Together, we celebrate and learn from each other. We value friendship, support, inclusiveness and accessibility.Through worship, music, contemplation, visual art, social justice and environmental activism, we help build a more resilient and sustainable community.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We respectfully acknowledge that the land we gather on is on the unceded traditional territory of the K’omoks First Nation, the traditional keepers of this land. We respect and honour the history, spirituality, and culture of the Coast Salish peoples.  We also honour the heritage of all Indigenous peoples as we recognize the need to seek a new relationship between the descendants of settlers and of those who were here before colonization.  As a congregation of The United Church of Canada, with them, we take responsibility both for past injustices and the need for healing and reconciliation.  We love and honour this land on which we meet and live and all whose footfall has trod and will tread upon it.

PRELUDE AS WE GATHER

WELCOME AND NEWS 

LIGHTING THE SPIRIT CANDLE

We give thanks for the light of hope—unrelenting and inexplicable.
Our hope shines on.
We give thanks for the light of peace—strong and unafraid.
Peace lights our way.
We give thanks for the light of joy—persistent and unpredictable.
Joy brightens our lives.
We give thanks for the light of love—healing and holy.
Love comforts and challenges.
We light the Spirit candle and celebrate the Light of the World.
Thank you, God, for your light in this world in Jesus Christ.
The light shines in the darkness.
And the darkness has not overcome it.

CENTERING OURSELVES IN PEACE, THE SACRED CIRCLE AND THE FOUR DIRECTIONS

We seek the wisdom of the directions.

From each direction, we return to the centre

reminded that Christ brings healing and wholeness and 

by the Spirit renews the face of the earth.

Let us begin with silence as we turn to our centre point.

From the east, the direction of the rising sun,

we glean wisdom and knowledge

through desert silences and humble service.

Creator, enable us to be wise in our actions and

in our use of the resources of the earth,

sharing them in justice,

partaking of them in gratitude.

 

From the South come guidance

and the beginning and end of life.

May we walk good paths, 

living on the earth as siblings,

rejoicing in each other’s blessing,

bearing each other’s sorrows,

and together looking to you,

seeking the good road.  

From the West come healing waters.

We pray that clean water might be available to all,

and that we, too, may be healed

and life sustained and nurtured

over the entire face of the earth.

From the North come strong winds and gentle breezes.

May the air we breathe be purified

and may our lives feel that breath of the Spirit,

strengthening and encouraging us.

 

As we walk a path in each direction,

the sacred paths form a cross.

Returning to the centre, we discover Christ,

who calls us and challenges us. (Traditional Lakota Prayer, adapted)

OPENING MUSIC – MV # 62 “THERE IS ROOM FOR ALL” (Psalm 91)

(Words and Music: Bruce Harding, 2004)

There is room for all in the shadow of God’s wing;

There is room for all, sheltered in God’s love.

And I rejoice and sing “My refuge and my rock, in whom I trust.”

There is room for all, There is room for all.

LENTEN CALL TO WORSHIP 

The sky that arches like a temple over all our days reminds us, 

from this pinnacle, that air can bear us up and breath conspired sustain.

The temptation is to fling ourselves into the airy abyss as though alone.

The temptation is to forget that we inhale and exhale the same air,

That we dwell together under one sky,

and are drawn together in one Spirit’s breath.

It is not in our daring and risking that we are lost;

It is in our separateness.

The temptation is to forget our connection

In one Spirit 

Under one sky. (Alyson Huntly in Courage for Hallelujahs)

OPENING PRAYER:  A Prayer to Learn to Love the World Again 

(Sarah Bessey. Excerpt from – A Collection of Meditations for Renewal: A Rhythm of Prayer)

God of herons and heartbreak,

teach us to love the world again.

Teach us to love extravagantly

knowing it may

(it will) break our hearts

and teach us that it is worth it.

God of pandemics and suffering ones,

of war and woe and want,

teach us to love the world again. 

