DENMAN ISLAND UNITED CHURCH: “WELCOME HOME!”
OUTDOOR WORSHIP JULY 12, 2020
Rev. Elaine Julian
Gathering and Centering
Welcome
Thank you for respecting the safety protocols so that we can keep ourselves and others as safe as possible. Thank you to Helen and the rest of the Board for working so hard to develop those protocols.
AGM Aug. 9after church
We know that many of the changes in how we are used to worshipping may be difficult. I know that you miss being in our beautiful old building, hugging and passing the peace, passing the offering plate, and especially singing. But here we are in the midst of God’s good creation, and I invite you to relax into this new normal and let the beauty of our surroundings speak to us as we share our words and our silence.
I’m grateful to Janice McLean of the online ministry The Prayer Bench www.prayerbench.ca. Many of the poems and the Mass of the World are from a retreat that she led last year at Bethlehem Centre in Nanaimo.
“The Threshold Breath” by Valerie Oden
Living and moving and being
between two worlds
in a space
where the old is no longer
and the new is not yet,
hearing the Deep
sigh
in awe of its own possibility,
we exhale.
And wait.
Listening.
In faith.
(Silence as the candle is lit. Chime)
And just as dusk hushes
the sounds of day
and ushers in
the soft stillness of night,
so Dawn sings light
through the dark,
filling the sigh
with the promise
Of life.
And somewhere between
The Deep sighing
And the Dawn singing,
We draw in a fresh clean breath
And take our first step
In the Rising
as new life.
Call to Worship
Christ, we gather in your name to worship in this sanctuary called Earth,
a planet filled with your presence, quivering in the forests,
vibrating in the land, pulsating in the wilderness,
shimmering in the rivers.
God, reveal yourself to us in this place,
And show us your face in all creation.
Holy! Holy! Holy! Earth is filled with God’s presence.
Reading and Reflecting: “Home Breaking, Home Making, and That Pesky Apostle Paul”
Romans 8:14-25 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. 15 For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba![a] Father!” 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness[b] with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
Future Glory
18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in[c] hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes[d] for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Luke 9:57-62 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
57 As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 59 To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” 60 But Jesus[a] said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” 61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” 62 Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Reflection
As you may have guessed from the title of this reflection, I’m not one of the Apostle Paul’s biggest fans. I’m therefore a bit surprised to find myself preaching today about his letter to the Romans. But recently I have been participating in an online book discussion of the book “Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice” by Sylvia Keesmat and Brian Walsh that has given me much food for thought.
The authors explain the title this way: they are writing about the way in which the letter “both disarms the violence of the first century Roman empire (and our imperial realities today) and the way in which the letter to the Romans needs to be disarmed itself, after centuries of being used theologically as an instrument of oppression and exclusion”. No doubt you are aware of some of the proof texts that have been misused in this way, to oppress and exclude LGBTQ people, women, non-Christians, and the list goes on.
The authors argue that the intent of the letter to the Romans was the opposite – to offer membership in Christ’s body the church to everyone: rich and poor, men and women, Jew and Gentile, slave and free. It is an anti-empire letter that contrasts the hierarchical imperial culture of Rome with the radically egalitarian and inclusive Kingdom of God.
It is exactly the many disparate elements that belonged to the early house churches in Rome that caused the tensions that Paul was concerned about when he wrote this letter. To help us picture the setting, Keesmat and Walsh imagine conversations between two individuals who are studying and arguing about Paul’s letter: Nereus, a tradesperson who lives and works in the Jewish ghetto on the outskirts of the city and Iris, pagan slave to a wealthy Roman citizen who uses her sexually and sells her young children. Iris is a Gentile, steeped in the Roman culture that oppresses her while Nereus lives by the Jewish scriptures and rules.
They don’t have much in common on the surface of things, but one thing they do have in common is that both have been made homeless by the Empire. Narcissus is part of the Jewish diaspora, Jews ejected from their Judean homeland and scattered throughout the Empire, one of the many stories of exile of the Jewish people. Iris has been captured from her home to sleep on her master’s kitchen floor and teach his children. They both have a roof over their heads but they are homeless in every other way, violently separated from their homes of origin, shorn of personal power and religious freedom in the heart of the Empire. And yet, although both are marginalized and disenfranchised in so many ways, they find it hard to understand each other, the very different values and laws that they have internalized, and how the way of Jesus changes everything.
In “Romans Disarmed”, we are invited to view the oppression of Empire from the margins as Nereus and Iris do, and we are invited to read the letter to the Romans through the specific lens of homelessness and the new kind of home and family offered by the early church. Home is broken by Empire, but made new in God’s Kingdom.
The authors ask, “…how does a mixed community of tradespeople and dependents, educated and illiterate, free and slave, men and women find home together in Messiah Jesus?…How does that community embrace the story of Israel in light of the story of Jesus? And how does that story shape this community into a place of home?
And they bring those questions into today’s context: “…just as empire had something to do with the precariousness of homemaking in the first century, so also can we discern similar dynamics in our own world of global capitalism. We live in a culture of displacement. Not only have we seen an alarming rise of socioeconomic homelessness (or houselessness) in most industrialized nations, so also has a wider sense of displacement or homelessness been manifest even among those who are well housed…
Lately, that sense of displacement has been magnified by COVID restrictions as we have been unable to gather in what is called the “third spaces” like this church where we gather and find community. And those who are literally homeless are at even greater risk without safe places to sleep, secure food sources, safe supplies of drugs and supervised use.
Another powerful chapter titled “Creation and the Defilement of Home” tackles the theme of home breaking at another level, our wanton destruction of our home the earth. It is a song of lament that builds on the lament in the passage we just heard from Romans 8.
