Responsive Call To Worship: God Is The Creative Spark of All Life (based on Isaiah 6:3)

Reader: God is the creative spark of new life. 

All: We have come seeking God in this new day.

Reader: God, you are the architect of life and wholeness.
All: Open our souls to your stirring.

Reader: Spirit, you are the creator of awe and beauty.
All: Open our eyes to your ever-surrounding presence.

Reader: Jesus, you are the one through whom everything came into existence.
All: Open our hearts to your love.

Reader: Everything that God creates is good.
The entire universe is filled with God’s goodness.
All: For this endless, all-surrounding grace, we rejoice and give thanks.

Benediction: Trusting God's Presence When We God Feels Absent (based on Psalm 13:5)

God, help us not to completely lose hope when we experience those times in life when you seem far away or when our walk through this world is difficult or feels lonely.

Give us grace to trust your indwelling and all-surrounding presence, especially when it feels like you're not there.

Likewise, help us to be the grace of your presence to those around us who aren't feeling you near, who are experiencing difficulty, or who feel all alone.

God Is Not "In Control" - Faith Forward at Patheos

It’s a problematic theology that’s not truly helpful.

To all my fellow Christian who find solace in saying/believing that “God’s in control” .... and try to use that belief to bring comfort to people who are hurting, grieving, and/or suffering people ... I respectfully encourage you to stop.

Stop needing God to be in control. Even if you only mean well in believing and saying it ... it’s a problematic theology that’s not truly helping you or others.

But why? Five reasons come to mind:

• We use this in a theologically inconsistent way. It’s really hard to avoid implying that God causes numerous atrocities while saying God is in control. No matter how many times you defend the sentiment with “God’s ways are not ours” or “we can’t see the whole picture,” you’ve made a theological choice.
• We say it because we’re scared, not because it’s true. We need to listen to our anxiety, not ignore it. “God is in control” is like a drug, distracting us from potentially solvable problems rather than leading us to courageously face them.
• God’s upset by injustice. I have a hard time believing God is cool and calm when violence, hatred, and oppression rear their ugly heads. I think God is pissed. But I also believe God is more like a caring, attentive and responsive parent then a stoic, hard-ass one.
• It’s patriarchal. The notion of a controlling God, where nothing out of God’s will is taking place, sounds like a relic of the days of kings. This is the God of slave-owners and abusive men, not the God of lighthearted but weepy, fiery but gentle, confident but teachable, foot-washing but foot-washed Jesus.
• It creates passivity. The “God is in control” narrative is silencing. It’s the kind of thing the oppressors tell the oppressed to maintain the status quo: just accept your suffering, God has a reason for this. What a horrible lie.

God has graced humans with creativity and passion and a longing for justice. If our theology silences these impulses—as I believe a theology of divine control does—it needs to be rejected, because it is allowing not good but evil to flourish under the guise of “God’s plan.”

The full article is available here

What Do Pipelines have to do with the Doctrine of Discovery? Do Justice

We've forgotten the wisdom of the ancient Hebrews, our ancestors of the faith, who understood that the created world is inherently sacred and pulses with the divine.
 
In 1493, Pope Alexander VI declared that any land not inhabited by Christians was free for the new generation of European explorers to take at will. History would remember this declaration as the third of three papal bulls that make up the Doctrine of Discovery, the legal and ecclesiastical justification for centuries of European theft of Native lands and genocide of Native peoples—imperialism baptized in the language of Christian mission.

The brutality and imperialism sanctioned by the Doctrine of Discovery is papered over in U.S. textbooks, glimpsed only in short units on the Trail of Tears or the massacre at Wounded Knee.

It's not hard to see this legacy playing itself out today. The exploitation and abuse rubber-stamped by the Doctrine of Discovery and played out in the rampant imperialism of the “Age of Exploration” is alive and well in the hearts and minds of Western economic, cultural, and political institutions today.

The Western imagination has been utterly colonized by the cold calculus of Discovery, convincing us that the earth is nothing more than inert raw material meant to fire our industrial machines and that non-white lives matter only if they can be assimilated into dominant Western culture to fuel ever more exploitation; of ever more “discovery”.

We have forgotten the wisdom of the ancient Hebrews, our ancestors of the faith, who understood that the created world is inherently sacred and pulses with the divine. Dismissed is the spirituality of Indigenous communities who recognize humanity’s place inside of, and dependent upon, the great web of beings.

The full article is available here

What The 2016 Election Revealed - Jeff Wiersma

The church's role in this time will be imperative.  It must contribute to a shared vision which rejects Religious Nationalism, Hate Speech Demagoguery, and Economic Darwinism - showing the way instead to expressions of social justice, compassion, empathy, and radical solidarity.  

The 2016 Election was not your run-of-the-mill Presidential Election.

