narrative lectionary – Page 19

Stuck in a Room: Contemplating Pentecost

Lord,

I am imagining the disciples, stuck in a room together.

Staying safe.

Lonely.

Yet sick of each other at the same time.

Stuck.

So stuck, they had nothing to do. And didn’t know what to say.

Can you imagine, followers of Jesus not knowing what to say?

But Jesus was gone, peacing out to heaven, to work from home, Jesus ascended back to his Father.

Telecommuting was just not the same.

So here were the disciples, stuck.

And, somehow, they were given gifts–arriving like packages in the mail.

The disciples unwrapped:

the words they couldn’t find,

the wisdom to take the time they needed

the knowledge to think on their feet

the healing to pass on to others

the miracles to see God at work in the toughest times

the prophecies to tell the truth to power

the discernment to see how spirits work

the interpretation necessary to understand tongues,

and the learning needed to speak in tongues.

All of these gifts were given, according to the disciples’ abilities, one body, one spirit, one baptism;

many gifts.

As we are stuck, remind us that we too are disciples, we too are gifted according to our abilities.

Empower us to be the body of Christ we pray.

Remind us of our gifts….

Point us to the need…..

And invite us into ministry and discipleship as you do every Pentecost we pray.

Amen.

Gifts of the Holy Spirit Plea/Prayer

Meditation on the Body of Christ

Pentecost Resources

All Resources can be used with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta

Pentecost, Gifts of the Spirit Seeds of Faith narrative Lectionary

Gifts of the Spirit

Acts 2:1-4; 1 Cor 12:1-13

(Mark 1:4-8)

Body of Christ

Stuck in a Room: Contemplating Pentecost

Gifts of the Holy Spirit Plea/Prayer

Bulletin and other Resources by Rev Dr Barb Hedges-Goettl

Another Resource for NL http://sacredise.com/lectionary-resources/pentecost-a/

Call to Worship

Lord we come here to celebrate our baptism

One Body, One Spirit, One Baptism, One Body of God

Bathe us once again, in the Holy Spirit

Come let us gather and greet the Lord

Call to Worship

Lord remind us that we are one in the Spirit

Help us to recognize your gifts, we pray

Let us use our gifts today and everyday

Let us use them to glorify the Lord

Confession: Lord, God we are feeling trapped and uninspired. We are weary. What do we say in times like this? How can we help those in need? How do we heal from this mass trauma? We feel alone. Breathe on us once again–give us live and inspiration and strength. Encourage us. Ennerve us. Energize us. Advocate for us, we pray.

Assurance of Pardon: God’s grace breathes upon us like a soothing breeze in the scorching heat. Know that God always loves us. Live into the refreshing forgiveness of Jesus Christ.

Prayer of Communion: Lord, before we even existed, your Spirit danced upon the water, blowing it’s presence across the earth. Then you formed us out of clay and breathed us into being. Then your Holy Spirit accompanied Christ: sometimes encouraging him, sometimes becoming the driving force behind him. Then when Jesus ascended into heaven, the Holy Spirit was sent to the disciples, as an advocate. So we ask for you to breathe once again here, upon these common elements. Transform them through the power of the Holy Spirit to carry the body and blood of Christ. Commune us together Holy Spirit: with all those who have celebrated communion, all those who are celebrating and all those who will celebrate communion. Create with us the invisible, present and virtual Church made real in Christ. We pray this is the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Prayer of Dedication/the Day: Lord, bless us so that we can be a blessing we pray. Remind us of our gifts. And when our gifts feel like a burden or a curse, remind us to rest and eat and to breathe, so that we might once again do our work in joy, we pray.

All resources can be used with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta

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Eastertide Preaching Narrative Lectionary

Virtual Communion Resources

Pandemic Resources

Death Swallowed in Life Seeds of Prayer for Narrative Lectionary

Death Swallowed in Life

1 Cor 15:1-26, 51- 57

(Mark 12:26-27a)

Lamentations 3:22-23

Call to Worship:
The Steadfast love of the Lord never ceases

His mercies never come to an end

They are new every morning

Let us praise the faithfulness of the Lord our God.

Prayer of Confession: Lord we confess that we do not want to die. Death is scary, it means missing people and it means change. Walk with us, we pray. When death seems near, hold our hand. When we feel like giving up, strengthen us to live fully into ourselves for as long as we have on earth we pray. Amen.

