Setting the table with the Sabbatical themes, this is the piece of paper that started it all. Enter / Depart. Back in Lent we asked this question:
How does this phrase, “Enter to Worship / Depart to Serve,” challenge us to live our faith out loud in our generation?
We spent a week on each of these parts:
- Worship is the Center
- Language tunes our Love
- Prayer focuses our Passion
- Community embodies our Action
- Discernment inspires our Service
Now, I’m building my sabbatical reflections around these same parts. And the Sabbatical Team is developing a strategy for our congregational Sabbatical reflections and study. Let’s ponder these together (again, if you were part of the Lenten Series!):
Consider Worship
Worship is the center. It’s what extravagantly welcomes us home, and focuses us to our own and all of creation’s needs,. It helps us hear where there is brokenness, and where healing can come. Worship engages our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits to following Christ’s Way, setting our attitudes for the Service of healing creation.
Consider Language
Language Tunes our Love. The words we hear, sing, and pray tune us to the needs of the world we serve. Radically inclusive, ever-expansive language of how God continues to create brings us into the centering of worship. ·Language tunes our hearts to new expressions of an ever-inclusive love
Consider Prayer
Prayer focuses our passion. It takes us into relationship with God; prayer is when we open our mouths first, and then our ears second, and let God engage us. Prayer takes us away from a false sense of responsibility that can move us for focused people and turn us into over-driven people. It gathers us in community, and in contemplation.
Consider Community
Speaking of Community: Community embodies our action. It’s caring for others, as much as we care for ourselves. It’s witnessing to the connections that bind us, and publicly striving for sharing more. The third practice is giving of ourselves. When we give in community, we admit that we are not owners. We trustees: trustees of our possessions, our time, our lives. We’re not running the world, because the world is not ours to run. Together with everyone else, we are recipients of this great blessing, and caregivers for the next generation. We are free to rest, knowing that our calling is to care for what we can now. We can trust that God will care for what will come next (just as God cared for all that has come before).
Consider Discernment
When we take time, when we pray, and focus, and share; then we find rest. In that time we consider one more thing: Our Discernment. We ask the questions about who we are called to be as individuals in God’s realm. We delve deeper as the living organism of connection and social engagement—the church.
Tie these all together, and I believe we find what we each need to “Enter to Worship / Depart to Serve.” We do not collapse from exhaustion. We do not sccumb to a lack of activity. But we do find a deep sense of purpose that spares us from being so driven, distracted, and busy. We are able to find the joy that waits for us in what we do. We get a taste of resurrection in our flesh and bones, our moments and our days.