As Andy Borowitz said, "Trump wasn’t created in a vacuum; he is the inevitable product of a coarsened culture that rewards bullying over kindness, humiliation over respect, hatred over love."

Meanwhile, his opponent was the 2nd member of Clinton Political Machine (preceded by Al Gore in 2000) to run a campaign that only compounded their likability problems and ultimately resulted in the election of an inferior Republican candidate.

Sociologically, this election has revealed the following:

• Technological changes combined with corporate global bottom-feeding, 36 years of voodoo economics, and hyper-capitalist financialization have left working people behind, who feel betrayed, unrecognized, and angry.

• Rhetoric about progressive social policy - policy that aims to help working people recover from the scorched-earth class war being waged against them by the 1% - falls on deaf ears when the Democratic candidate is the ultimate crony capitalist.

• The false lure of a conservative Supreme Court and single-issue voting still holds many Evangelicals hostage. They have voted Republican for this one reason - all the while supporting wars, environmental destruction, the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor - and not gotten one bit closer to overturning Roe v Wade, which was made law by a Republican-nominated Supreme Court. (And even if they did overturn it, abortion wouldn't go away without a culture that supports life).

• The public witness of Evangelical Christianity is now seriously discredited, with its most visible and cacophonous white, male leadership aligned with a political agenda antithetical to the values and life of Jesus. 

• The entrenched attitudes of racial bigotry in American society have been shamelessly exposed. 

• The decades-long pattern of manipulating racial fears, employed by the GOP beginning with their Southern strategy, now boiled over in an ugly political movement driven by resentment of those who are different. That their candidate was manifestly and dangerously unqualified didn't trump the affection that the President-elect's supporters lavished on him because he spewed hate speech at the same "other" that they've been told to hate. 

• Fears and biases have clouded attention to facts. An entire self-reinforcing network of right wing media have captured an audience by playing to fears and biases, all while using the time-tested cult tactic of warning it's adherents that they are the only source of truth and that all other media sources are lying to them and biased. 

• The white, largely male majority which controlled political power since America’s founding is losing its dominant power, provoking anxiety and political desperation among its adherents.

Within this setting, the need for public discernment and a resonant vision is paramount.

The church's role in this time will be imperative. It must contribute to a shared vision which rejects the idolatry of Religious Nationalism, Demagoguery, and Economic Darwinism - showing the way instead to expressions of social justice, compassion, empathy, radical solidarity, mercy, and righteousness "as an ever flowing stream," which is our ancient and future calling.

Benediction: Renewing Our Hearts and Minds (based on Romans 12:2)

Loving God, through the power of your Spirit, renew our hearts and minds ... so that we may give thanks for your life-giving presence and follow the example of Jesus, who served all of your creation - which you called "good" - with love.

Responsive Call To Worship: God's Blessings (based on Psalm 100)

Reader: We gather to celebrate the goodness and love of God.
All: God is faithful and just.

Reader: God's promises stand the test of time.
All: God’s grace and mercy sustain us.

Reader: God is our source of light and life.
All : For all of these blessings and more, let's share our praise and thanksgiving!

Why Many Other Christians and I Are Grieving Trump's Victory - Jeff Wiersma

It feels like our yearning for what Jesus called "shalom," our desire to live out Micah 6:8, and our allegiance to what Jesus taught in the beatitudes has been rejected by 80% of our own faith community. It feels like our core beliefs have been rejected in favor of the pursuit of power by evangelical leaders and a candidate who built his campaign by stoking fear.

I will begin with my standard 2016 election disclaimer: "I didn't vote for Hillary either. In fact, I have never voted for a Clinton."

Ok, now that we got that out of the way ... here is my best attempt to explain - to those of you in my faith community that voted for Trump - why exactly it is that many of your fellow faith community members are feeling discouraged and alienated in the wake of Trump's win.

Many people I know who voted for Trump are people I worship with each week, people whose kids hang out with my kids, people who visited me when I was in the hospital. I know them to be people with good hearts and caring souls on a personal and community level.

So with that understanding ... in the time following election day, I have been determined to keep an open mind to the possibility that many of my friends - who chose to vote in favor of Donald Trump - could have been doing so as much to cast a negative vote against Hillary for ideological reasons as they were wholeheartedly endorsing who Donald Trump is as a person.

As for more specifically political reasons that some who have supported Trump have told me where among their determining factors ...

*  The economy and Washington corruption: The upset that many Trump supporters feel with how the economic policy has played out over the last 36 years - and how crony-capitalism disadvantages 99% of the U.S. populace - is understood and shared by many of us.

* Pro Life: I understand the tenacity with which the abortion issue is reiterated in evangelical church culture and how that is often the lone issue around which many choose which candidate they will support (more on that later, or check out this link).

