Being part of God's machine
in a tiny way, of course.
Unless you are very familiar with a pastor, or a pastor yourself, you probably don't think about how a worship service comes to be. You just show up on Sunday and someone has picked the hymns and written the prayers. Someone will pass the plates around, and someone will hand you a nametag. If you stick around enough Sundays, you will end up handing out nametags yourself.
I am on the worship committee right now. A worship committee is a fine and excellent thing for a pastor to have, because it shakes up some of the rote and tedium that can, must, inevitably creep into designing a service. Pastor Dennis's comments on how he feels about preaching YET AGAIN on the transfiguration were...trenchant. (We're having Mardi Gras instead. And pancakes. Thus the inspiration of a worship committee.)
Because I did not learn from LAST time, I signed up for the first week of a series again, so I am setting the template for this series, which is a slight pain, because what if I remembered it all wrong?
On the other hand, the scripture is Isaiah -- God has called you by name. Since Baz just read Wrinkle in Time, I was thinking about L'Engle, and Meg Murry, and Naming. So that's the meditation quote. And then naturally the first hymn is "God, Who Stretched the Spangled Heavens" (to the tune of "Holy Manna", for you hymn nerds.
God, who stretched the spangled heavens infinite in time and place,
Flung the suns in burning radiance through silent fields of space;
We, your children, in your likeness, share inventive powers with you;
Great Creator, still creating, show us what we yet may do.
We have ventured worlds undreamed of since the childhood of our race;
Known the ecstasy of winging through untraveled realms of space;
Probed the secrets of the atom, yielding unimagined power,
Facing us with life's destruction or our most triumphant hour.
Yes, yes it is a hymn about space travel and cracking the atom. Life is awesome.
And then because the denomination is kind, there is a prayer I don't hate, that I can use, so I'm not writing the prayer of confession. Writing prayers is HARD, yo. It has to be spiritually digestible AND easy to read aloud. Easy, of course, varies by congregation. I will swear that at least 50 of my SAT verbal points come from going to an intellectually rigorous church, because, by gum, I learned some obscure words from hymns.
And because I am incapable of being good all the time, the offering response for the series is "Come, O Fount of Every Blessing", voted "Way Up There in Hymns That Slash Themselves"
O to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it to thy courts above.
Thankfully for my ability to maintain a straight face in church, we are singing the UCC version, which is slightly less BDSM-flavored.
Lala, scripture, children's sermon.
The next hymn is only tangentially thematic, but I deeply love it. The last verse is so:
Spirit, spirit of gentleness, blow through the wilderness, calling and free,
Spirit, spirit of restlessness, stir me from placidness, wind, wind on the sea.
You call from tomorrow, you break ancient schemes,
from the bondage of sorrow the captives dream dreams;
Our women see visions, our men clear their eyes,
With bold new decisions, your people arise.
Sermon.
Hymn: Jesus Calls Us, O'er the Tumult (yet another vocabulary builder). Sadly for me, there are two versions in the hymnal, the tune I grew up with, and the tune the congregation knows. Well, it was very nice of the pastor to give me a spreadsheet with all the hymns people know highlighted. Still, of course I wish they sang the RIGHT one. Especially since I can't read music. (this is a long-term goal of mine, becoming marginally literate in music). So I had to go ask sil which one it was I knew. Sheesh.
Whew, just the benediction left, and I can go to bed. I really hoped to get to bed early tonight. Hah.
Unless you are very familiar with a pastor, or a pastor yourself, you probably don't think about how a worship service comes to be. You just show up on Sunday and someone has picked the hymns and written the prayers. Someone will pass the plates around, and someone will hand you a nametag. If you stick around enough Sundays, you will end up handing out nametags yourself.
I am on the worship committee right now. A worship committee is a fine and excellent thing for a pastor to have, because it shakes up some of the rote and tedium that can, must, inevitably creep into designing a service. Pastor Dennis's comments on how he feels about preaching YET AGAIN on the transfiguration were...trenchant. (We're having Mardi Gras instead. And pancakes. Thus the inspiration of a worship committee.)
Because I did not learn from LAST time, I signed up for the first week of a series again, so I am setting the template for this series, which is a slight pain, because what if I remembered it all wrong?
On the other hand, the scripture is Isaiah -- God has called you by name. Since Baz just read Wrinkle in Time, I was thinking about L'Engle, and Meg Murry, and Naming. So that's the meditation quote. And then naturally the first hymn is "God, Who Stretched the Spangled Heavens" (to the tune of "Holy Manna", for you hymn nerds.
God, who stretched the spangled heavens infinite in time and place,
Flung the suns in burning radiance through silent fields of space;
We, your children, in your likeness, share inventive powers with you;
Great Creator, still creating, show us what we yet may do.
We have ventured worlds undreamed of since the childhood of our race;
Known the ecstasy of winging through untraveled realms of space;
Probed the secrets of the atom, yielding unimagined power,
Facing us with life's destruction or our most triumphant hour.
Yes, yes it is a hymn about space travel and cracking the atom. Life is awesome.
And then because the denomination is kind, there is a prayer I don't hate, that I can use, so I'm not writing the prayer of confession. Writing prayers is HARD, yo. It has to be spiritually digestible AND easy to read aloud. Easy, of course, varies by congregation. I will swear that at least 50 of my SAT verbal points come from going to an intellectually rigorous church, because, by gum, I learned some obscure words from hymns.
And because I am incapable of being good all the time, the offering response for the series is "Come, O Fount of Every Blessing", voted "Way Up There in Hymns That Slash Themselves"
O to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it to thy courts above.
Thankfully for my ability to maintain a straight face in church, we are singing the UCC version, which is slightly less BDSM-flavored.
Lala, scripture, children's sermon.
The next hymn is only tangentially thematic, but I deeply love it. The last verse is so:
Spirit, spirit of gentleness, blow through the wilderness, calling and free,
Spirit, spirit of restlessness, stir me from placidness, wind, wind on the sea.
You call from tomorrow, you break ancient schemes,
from the bondage of sorrow the captives dream dreams;
Our women see visions, our men clear their eyes,
With bold new decisions, your people arise.
Sermon.
Hymn: Jesus Calls Us, O'er the Tumult (yet another vocabulary builder). Sadly for me, there are two versions in the hymnal, the tune I grew up with, and the tune the congregation knows. Well, it was very nice of the pastor to give me a spreadsheet with all the hymns people know highlighted. Still, of course I wish they sang the RIGHT one. Especially since I can't read music. (this is a long-term goal of mine, becoming marginally literate in music). So I had to go ask sil which one it was I knew. Sheesh.
Whew, just the benediction left, and I can go to bed. I really hoped to get to bed early tonight. Hah.