Assurance of Pardon: Hear the Good news: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to the end. Hear the good news: In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.

Hymns: Morning Has Broken, Great is Thy Faithfulness, What Wondrous Love is This, Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise

1 Corinthians 13: Apocalyptic Thinking

1 Cor. 13:1-3

(Mark 12:28-31)

Resources, Commentaries and Prayers by Rev. Dr. Barbara Hedges-Goettl

Rewritten 1st Corinthians 13 in light of today & pandemic

If I speak with all of the authority & power in the world, but have not love,

My voice becomes blurred and untrustworthy.

If I can move mountains, changing laws, changing history, changing minds, and have not love–my work becomes meaningless

If I proclaim victory: that we are “great” the “best” the “most” and talk about all I have done for my family and my country, but have not love. I in actuality, have gained absolutely nothing.

Love: does it’s best to wait til after the danger of disease has passed to hug a loved one.

Love does not compare leaders, all of whom are doing the best they can to keep people safe.

It does not gut medicare and ignore the vulnerable and the elderly in the nursing homes as it boasts that it is doing everything possible to save lives

It is not racist or bigoted, It is not ignorant or panic-inducing.

Love is not irritable or resentful–it wears a mask out of love, and pays the essential workers more, and understands how reliant we are on one another for survival.

Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, it does not ignore the racial discrepencies in illness, treatment or quarantine enforcement.

Love rejoices in the truth, even when it is hard.

For it is through love we bear all things even in sickness and death, it believes all things even in joblessness and loneliness, hopes all things: even as singing is silenced the hope for the opportunity to sing again persists.

Love can endure all things.

Even when we can’t believe it especially, when we can’t believe it.

Love endures all things

Love never ends: As for prophecies: promises of the future beauty & success: it comes to the end.

Tongues: chattering gossip and lies–they too will cease.

Even knowledge: will come to an end as humans are limited and to think we know more than a grain of how the world works is hubris.

For we only know bits: facts & science serve as only the beginning, and we can foresee some other bits: arts and gospel serve to extend our knowledge beyond our own sphere and experience.

But, when the complete comes, the partial will end. God will give all knowledge to everybody. And it is up to us if we experience that knowledge as judgement or grace.

For I am but a child of God, speaking and reasoning like a child: babbling the bits of love I understand to God and other humans.

When I fully mature: when I join God, I will put away childish ways: jealousies, regrets, conspiracies, imposter syndromes, competitions and internalized bigotries and self-hate will fade into the foolishness they are.

Now, I can barely glimpse God and love: sometimes I feel it when I briefly glimpse myself in the mirror and can actually affirm, for a moment, that I am God’s beloved.

Someday I will see love, God, each other: face to face.

Now I acknowledge that even in the best of time, I can only know things in part.

Someday I will know fully, just as I am already full known by God.

Someday I will fully know myself, and I will be fully known by others, and acknowledged as belonging–not a piece or part of me, but all of me, as a created beloved piece of God’s love.

And as Faith, Hope and Love abide today.

Someday there will be no need for faith and hope.

So fully will we be bathed and punctuated by Love.

Feel free to use for sermon/worship/prayer with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta

Virtual Communion Resources

Pandemic Resources

Eastertide Narrative Lectionary Resources

Narrative Lectionary Seeds of Prayer: Church at Corinth

Church at Corinth

Acts 18:1-4

1 Cor. 1:10-18

(Mark 9:34-35)

Lectionary Resources & Prayers by Dr. Barb Hedges-Goettl

Call to Worship

To whom do you belong? Are you an American? A Democrate? a Republican? An Independent?

I belong to Christ

Can Christ be divided?

No, we are the body of Christ.

Call to Worship

Look who has gathered here today?

It is us, the hands and feet of Christ

It is so good you are here, we have need of each and every one of you!

Come let us worship the Lord together!

Prayer of Confession: God, too often we forget who formed us, and blessed us and sent us into the world. We think we are made of our own bootstraps, or that our merits are based on our worthiness. Bless us as children of God, we pray. Amen.

Prayer of Confession: Lord, I confess that I am desperate to belong, to fit in, to be a part of it all. And it is hard to know that I fall short, it is hard acknowledge that I can disclose others, who also want to belong. Teach me how we all belong to you I pray. Amen.

Assurance of Pardon: God’s love always leaves the light on for us, come home and know the truth: In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.

