this is what is involved in becoming and maturing as a human being."

The full article is available here

Drive A Spoke Into Injustice - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Holy Saturday: Take Time To Sit at Your Tomb - from Progressive Red Neck Preacher

On Holy Saturday, Jesus takes into God’s self the experience of death, of abandonment, of guilt and of hell. On this day, as one of us, God experiences what it means to be totally abandoned by God.

But really, who wants to think about what this day was like? Jesus, buried behind a tomb. Judas hanging himself on a tree. The disciples hiding in fright, scattered to the four winds in fear.

The hopes of all who followed Jesus shattered and lost… From the appearance of all who looked up, a day in which evil won, where injustice reigned triumphant, where oppression rules.

To truly appreciate the full depth of Easter, we need to take space to sit with the bitter pain of Holy Saturday, to sit at the tomb where Jesus lays, to face our own tombs.

We need to stay a while with the disciples, to hear the cry of mother Mary as her baby boy lays in the tomb. I think as we do so, we can find Holy Saturday teaching us great things.

First it shows us the value of sitting with our own experience of pain and forsakenness, when so often we talk as if our experience of pain, of anguish, of uncertainty, and of doubt are signs that we have lost our way, that we have gone down the wrong road.

Holy Saturday teaches us that trying to reach Easter, new beginning, and hope before we - like Jesus - sit in the midst of death, of grief, of loss, of terror, and total abandonment can mean not yet being ready. Facing and admitting our pain and heartache is part and parcel of the call of Holy Saturday.

On Holy Saturday, Jesus takes into God’s self the experience of death, of abandonment, of guilt and of hell. On this day, as one of us, God experiences what it means to be totally abandoned by God. This means in the heart of our experiences of grief, of terror and abandonment, we are not alone though, as Jesus did on the cross, we do feel abandoned in those moments.

This is why as he died Jesus cries out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” and why Christian mystics have talked about the need to face the dark night of the soul.

The full article is available here

Execution Of The Innocent - Pope Francis