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But here is what I would like to ask these friends who voted for Trump - can they empathize with those of us who are devastated that Trump won and hear the reasons why? Can they see why we would be discouraged by the fact that a candidate whose values are antithetical to those Jesus lived out and taught - for which the candidate was criticized by many across different political and theological spectrums - will now be our nation's leader?

It's worth nothing that famously conservative publications like Christianity Today and World Magazine made the same critique of Trump's character deficiencies and hateful rhetoric. Conservative church leaders like Russell Moore, Max Lucado, Alan Noble, and R. Albert Mohler Jr did as well, to name but a few.

Please, try to see how it is confounding to many of us that a group of celebrity American preachers actively campaigned for Trump. They weren't merely rooting behind the scenes for "anyone but Hillary." Exasperatingly, the ethical and moral deficiencies of Trump - which they so readily shrugged off - were the very same ones that they had cited as disqualifying factors in previous candidates and presidents.

As a result, many of us feel sold out by the established Church which compromised its moral authority for the promise of power.

In addition, the perpetual insistence by Jesus that we are to "love our neighbors as ourselves" appears to have little effect in chipping away at the evangelical support of a man who degraded women based on their physical appearance and vilified entire ethnicities and faiths.

It is disheartening that a man who advocated for torture and the illegal killing of civilians during his campaign was so overwhelmingly approved of by American Christians.

Along those lines, our fear for the safety of those fellow image-bearers of Christ who comprise the "least of these" has left us shaken.

(Did this statement trigger any of you to ask the valid question, "What about abortion?" If so, I'd urge you to read "Why I'm A Pro-Life Liberal," which can be found here.)

Our fear is valid and reasonable. Trump's candidacy and rhetoric were heartily endorsed by the KKK, Neo-Nazi groups, and white supremacists. While it is true that no one can control who supports them, it is also true that those groups have felt moved to support Trump because his rhetoric often echoes and amplifies their message. That these are groups that cause harm would be grounds enough for our apprehension. That these groups do so in the name of our faith tradition is exasperating.

That the president-elect has tapped prominent white supremacist-sympathizer Steve Bannon to be his Chief Of Staff has not helped to allay our fears.

These are some of the key reasons why our lingering grief and upset is unique to this particular election. We aren't grieving that a preferred political ideology didn't win the day or that we didn't get what he want. We've all had the candidate who we preferred to see win end up losing.

This is different.

It feels like our yearning for what Jesus called "shalom," our desire to live out Micah 6:8, and our allegiance to what Jesus taught in the beatitudes has been rejected by 80% of our own faith community. It feels like our core beliefs have been rejected in favor of the pursuit of power by evangelical leaders and a candidate who built his campaign by stoking fear.

These aren't things we need to "get over" or to "stop being crybabies" about. These are serious questions about the validity of the missional priorities of the American Church and whether there's much saltiness or light left in its public witness.

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In the midst of all of this, the good news is that Jesus is already on the margins. Jesus is already present among the very people that our president-elect degrades as weak and targets with hate-speech. When we stand in solidarity with the despised and the suffering, we're standing where Jesus is already present.

Most importantly, we don't have to abandon Jesus to abandon the unholy marriage (whether of genuine affection or ideological convenience) between Donald Trump and a large segment of the American Church.

Just as we love all of humanity as instructed by our Christian faith, we love Donald Trump. Were he about to step in front of a bus, we'd pull him back to safety, etc. We hope that the light and life that we all possess inherently will come to the surface in his life.

500 Clergy Hold 'Historic' Mass Gathering for Standing Rock - Common Dreams

In a "historic" show of interfaith solidarity, 500 clergy members prayed along the banks of North Dakota's Cannonball River on Thursday in support of Indigenous peoples protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

During the day of prayer on November 03, the clergy members marched to the bridge over the Cannonball River and "ceremonially burned a copy of a 600-year-old document," AP reported. Known as the Doctrine of Discovery, "the document from the 1400s sanctioned the taking of land from Indigenous peoples."

According to the Episcopal News Service, "The interfaith group spent more than 5 hours on site, marching, singing hymns, sharing testimony, and calling others to join them in standing with the more than 200 tribes who have committed their support to the Sioux Nation as they protest the route of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)."

"It was very moving to be there in solidarity," said Philadelphia-based Bishop Dwayne Royster. "I wanted to be present as an African-American clergy person to let the people at Standing Rock understand that we as African Americans need them to know that we stand with them in their fight."

Similar acts of solidarity, particularly by people of faith, have grown in recent days. On Wednesday, 9 rabbis, rabbinical students, and Jewish community members were arrested in Philadelphia for staging a civil disobedience action at a downtown TD Bank, one of the biggest financiers of the pipeline project. Nearly 300 rabbis have signed a statement in opposition to Dakota Access.

The full article is available here

Care For The Poor Is The Essence Of Christianity - Henri J Nouwen

Following Jesus = Welcoming The Stranger - Scott Bader-Saye