God of loneliness and longing,

of bushfires and wilderness,

of soup kitchens and border towns,

of snowfall and children,

teach us to love the world again. Amen

READING FROM SCRIPTURE

Isaiah 58: 1-12, Luke 4: 1-13

Hear and consider what the Spirit is saying to the Church and to the whole created order: Thanks be to God.

RESPONDING IN SONG: MV # 10 “COME AND SEEK THE WAYS OF WISDOM”

(Words: Ruth Duck, 1993 Music: Donna Kasbohm, 1995)

Come and seek the ways of Wisdom, she who danced when earth was new.

Follow closely what she teaches, for her words are right and true.

Wisdom clears the path to justice, showing us what love must do.

Listen to the voice of Wisdom, crying in the marketplace. 

Hear the Word made flesh among us, full of glory, truth, and grace.

When the Word takes root and ripens, peace and righteousness embrace.

Sister Wisdom, come, assist us; nurture all who seek rebirth.

Spirit-guide and close companion, bring to light our sacred worth. 

Free us to become your people, holy friends of God and earth.

REFLECTION – CHALLENGE AND PARADOX 

Thank you again for welcoming me here to share some space for silence and reflection with you. 

It’s Sunday –  a Sunday where so much competes for our attention and our hearts. It’s the

• First Sunday of Lent
• A day where parts of our world are immersed in the unpredictability of war, including the daily unpredictability of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine with all its geopolitical and possibly nuclear implications
• A Sunday where we absorb and digest the findings of the latest International Panel on Climate Change report
• Where we continue to respond to what feels like an interminable Covid-19 pandemic…
• The continuing uncovering of children in unmarked graves at former Residential Schools
• And the complexity of our inequitable response to the needs of refugees from different parts of our troubled world (Syria, Afghanistan to name but two, and the millions of internally displaced persons in the world)
• And at home, the growing gap between the haves and have notes,  particularly around affordability and security of housing 
• And an increasingly toxic supply of illicit drugs coupled with our growing dependence on substances to respond to trauma and despair AMONG OTHER JOYS and CONCERNS

I don’t know about you, but I’m struggling these days. I find myself in a deeply and profoundly Lenten space. I want to get to the Good News, but I hardly know where to begin. From where I see it, the good news, like today’s gospel looks like trouble. It looks complex and confusing and difficult. 

Poet William Carlos Williams said: “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.” So, I’m going to invite you to stay with me for a moment and if you will, to allow yourself to enter into the liminal space of the poet –  to allow yourself for a few moments to be suspended between your mind and your heart. 

The wonderful poet, Jan Richardson, offers another framing of this morning’s gospel reading. Drawing us back to the prologue to the scene in the desert, she suggests that to understand Jesus better, we “back up a bit in Luke—[that] we turn around, hang a left at the genealogy, and take a look at Luke 3.21-22, [and in doing so] …enter this week’s text with the same knowledge that Jesus had: that when [Jesus] went into the desert, he went with the baptismal waters of the Jordan still clinging to him, and with the name Beloved ringing in his ears. 

How else, she says, to enter into the forty-day place that lay ahead of him? How else to cross into the wilderness where he would have no food, no community, nothing that was familiar to him—and, to top it off, would have to wrestle with the devil? How else to go into the complicated, paradoxical, seemingly unpromising years ahead?  How else, but to go into that landscape with the Knowledge of his own name: Beloved. 

 “Beloved Is Where We Begin” 

If you would enter
into the wilderness,
do not begin
without a blessing.

Do not leave
without hearing
who you are:
Beloved,
named by the One
who has traveled this path
before you.

Do not go
without letting it echo
in your ears,
and if you find
it is hard
to let it into your heart,
do not despair.

That is what
this journey is for.

I cannot promise
this blessing will free you
from danger,
from fear,
from hunger
or thirst,
from the scorching
of sun
or the fall
of the night.

But I can tell you
that on this path
there will be help.

