Joyce Borger

This litany is the text of Psalm 100 interspersed with Philippians 4:4–9 for two readers, for a leader and the congregation or for a congregation split into two parts.

“Will God find faith on earth?” Only if we grow a true love for God’s law. That can only happen if we engage with the law more often. To set the stage, Psalm 119:97–104 is incorporated into a confession and assurance of pardon sequence.

A sequence for the opening of worship based on Psalm 66 which provides opportunity for worshipers to offer their own reasons for praise. Particularly appropriate for Thanksgiving Day and RCL Sundays Proper 9C and 23C.

Psalm 137 is a difficult and complex psalm only appearing in the Revised Common Lectionary once over the three year cycle (Proper 22C). This reflection helps us understand it better and provides some background and suggestions for how it might be used in our current context.

The main page for the "Grounded and Growing—A Series for Advent and Christmas." This includes links to service outlines for each week of Advent and Christmas which include an Advent candle lighting as well as additional resources and creative ideas. Ahead of each service you will find a reflection to aid you in your worship and sermon planning.

“O LORD, you have searched me and known me” begins the familiar words of Psalm 139. The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE) titles this psalm, “An Inescapable God.” To me the word “inescapable” has negative connotations. We’ve been taught to value freedom and privacy. Being known, really known, is a scary notion. There is a part of each of us that is afraid of being known because we fear the anticipated rejection, certain we aren’t good enough. But yet, God knows us. All of us. Parts of us that we ourselves don’t even want to acknowledge. God knows us. All of us. Even the parts that we manage to hide from others.

As a parent and educator I relate to Psalm 81. How often haven’t we thought or said, “if only my child or my student would listen to what I say, this would be so much easier for them.” And yet again and again you feel like your voice is little more than that of an adult in a Charlie Brown episode—noise in the background. In Psalm 81 we hear the heartwrenching cry of God about God’s people, “If only they would listen!”. The unspoken question for those hearing the psalm today is whether we will unstop our ears or treat God’s voice like annoying background noise.

What follows is a re-praying of Psalm 71. It isn’t so much a paraphrase as a prayer based on the psalm. Like the psalm, this prayer uses the single personal pronoun, but that doesn’t preclude it from being a communally articulated prayer. The refrain “Life is full of trouble —yet I trust in you, my God” is not a part of the psalm but added as a rhetorical device.

Many of us can resonate with Psalm 80’s plea to God to “hear us,” “restore us,” and “save us” intermingled with the gut-wrenching question “how long?”. It doesn’t take much pastoral imagination to think of ways in which members of our community relate to this psalm and what occasions have brought the lament “how long?” onto their lips. For that reason it is an important psalm to turn to again and again and worth exploring in its entirety.

Who of us wants to hear words of critique even when they are true and spoken in love? Our natural instinct is to rebuff such words and deny their veracity. At the same time, few of us know how to offer true words of critique and prefer to avoid them. We often do the same in worship, especially when it comes to the prayers of confession…However, words of hope and grace are meaningless if we don’t understand just how mired we are in sin. What’s more, calls to live lives of justice and grace are missing their mark if we leave the bar too low. We need to dwell on difficult passages like Psalm 50. We need to hear God’s words of judgement in order to change our ways and receive God’s message of hope and abundant grace.