Worship resources for September 10, 2023

September 10, 2023 Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost Matthew 18:15-20 Various circumstances, including a hefty measure of parental concern, kept me from playing football when I was growing up. Instead, I spent a lot of time in the backyard creating a sort of one-person football game. The game involved throwing a NERF ball at various targets in the backyard: poles and posts and trees and the like. Points were accumulated based on my accuracy. I would be the quarterback for one team and then the other team, moving around the backyard, tossing the NERF ball at all sorts of targets. The game was fun, relatively safe, and gave me something to do. Still, no matter how vividly I imagined it, the game I concocted in the backyard bore little resemblance to the actual game of football, which, of course, is a team sport with offenses and defenses and different positions filled by different players with different gifts and abilities. You can’t really play football by yourself. It’s a group activity. There is a group aspect to Christian faith. It’s not something we can really do by ourselves, no matter how vivid our imaginations. God calls us to faith but that call inevitably leads us into the company of other people. We learn to believe and we grow in faith together. Accordingly, a prevailing image in the New Testament for the church is a body, a body with many parts. The people in the body of Christ come with different gifts and abilities, backgrounds and assumptions. Yet in all of our differences we are made one in Christ. God gathers us together as a community of faith. Left alone, we might come up with something kind of like Christianity that we could do on our own, even something fun and relatively safe; yet, no matter how vividly we conceive them, our solitary religious games at best are partial expressions of faith the way the Bible speaks of it. You can read the rest of the commentary on our website. Thank you to this week's guest writer John Wurster. Order of worship for September 10, 2023, by John Wurster. These liturgies are free to use. Working out conflicts — Weekly Christian ed lesson by Joelle Brummit-Yale How do we keep the Sabbath holy? (September 10, 2023), by Daniel Frayer-Griggs The 2023-2025 Book of Order is now available and in effect by Lucinda Isaacs Want the worship resources for September 3, 2023? You can find them here. IN CASE YOU MISSED IT... We don't recreate - we reclaim The rooms that house us bear witness to the best and worst of us, even after we've splashed paint on the walls and moved on. And so does God. Katy Shevel reflects on what it means to reclaim something. Finding hope in family letters Andrew Taylor-Troutman learns about his great-uncle's experience as a soldier in WWII and reflects on the habitual nature of hardship — and grace. The interim's call is to take out the garbage Reflecting on Paul’s metaphor of tilling, planting and watering, Thomas Wesley Moore IV adds "taking out the garbage" that's threatening the church's fragile ecosystem.  Breaking the chains of complementarianism Amanda Shanks felt uncomfortable with her call to ministry, having grown up in a church in which women and men were considered equal in personhood but with different and complementary roles. What changed?  Finding a new pace: A prayer for Labor Day Daniel Heath offers a prayer that recognizes workers and reminds us that we are not defined by our work. For all of the bittersweet changes A prayer-poem for waning seasons and changes, by Shannon Beck.