Prayer of the Day: Lord, remind us that we can find home and love in you. Especially when it’s hard to face the world. Be our soft place to land, we pray. Amen.

Communion Prayer: Lord, like a mother you nourish us. Giving Adam and Eve the Garden of Eden and all that dwelled therein. Then when we were wandering in the desert with Moses, you fed us manna. Again, when the temple was destroyed, you fed us hope. Feed us today, again, today in any way we need. Bless this food and cup with the Holy Spirit so it can be the food of Jesus Christ, communion and love. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, your firstborn child, who adopted each of us as family. May we celebrate all of our meals with our brother Jesus we pray. Amen.

Body of Christ Litany

Mother’s Day Confession Prayer

Mother’s Day Litany Prayer (in light of the pandemic)

Virtual Communion Resources

Pandemic Resources

Eastertide Narrative Lectionary Resources

Standing in the Breach

Lord, I am not the beggar with a disability waiting at the gate of the church. But I understand their plight better this year. As I stand in the breach of church–trying to hold open the bridge between the world and worship. As we collect money for food pantries, and try to find ways for communities to meet and pray. I feel like we too are stuck at the gate of the temple.

Sometimes we are outside the temple, begging to get in, yet unable to pray.

Sometimes we are at the gates of heaven, barely breathing in and out.

Sometimes we are waiting by the side of someone who is on the cusp of death.

Lord, the breaches are gaping right now: the gap between rich and poor, healthy and sick, abled and disabled, the privileged and the marginal, essential and nonessential, the black and the white and the rest of the people of color.

Help us to be the disciples at the breach, fixing our eyes upon them, seeing not just their stated wants but also their deeper needs. Help us to to touch those who are stuck, and to take their hand and walk with them in the community. Even if that touch and walk is only metaphorical today.

Lord we know what it’s like to be in the breach.

Show us how to be the helpers, the healers, we pray.

Remind us that no help is too little, that we are longing for one another’s company, touch and presence.

Help us to be present and stand in the breach, we pray.

Amen.

Eastertide Resources

Peter Heals in Jerusalem Seeds of Prayer

Acts 3:1-10

(Mark 6:53-56)

Psalm 6

Call to Worship

Be gracious to me God, for my bones are shaking in terror.

All that opposes me will depart, for God has heard my weeping.

I am weary Lord.

The Lord will deliver me through steadfast love.

Call to Worship

Lord we long for you.

Touch our eyes, our hearts, our bodies & our souls

Lord we long for your healing

Touch your blessings on our heads, we pray.

Prayer of Confession: Lord, I confess I am weary with my moaning. I flood my bed with tears. I feel surrounded by evil and adversity. Every day brings bad news. But I know the Lord hears my supplication. Wherever I invite God, God promises to hear and be there. When the world wastes away, I know that healing awaits. I will wait for the healing touch of the Lord.

Assurance of Pardon: Lord, we know your healing floods out, a droplet of grace will save us. Hear the Good News In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.

Prayer of the Day/Dedication: Lord, we cast our imperfect bodies before you. We give them on to you. We await the healing of the entire world, we breathe for the moment that the world is made whole. Orient us towards you and your touch, we pray. Amen.

Eucharist Prayer; As we touch the bread and cup, the body and the blood of Christ to our lips. Let us remember that Jesus came as embodied love. Fully human, he bore the scars of his death upon the cross. When we consume Christ, when we practice communion with his body, we re-member you, we start the healing of coming together. No matter how we are practicing communion, we are practicing with you and therefore with one another. Strengthen us as the body Christ, heal us as the body of Christ and empower us to be the body of Christ we pray. Amen.

Hymn: Balm in Gilead, There’s a Sweet, Sweet Spirit in this Place. O Christ, the Healer, We Walk By Faith and Not By Sight, Jesu, Jesu Fill Us With Your Love, My Shepherd Will Supply My Need, We Are Your People, They Will Know We Are Christian’s By Our Love

With Children: Talk about tools of Healing and How God continues to work with us as we try to heal (bandaids, medications, masks), Read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible No Good, Very Bad Day, Where the Wild Things Are, Beauty & the Beast

Healing Touch

Lord,

We hunger for your healing touch. We want to rush out to you, heedless of noise & crowd to touch even the fringe of your cloak, so that we too might be healed. In a time when so many of us are begging at the gate. So many of us our dealing with illness. In a time where the disabilities that can follow coronavirus can be as frightening as the illness itself. Lord we hunger for healing.