I can tell you
that on this way
there will be rest.

I can tell you
that you will know
the strange graces
that come to our aid
only on a road
such as this,
that fly to meet us
bearing comfort
and strength,
that come alongside us
for no other cause
than to lean themselves
toward our ear
and with their
curious insistence
whisper our name:

Beloved.
Beloved.
Beloved.

“In this first week of Lent, as we turn our faces toward whatever this forty-day place holds for us, we would do well to have that name echoing in our own ears—to enter into the terrain of this season with the knowledge that we, too, are the beloved of God. 

As we cross with Christ into the landscape of Lent and into the mystery that lies ahead of us, may we know at least this about ourselves: that our name, too, is Beloved.”   

“Beloved is Where We Begin” © Jan Richardson. www.janrichardson.com 

 —Jan Richardson © from Circle of Grace http://paintedprayerbook.com/2016/02/11/lent-1-beloved-is-where-we-begin/

So this is where we begin, here once again smack dab in the middle of this complicated and messy and confusing and frightening adventure called life. In the Wilderness. In the desert with Jesus. This time, firmly grounded in the mystery and astonishment of our own Belovedness. 

BUT MAKE NO MISTAKE – there is no hierarchy of Belovedness with the Divine. When we embrace that identity of Beloved, we are not referring to any exclusive identity as Christians, as Canadians, or even as humans. 

As my late friend and mentor, Anglican priest and Dene elder Vivian Seegers would say, we are all in this soup of Belovedness together – the two leggeds, the four leggeds, the finned ones, the winged ones, the ones that creep and the ones that crawl, the rock people, the star people, the air, earth, water and fire. All BEAR THE NAME BELOVED.  In my years of friendship and chaplaincy with some of the most deeply unloved people in our country, I have learned something of the power of naming. Addict, alcoholic, junkie, liar, unfit parent. But there is power in un-naming too. 

So this is where we encounter Jesus, here in Luke’s gospel, almost for the first time, as he confronts the Tempter in the desert. Not so much resisting the temptation to be human, to eat when he was hungry, or even to dream, but instead resisting the temptation to allow himself to be named by someone or something masquerading as the truth. (Turn these stones into bread – cut down this rainforest to make cheap hamburgers. Take power over these kingdoms – invade this nation. Throw yourself off these heights – threaten this nuclear plant.) Secure in his true name and identity, Beloved, Jesus was not tempted to be named again – not even king. 

Some of you here this morning know this part of my story – that 15 years ago I spent time in an alcohol and drug treatment program, learning how to live again, and how following that six week residential program, the support of various 12-step groups helped me to want to keep on living. But one thing almost derailed that part of my recovery – the expectation that I would define myself as my addiction. I may have learned a little about humility, but to this day I will assert with confidence, Alcoholic is not my name. 

Maybe you’ve been named too – I’m sure you can fill in the blank for any unkind, abusive, or even just descriptive name you’ve heard, or been called, or called another person. Or more accurately perhaps, any name we’ve allowed our culture to call us. Consumer. Taxpayer. Patriot. Pur laine… I don’t have to enumerate them all for you – likely you are already holding a particular one close to your wounded heart. Worse yet, we’ve allowed our world to be named: commodity, resource, enemy.

• JUST Treat everything as a commodity – water, food, housing, freedom, power, nature, humanity – and I will give you more than you could ever ask or desire.
• JUST dehumanize and demonize your enemies or your neighbours (Ukranians are Nazis, Tutsis are insects, Jews are Christ-killers, Muslims are terrorists, Mexicans are criminals and rapists, Immigrants steal your jobs) and I will give you security, prosperity and power over all the kingdoms of the earth
• JUST treat the earth as if its resources are limitless or inexhaustable – the air, water, land, animals, fish and fowl, and you can enrich yourselves without penalty or consequences (throw yourself down from here… and God will have the angels save you)