“When did you first notice? When did you realize that delight had turned to grief? When did it become painful to merely open your eyes and see the land, the river, the marshes? Do you remember the moment that joy turned to mourning?
Was it when you led your grandchildren to the traditional sites and there were no blueberries, no herons, no hawks to be seen?
…Was it the spring your apple trees blossomed but there were no bees to pollinate the fruit?
…was it the morning you watched the oil seep up through the ground, into the muskeg, into the water, into the fish, your food, your children’s blood?
…we know that there are things we can never know about God, because we have silenced creation. We know that the psalmist’s words about creation’s praise no longer describe our reality. We know that the songs of praise are now groans of longing…Paul knew about those groans too.”
And so here we are now, at one and the same time homeless, home makers and home breakers, displaced by Empire yet complicit in its wastefulness and violence, no longer sure of home. Here we are, on this beautiful little corner of creation, trying to care for it and for our community, our “household” as Wind so beautifully named it at the Board meeting on Thursday. Here we are, in all our diversity, trying to figure out how to make this little church community into a new kind of home, a new kind of family. We have left our homes that were maybe starting to feel as much prison as refuge to return to this place that is both familiar and forever changed. Welcome home!
Questions for reflection:
When you consider the question of home, what place comes to mind for you? What makes that place and that set of relationships home for you?
Has the COVID 19 shutdown changed your perceptions of “home”?
What does “home making” mean for a community that follows Jesus?
Response
Offering: We arecreatively combining work and play in the Spirit, talking, dreaming, and planning for a new way of being the church and connecting with the Denman Island community. We continue to need your support through your sharing of time, talent and treasure. If you are worshipping from home and you are able tosupport us financially, your donations can be mailed to:
Denman Island United Church, 4575 Denman Road, Denman Island BC V0R 1T0
Dedication: Divine Spirit, there are no limits to your goodness, no limits to your love. We have received beyond anything we could ask or expect, and, joyfully, we give in return. Bless our offerings and remind us that as our gifts are used to bring compassion, hope, and justice, you, Divine Spirit, are discovered to be at work with us. Amen.
Mass of the World: Based on the mystical work of Teilhard de Chardin.
Easter Sunday, 1923. Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a palaeontologist and geologist and served in the army as a stretcher bearer, sat writing under a tree in an oasis of sorts in China’s Ordos Desert during a lull in the fighting of World War I. As the sun came up, once again Teilhard was without chalice or paten or altar. He made the world an altar and he gave “all the matter in the universe” as an offering to God, the Mass of the World. We enter the day with gratitude and surrender.
Prayers of the People: “If It Be Your Will” by Leonard Cohen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LVSsUhzHq8(Be sure to click “Skip Ads”)
If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will
If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well
And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will
If it be your will
(Silent reflection and prayers. Chime)
Over on the horizon, the sun has touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles and begins its fearful travail.
Once again…we have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar. We will make the whole world our altar and on it we will offer to God all the labours and sufferings of the world.
God, grant us the mystic presence of all whom the light is awakening to the new day. One by one, we see and we love all those whom you have given us to sustain and charm our lives.
One by one, we number also those who make up that other beloved family which has gradually surrounded us, its unity fashioned out of the most disparate elements, with affinities of the heart, of scientific research, and of thought.
And again one by one – we call before us the whole vast anonymous army of living humanity; those who surround us and support us though we do not know them; those who come and those who go; those who in office, laboratory and factory, through their vision of truth or despite their error, truly believe in the progress of earthly reality and who today will take up again their impassioned pursuit of the light.
All the things in the world to which this day will bring increase; all those that will diminish; all those, too, that will die; all of them, God, we try to gather into our arms so as to hold them out to you in offering. This is the material that you desire. Nothing less than the growth of the world borne ever onward in the stream of universal becoming.
(We stand and raise our arms in offering toward the East)
Receive, Holy One, this all-embracing host which your whole creation offers you at this beginning of a new day. In this formless mass you have implanted an irresistible desire, which makes us cry out, believer and unbeliever alike: “Lord, make us one.”
Lord, make us one.
(We are seated for silent reflection)
Chime
God, we know ourselves to be irremediably less children of heaven than children of earth; therefore we will this morning climb in spirit to the high places, bearing with us the hopes of all.
Upon all that in the world of human flesh is now about to be born or to die beneath the rising sun we will call down the Fire. Fire, the source of being; we cling so tenaciously to the illusion that fire comes forth from the depths of the earth.
But in the beginning was Power, intelligent, loving, energizing. In the beginning was the Word, supremely capable of mastering and moulding whatever might come into being in the world of matter. In the beginning there was not coldness and darkness: there was the Fire.
Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say again the words: This is my Body.
Chime
And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding words which express the supreme mystery of faith: This is my Blood, my Life in everlasting flow.
Chime
It is done. Once again the Fire has penetrated the earth.
Chime
Without earthquake, or thunderclap; the flame has lit up the whole world from within. All things individually and collectively are penetrated and flooded by it, from the inmost core of the tiniest atom to the mighty sweep of the most universal laws of being; that one might suppose the cosmos to have burst spontaneously into flame.
If the Fire has come down into the heart of the world, it is, in the last resort, to lay hold on us and to absorb us. Henceforth, we cannot be content simply to contemplate it. What we must do is to consent to the communion which will enable it to find in us the food it has come in the last resort to seek.
So, our One, we are your Presence in the universe which has now become living flame.
Blessing: “In the Stillness” by Jane M. MacKichan
In the stillness
See the wonder of God’s art
In the silence
Feel Christ’s presence
In the sunlight
Watch the Holy Spirit dance
In the darkness
Find faith’s essence.
Amen.
Let us bow to each other and leave knowing that we are never homeless, that we are always at home in God and God is at home in us and we are called to hear and share that good news. Thanks be to God. Go in peace and go in love.