We also long for touch. How long has it been, Lord, since I’ve hugged a friend or shared a handshake or passed out communion? I don’t think I’d know what hunger I have for human touch, until the restrictions to pause and stay safe came into play.

I suspect the next thing I will miss are the smiles that the masks hide.

Smiles, prayers, touch how little does it take to make church happen Lord? How much it takes to make church happen!

Thank God for the healers: the doctors, the nurses, the medical staff, and the researchers. Thank God for cleansers: the custodians and cleaning crews and trash collectors. Thank God for the providers: the retail & grocery workers, the restaurant workers & gas attendants. Thank God for the repairers: the mechanics, the plumbers, electricians, energy and water providers. We know that all of these people are part of the healing touch.

Help us to remember that we are not Jesus, healing is not instantaneous, that touching and prayer and smiles might appear in different ways but they are still essential to how we are going to survive and heal. Remind us today and every day we pray.

Eastertide Resources

Pandemic Resources

Looking to Heaven: Eastertide

Jesus went to heaven, and the disciples would have liked to have stayed there.

Looking at the heavens.

Just like the transfiguration.

Let’s move in, we are ready for heaven.

Or at least we can spend all the time with the pure ones, the disciples, the ones in the know.

And Jesus said, don’t worry I’m going to send you to the ends of the earth, don’t worry I’m going to give you a million Easters, 2,000 years to learn; 2,000 years of grace.

Talk about a grace period for one’s debts.

Many weeks and Sunday for Easter to unfold into your hearts, and your children’s hearts and your children’s children’s children’s house.

I’m going to give you time to learn how to be community.

I’m going to leave you with my one commandment, love one another.

Stop looking at heaven, the answer isn’ there.

Look to earth, to the relationships.

Grief

Dearest God,

Who loved us into being. I have the sad today. It is lingering on all the things I touch. As I wake my kids up, I miss putting them on the schoolbus and the few moments breath between home and work as I travel in.

I miss stopping for tea-coffee for some- as a pick me up.

I miss seeing my friends.

I miss alone time, truly alone, with no one in the house.

I also miss hugging others. How can I miss both at the same time? Only you know Lord.

I miss funerals.

I miss all the kids I’ll see grow: at church, nursery school, elementary school, at the college, and ALL the babies at playgroup!

Jesus who missed sitting by Lazarus when he died, who wept openly when his mother had to leave him to die alone.

I miss not having to wear an itchy mask that fogs up my glasses every time I go out.

I miss touching my face.

I miss not worrying if every small business, theater and church is going to be open next year.

I miss the therapies for my kids. I miss anyone taking over for the kids for an hour or two, I miss babysitting.

I miss talking on the phone for fun. I miss real meetings (Who thought I’d say that?)

I miss sitting in church, and singing and praying together.

I miss my sister coming out for Easter. She already missed last year, to miss two in a year feels a cruel trick.

Jesus what did you miss those three days in the tomb? The friends, the family, the touch. Did you miss the purposeful meaning-making of work? Did you miss your favorite food? Did you miss the beautiful lakes you frequented? Did you have a plan you had to cancel the morning of the last supper, when you realized the arrest was coming that very day? Did you miss a child’s first step or word? A niece or a nephew you had been waiting on?

I wonder if Jesus misses the very crowds that annoyed him now that he has ascended into heaven?

Grief is the slow journey of realization: That my middle child will never go back to elementary school he will suddenly move to fifth grader, my eldest will never be Peter Pan in Shrek, that my youngest will never get to see his brand new friends–who he just made this year–in school until after summer.

I’m grieving the small overnight trips I was going to make: for business and to see friends, I love traveling.

I’m grieving all the misses and the can’ts: the events, the peoples, the milestones, the simple moments.

I’m grieving not being able to go to the library and pick out a free book, pick up an art supply or even my favorite pasta from the grocery store (shell noodles).

It’s all, every single bit of it, real.

There is no piece of grief too small for Christ. Each one appears in my path, threatening to derail my journey–whether it’s a mountain in the way or a pebble in my shoe.

Lord, help me journey through my crumbs and mountains of grief I pray.

I lift my eyes to the hills of my grief, from whom shall my help come?

My help comes from the Lord, my God.

Help me I pray.

Amen.

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