When we, like Jesus, insist on being accurately named, we understand instinctively that all of creation is Beloved, that our world, our universe is finite and precious and inextricably interconnected. Wise ones and prophets have always reminded us of that…

• Elisabeth Johnson theologian – “If separation is not the ideal, but connection is; if dualism is not the ideal but the relational embrace of diversity is; if hierarchy is not the ideal but mutuality is; then the kinship model more closely approximates reality. It sees human beings and the earth with all its creatures intrinsically related as companions in a community of life. Because we are all mutually interconnected, the flourishing or damaging of one ultimately affects all.” 
• What happens to the web of life, happens to us all – Chief Sealth (Seattle) 
• Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr. from a jail in Birmingham, Alabama – Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. 
• Archbishop Desmond Tutu – Ubuntu – I am human only because you are also human, what diminishes your humanity diminishes my humanity. 
• The Nuu-chah-nulth “hish uk ish tsawalk,” everything is connected, everything is one. 
• Suzanne Simard, Dr. David Suzuki – our natural ecosystems and the biome undergird the health of our forests and our land, (and ultimately, all life on earth) from fungi to salmon to black bears and grizzlies.

And contrary to what the Tempter or the devil (or call it what you will: society, the system, the powers that be, the international system of accounting, the GDP or IMF), every one of our actions and inactions have consequences. All we have to do is to forget, or better yet, reject the knowledge that the true name of Everything is Beloved. 

The Tempter says, it’s simple.  You can have the world and all its riches, you can have power over, you can have all you can imagine or desire and more if you only forget that one irreducible truth – that the name of every single mosquito, every merest fragment of old growth forest, every tired, dirty, disenfranchised person on the street, every thing or person we choose to hate is BELOVED.

Because forgetting binds us to the limitations of greed, addictions, fear, prejudice, xenophobia – all the isms and phobias we are prone to… (racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, colonialism, gender bias, homo/trans-phobia) 

Remembering, on the other hand, invites into the spaciousness of our inter-relatedness and BELOVEDNESS:

• Everything is interconnected/inter-related, (we do not live by bread/food, physical needs alone) 
• Everything/everyone is intrisnically worthy (“You will worship the Most High God; God alone you will adore.”) 

Arundhati Roy, Indian novelist, activist and world citizen has said: 

“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling…their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” 

In the desert, Jesus said much the same thing to the Tempter – I refuse to buy what you’re selling – your ideas, your version of history, your wars, weapons, your notion of inevitability. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way… and from there he went on to Galilee, to the teach in the synagogues and to read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah – “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…”  – but that’s a story for another day.

For today maybe it’s enough to know that, bound up as we are in that inescapable network of mutuality, that single garment of destiny that is the name, BELOVED, we are not alone.

DIRECTIONS – by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

It is not that the path 

has disappeared. It is only

that, stunned with grief

and kicked by fear,

we sometimes lose our will

to put one foot

in front of the other.

But we are not lost.

Already in the dark

we have found each other.

What astonishes is

that there are so many of us,

and already

we are building bridges

made of light.

The world shakes,

we stumble

and we help each other rise,

and now it is time

for us again to put one foot in front of the other—

not to escape what frightens us

but to walk unflinchingly

toward the messy center of things.

The path we choose now

is not one we’ve walked or even seen before,

the path is one that appears

beneath our feet

with each step,

and we persist,

travelers in the frozen dark

who begin to see the light as it shapes the horizon 

and know, though it’s cold,

that the change we dream of

has already begun to arrive.  MAY IT BE SO.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in Southwest Colorado with her husband and two children, served as the third Colorado Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and was a finalist for Colorado Poet Laureate (2019). 

A TIME FOR REFLECTION, PRAYER, OFFERING AND CONVERSATION

You are invited to reflect in silence, to light a candle or place a stone or shell as an expression of your intention or prayer. We rely on your generous donations to support our ministry in the Denman Island community. This link will take you to instructions for donating. We are grateful for all your contributions of time, talent and treasure.  https://denmanislandunitedchurch.ca/donate/ 

RESPONDING IN SONG: MV # 174 – “SOIL OF GOD”

(Words and music: jim hannah, 1995)

Soil of God, you and I, stand ready to bear 

seeds of faith nourished by God’s tender care.

