Peace, Be Still: Reflections for a Simple Summer Sabbath
Mark 4:35-41
June 21, 2009
Sung: Peace, be still … peace be still. The storm rages, peace be still.
This passage from Mark has long been one of my favorites, especially for meditation, and I was grateful that the lectionary cycle brought it before us this Sunday. I’ve been thinking about summer worship, and how it might be a time of reflection for us as a community, and I decided well before I turned to the lectionary readings that this morning would be an excellent time to celebrate a simple summer Sabbath of readings and songs and relatively few preached words for a Presbyterian worship.
These words from Mark strike me as the perfect text for such a service, because they invite us into quiet, reflective trust – in other words, into deep faithfulness. These words are not about believing, not about creed, not about theology or Christology or ecclesiology. They are about trust, about letting go in the midst of the storms of life and simply trusting that, in the end, it will be all right.
To be guided also in this by Paul’s admonition to the church as Corinth is all to the better.
That is the perfect way to begin a summer season of reflection – with an attitude of deep trust that it will be all right.
This summer we are going to reflect on the vision for Clarendon Presbyterian Church. I will introduce this theme with a bit of detail next Sunday. The following week – the Sunday of the 4th of July holiday weekend – we will have a good, old-fashioned hymn sing.
Singing praise to God ought to get us in precisely the right frame of mind and soul to think together, through the Sundays of July, about what God is calling us to be and do in the seasons just ahead. We’ll focus in worship during July on three areas that the mission discernment group has lifted up: worship; our common life together; and local mission.
The first Sunday of August, we’ll pull that all together into a more-or-less cohesive vision.
The second Sunday of August we will focus on our experiences in local mission. The middle two Sundays of August will be full of song and celebration, then we’ll take the whole thing on the road for a picnic on August 30, before the final summer Sunday, September 6, when we will celebrate work on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend.
So, theirs is the thumbnail sketch of summer at CPC. I hope that you will feel called to be part of worship as often as possible this summer, knowing that each of us will be away from time to time. Summer worship 2009 is important in helping us lay a common foundation for the season to come in our common life.
In part, summer worship will be important because we are going to experience it in a slightly different frame: more of you, less of me. We will be “preaching together.” Preaching, at its best, is an inherently communal activity – a multi-voiced conversation involving the preacher, the congregation, the lively text, and the Spirit of the living God.
Too often, in our heady Reformed Protestant tradition, the preacher’s voice drowns out all others – especially, far too often, the still small voice of the Spirit.
We can do something about that, and we will this summer – beginning right now as we engage this text from Mark together.
Sung: Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me …
The remainder of this “sermon” will be a community lectio divina on the text from Mark.
June 21, 2009
Sung: Peace, be still … peace be still. The storm rages, peace be still.
This passage from Mark has long been one of my favorites, especially for meditation, and I was grateful that the lectionary cycle brought it before us this Sunday. I’ve been thinking about summer worship, and how it might be a time of reflection for us as a community, and I decided well before I turned to the lectionary readings that this morning would be an excellent time to celebrate a simple summer Sabbath of readings and songs and relatively few preached words for a Presbyterian worship.
These words from Mark strike me as the perfect text for such a service, because they invite us into quiet, reflective trust – in other words, into deep faithfulness. These words are not about believing, not about creed, not about theology or Christology or ecclesiology. They are about trust, about letting go in the midst of the storms of life and simply trusting that, in the end, it will be all right.
To be guided also in this by Paul’s admonition to the church as Corinth is all to the better.
That is the perfect way to begin a summer season of reflection – with an attitude of deep trust that it will be all right.
This summer we are going to reflect on the vision for Clarendon Presbyterian Church. I will introduce this theme with a bit of detail next Sunday. The following week – the Sunday of the 4th of July holiday weekend – we will have a good, old-fashioned hymn sing.
Singing praise to God ought to get us in precisely the right frame of mind and soul to think together, through the Sundays of July, about what God is calling us to be and do in the seasons just ahead. We’ll focus in worship during July on three areas that the mission discernment group has lifted up: worship; our common life together; and local mission.
The first Sunday of August, we’ll pull that all together into a more-or-less cohesive vision.
The second Sunday of August we will focus on our experiences in local mission. The middle two Sundays of August will be full of song and celebration, then we’ll take the whole thing on the road for a picnic on August 30, before the final summer Sunday, September 6, when we will celebrate work on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend.
So, theirs is the thumbnail sketch of summer at CPC. I hope that you will feel called to be part of worship as often as possible this summer, knowing that each of us will be away from time to time. Summer worship 2009 is important in helping us lay a common foundation for the season to come in our common life.
In part, summer worship will be important because we are going to experience it in a slightly different frame: more of you, less of me. We will be “preaching together.” Preaching, at its best, is an inherently communal activity – a multi-voiced conversation involving the preacher, the congregation, the lively text, and the Spirit of the living God.
Too often, in our heady Reformed Protestant tradition, the preacher’s voice drowns out all others – especially, far too often, the still small voice of the Spirit.
We can do something about that, and we will this summer – beginning right now as we engage this text from Mark together.
Sung: Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me …
The remainder of this “sermon” will be a community lectio divina on the text from Mark.
posted by David Ensign at
7:28 AM
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