June 16, 2019
Pentecost
Worship Resources for
the Center for Faith and Giving
Call to Worship (from Psalm 8)
(if you have someone who can sing Psalm 8:1 from Sandy Patty’s song,
or can incorporate the video of Sandy Patty singing, use it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXzzsoL7tEI)
One: How majestic is the name of the Lord in all the earth!
Many: Look at the heavens, the moon and the stars…
One: yet God has crowned humans and given us dominion over it all.
Many: How majestic is the name of the Lord in all the earth!
One: God sets creation under the authority of people.
Many: We lift our hearts and hands in thankful prayer:
Opening Prayer
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
We stand before you today to offer you our praise and worship,
to honor your name and turn our eyes back to you.
Thank you for bringing us to this place
and making space for us to focus on your power and your care.
Accept the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts
as we proclaim our love for you, AMEN
Moment for Stewardship (from Romans 5:1-5)
Often at this point in our worship, we make an appeal for every person to reach deep and offer a generous gift. Today, however, let’s begin not with what we can give, but with what we are being given.
It’s wrapped up in a word we hear quite a bit in 2019: “resilience”. While inthat may be a buzzword, it captures what Paul describes as the reality of believers’ lives.
Believers in the first century frequently suffered because of their faith. Resilience is the capacity to bounce back from that type of suffering to lives of hope. Today we recognize hope coming from God’s love, poured into our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Here’s the thing: because God has already acted in love and we’ve already received the Holy Spirit, we want to respondwith joyful and generous gifts.
That response shows our bouncing back, our resiliency, from one-sided lives.
When we do not get side-lined by God’s actions, we’re able to move full-heartedly into lives of wholeness and shalom.
Prayer of Thanksgiving
All things come from you, God of creation. Thank you for your gift of the Holy Spirit, and for your love, which binds us to one another and to you.
We ask you to receive our gifts as signs of our lives. Together with these gifts, grant us resiliency to be re-formed into your image. We’re grateful for your hand at work in us, in our giving and in the world. AMEN
Invitation to Communion
Frederick Buechner writes “In printers’ language, to justify means to set type in such a way that all full lines are of equal length and flush both left and right; in other words, to put the printed lines in the right relationship with the page they’re printed on and with each other. The religious sense of the word is very close to this. Being justified means being brought into right relation. Paul says simply that being justified means having peace with God (Romans 5:1).”
(originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words)
When we come to communion, we find God already in action, justifying each one of us – setting us in right relationship to God. It’s one way we recognize we have a place at the table. This is not our own doing. It’s God’s justification, bringing us to the right place.
So know you are welcome here. Your invitation is engraved with your name and sealed by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ.
The feast is prepared and the Spirit bids you “come”!