Growing in everyone for here God is found. 

All stand together, we are…Holy ground.

Soil of God, you and I, now ready to be 

part of God’s promise, for others to see.

Open to everyone for here God is found. 

All stand together, we are…Holy ground.

Soil of God, you and I, now called to rebirth 

joining as partners with all of the earth.

Living in harmony for here God is found. 

All stand together this is…Holy ground.

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE AND THE PRAYER OF JESUS:  

During our time of prayer together you are invited to respond to the words: 

Deep peace of the God of peace with the response: The peace of Everlasting

Together let us pray for the peace of the world, 

for the people of Ukraine and Russia,

for a spirit of respect and reconciliation among nations and people.

Holy One, grant that we may live together in justice and peace.

Deep peace of the God of peace  

The peace of Everlasting

Together let us pray for those who are condemned to exile, 

prison, harsh treatment, or hard labour, 

for the sake of justice and truth.  

Creator support them and keep them steadfast.

For refugees, and families who are parted by conflict

For those who risk their lives on the road to escape 

or in the streets to defend

For political prisoners and prisoners of conscience

For those who bear the responsibility

for beginning and ending these terrors

and for those who will not survive their suffering 

and will return to your eternal presence

Deep peace of the God of peace

The peace of Everlasting

Together let us pray for our countries, 

and especially for those who would lead us.

God, help them to serve the people according to your wisdom.

For the leaders of all nations

For those tasked with the making of peace

For those who would put profit and expedience before the work of peace

For those who propagate hate and misinformation

For those for whom peace means compromise

Deep peace of the God of peace

The peace of Everlasting

Together let us pray for one another, 

for this place and all who live here, 

The poor and the rich, the elderly and the young, the sick and the needy. 

We bring our prayers and concerns for friend and stranger,

as we name them before you now, either silently or aloud 

(PLEASE OFFER YOUR PRAYERS)

Lord grant them your healing love.   

Deep Peace of the God of Peace to you.

The peace of Everlasting

THE PRAYER OF JESUS    

(from a Dominican Sisters Retreat, March 1993, Great Bend, Kansas)

Our Father 

Our Mother 

Who art in heaven 

Who are in all the earth 

Hallowed be thy name 

Holy is your truth 

Thy kingdom come 

May your wisdom come 

Thy will be done, on earth 

Your circle be one uniting as it is in heaven and earth 

Give us this day our daily bread 

Give us today a nurturing spirit 

And forgive us our trespasses 

Heal through us those who trespass against us

as when we forgive, we ourselves are healed

Lead us not into temptation 

Lead us into Fullness of life 

But deliver us from evil 

And liberate all that is good 

For thine is the Kingdom, 

For the Wisdom, the power and the glory, 

Presence and the Goodness are Yours 

Now and forever.  AMEN 

Commissioning and Benediction:

May hope rise among us for every tired, weary, broken heart. 

Let hope strengthen us into action 

so that we may grow in our collective awareness of each other, 

letting every interaction be a reminder: 

none of us are in this alone. 

Breathe deep. 

Stay connected. 

Together, we will hold the tension of things. 

Some flowers will take longer to bloom. 

And this is also true: there is still hope for our uncertainty.
https://morganharpernichols.com/

A word of love

A word of compassion

A word of healing, hope, peace.

You are that word.

Go into the world to serve and to live the word.

SUNG BLESSING – MV # 214 – May God’s Sheltering Wings

        (Words and Music: Judith Snowdon, 2004)

May God’s sheltering wings, her gathering wings protect you.

May God’s nurturing arms, his cradling arms sustain you,

And hold you in their love, and hold you in their love.