God, hear my plan

Yesterday in worship I made a Freudian slip that made me glad I wasn’t on a microphone at that moment. While my colleague was presiding and the assisting minister was leading the Prayers of the People, I was participating in the congregation’s response to each petition: (assisting minister) “God, in your mercy,” (people) “hear our prayer.”

One of the petitions was for our congregation’s strategic planning process coming up, a huge endeavor of discernment which involves the whole congregation and lasts almost a year. Apparently I was thinking hard about planning during that petition (or I was just worn out toward the end of our third worship service that morning), because instead of responding “hear our prayer,” I said, “hear our plan.”

Blessed by the journey

Wow! Tonight we had the first “Breathe” worship, and I’m grateful for the attendance and response, pleased with how it worked out, and grateful for the talents and spirituality of my fellow staff/church members/worshipers.

I’m also too tired to post much, but there is one thing I keep thinking about. I preached this morning on our theme for the season of Lent, “Journey in the Wilderness: Faithful Living in Fearful Times.” As it often happens, I was going to use a story for the sermon–had begun working my sermon around this story, in fact–and then late in the preparations, had to let the story go. (Really–that happens more often than not when I’m so sure I’ve found “the perfect story.”) Still, I keep thinking about the person who told me this, and what it says about the 40-day “Lenten journey.”

It’s a story of one of the more complicated journeys I can remember taking: the journey to Holden Village up near Washington’s Lake Chelan, deep in the Cascade Mountains.

Foreheads and freedom

Ever since I was a young teenager, I’ve loved Ash Wednesday, which begins the 40-day season of Lent and which Lutherans observed today along with some other Christians. It’s a somber day for confession and receiving the mark of the cross in ashes on the forehead, with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” In more colloquial terms, it’s a day for remembering, “There is a God, and it is definitely not me.”

I suppose there are times when this sounds like really bad news–times when we struggle with our own mortality, insignificance, weakness, sinfulness, and the way humans can make a huge mess of most things we get our hands on. Sometimes, we would prefer not to be reminded of all that. But for me, all that isn’t the main message I usually took away from Ash Wednesday. What I usually felt on Ash Wednesday was relief.

‘God-breathed’ worship

It’s been a busy week, but much of that busyness has had a common theme: worship. Last weekend we had an 8-hour confirmation retreat on that topic with middle school kids. And in the midst of preparations for Lent and Holy Week worship, we’ve also been counting down (and preparing like crazy) for a new “contemplative, experiential” worship, called Breathe, which launches this coming Sunday.

So, naturally, I’ve been contemplating and experiencing worship a lot these days. Christian worship is an art form which is both remarkably sturdy and surprisingly fragile. Sturdy, in that even when it’s done poorly, there’s often a sense of the holy which overcomes all kinds of human failing. Fragile, in that even when it’s done well, it can still fall really flat.