Sunday Morning & Beyond
New Hymns
Editor's note: Is this publication late, or just a reminder? If you're like me, there's often some worship filing on your desk on Monday and Tuesday. If you're really like me, you may just now be getting around to filing Easter materials. And, thus, it is the perfect time to publish these lovely hymn texts by Rebecca Littlejohn, one for Easter and another based on the Acts 10 lectionary reading for the past Sunday. So get out some file folders and mark them up for Easter B and Easter 6B, file your materials, and add these hymn ideas. You'll thank yourself when 2012 rolls around!
In the last month or so, I have written two hymns for the tune "Austrian Hymn". It's a lovely tune, but the words of "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken" just never manage to have anything to do with the themes of our worship services. I have not used the Easter hymn text, but this week I just couldn't find anything I liked to go with the story of Peter and Cornelius from Acts 10, so I made my own.
Trinitarian Formula
It was bound to happen sooner or later: a baptism fight in the pastor’s meeting.
“Fight” might be too strong a word. I’m blessed to serve on a pastoral staff with a healthy sense of friendship and collegiality. We might grumble a bit, but there’s good give and take, and things tend to get resolved in the light of day before anything festers too often.
In fact, it was the very health of the way we share worship leadership that led to this disagreement. Our head of staff, Carl, insists on sharing the sacraments among the four pastors. Communion responsibilities are varied, and things are arranged on a given Sunday so that there’s never one officiant. One of us might give the invitation, another the Great Thanksgiving, and the other two split the responsibilities for breaking bread and pouring the cup.
I'm with Them
A sermon on Genesis 9:8-17 and 1 Peter 3:13-4:2, preached at Fox Valley Presbyterian Church, Geneva, IL, on March 1, 2009
If there’s any Bible story that is truly a part of “youth culture”, or at least the culture of the youngest of youth, it’s Noah and the Ark. If you do a search on Amazon for “Noah’s Ark toys” you get 303 results. That’s a whole toy-store-full of options!
When the Bible shows up in the toy aisle, I figure that’s a pretty clear sign that we’d better pay closer attention. Because, let’s be honest, Bible stories are often a little twisted. And if you can mass-produce the story in colorful plastic, you’re probably skipping over the difficult parts…
...as anyone who has ever tried to tell the Noah story to a little kid knows. Because, eventually, the kid starts to ask tough questions: like the people and animals who don’t make it onto the ark. The possibility that 40 days and 40 nights in a ship being battered by cataclysmic weather was not so much comfy and cozy as nasty and nauseating. That a grand total of 150 days with all of the animals of the world likely involved some of the most tremendous pooper-scooping efforts in humans history, and all of that doesn’t even begin to account for the bizarre appendix to the story where Noah gets drunk and naked.
When the Heavens Had to Shout
Matthew 17:1-9
Preached on Feb. 3, 2008 at First Baptist Church of Gaithersburg, MD
After preaching for the third consecutive year on Transfiguration Sunday, I found myself amazed that I had something new to say on the same passage.
After my father’s second year of seminary, my parents got joyous news that changed everything for them. My mom unexpectedly discovered that she was pregnant. Without the funds to support this new addition to their family, which would be me—my dad knew he needed to find another job, even if it meant quitting school temporarily. With my dad’s new family responsibilities, it took him until my third birthday to complete his MDiv. I don’t recall this but the following story has been told to me so many times that I feel like I could actually remember it myself.
Prayers for a Budding Year
In the spirit of those wonderful "gift of the month clubs", we offer a year's worth of prayers by Maria Bergius Krämer. She introduces these prayers with some description of the tradition of New Years' worship in her congregation.
White Elephant Party
It's a liturgical white elephant party! You know how you have these great worship ideas that, for one reason or another, just aren't going to happen in your church? (Or, maybe they will happen in your church, but you just want to share?) Well, here's a collection of Christmas-y ideas from other young clergy women. Maybe you are still looking for the perfect little thing to add to Christmas 2009, or maybe you'll file this away for next year. But we're sure there's something here for everyone. (And feel free to leave other white elephant ideas in the comments.)
An Advent Candlelighting Liturgy
First Sunday in Advent
Reader: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined… For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:2, 6)
Still Breathing
After a year or two in ministry you probably know the drill: you attend a conference, hear some really exciting stuff, come back all fired up, use what you learned a time or two, and then get sucked back into the undertow of meetings and budgets and organizing files and bad habits and cleaning your house and all those little everyday things that you got to leave behind while you were away continuing your education. And while many of our conference and seminar experiences are valuable if only because of the time away, the time to reflect, recreate, and recharge, there are some times when practical things stick with us, when we find that our preaching or pastoring or even paper-shuffling is impacted and improved by what we learned.
Church Shopping
This article must start with a disclaimer: I love my own
church. I love to worship at my own church. We do worship well: good hymns, a
great organist, a wonderful choir, kids participating, fervent prayer, gorgeous
banners, liturgy with a good mix of pattern and flexibility. But, here’s the
thing: if I didn’t do what I do and I were church shopping, I’m not sure I’d
worship at my church.
Church shopping is a completely foreign concept to me: I’m a pastor’s kid and a pastor. Except for a few brief years in college (when, truth be told, I mostly skipped church), I never picked my own church. In seminary, my husband and I attended the first church we visited—we were hooked after one Sunday. Or, maybe we weren’t hooked, but we just didn’t have the energy to look any further.
Since then, I’ve been attached to whichever congregation I serve. I’ve had varying degrees of influence over worship in these places: from the place where I wrote the entire liturgy every week to the massive downtown congregation where I might, once in a blue moon, get to compose a prayer.
(Extra)Ordinary Time
For lectionary-followers, this summer has been an unusually long slog through Ordinary Time. Maybe it's getting a little too ordinary for you by now. Help is on the way, though. For August 31, the 22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time (year A), the lectionary presents us with several stories of people pulled from the ordinary. Laura Stephens-Reed presents us with the following call to worship, an excellent example of how a finely crafted call can be beautifully written, liturgically appropriate, and gently exegetical. Inspired by her good work, Erica Schemper adds a short prayer that might also be used on that Sunday.
With a few weeks left until August 31, we'd love to see a few additional worship ideas posted in the comments!
