For those of us who are liturgically minded and for those of us without a clue about the church calendar, Doug has a reminder: Easter Sunday, while it’s the culmination of the season of Lent, is also the beginning of the season of Easter in the church calendar year.

Let us focus our minds on this prayer from Walter Brueggemann:

Not the kingdom of death

Christ is risen!
We give thanks for the gift of Easter
that runs beyond our expectations,
beyond our categories of reason,
even more, beyond the sinking sense of our own lives.
We know about the powers of death,
powers that persist among us,
powers that drive us from you, and
from our neighbour, and
from our best selves.
We know about the powers of fear and greed and anxiety,
and brutality and certitude.
powers before which we are helpless.
And then you…you at dawn, unquenched,
you in the darkness,
you on Saturday,
you who breaks the world to joy.
Yours is the kingdom…not the kingdom of death,
Yours is the power…not the power of death,
Yours is the glory…not the glory of death.
Yours…You…and we give thanks
for the newness beyond our achieving.
Amen.

Walter Brueggemann, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth

go here: http://blogs.salon.com/0004870/message.html
and listen to the clips from a concerned pastor:

ready? comment!

from Eugene Peterson’s book A Long Obedience:

“If Christians only worshipped when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship that went on. Feelings are important in many areas, but completely unreliable in matters of faith….

“Living in the age of sensation, we think that if we don’t feel something, there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different, namely, that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act which develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God which is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured.”

ready? discuss!

one of Doug’s favorite thoughts on worship:

“If creation includes all that God has made–physical material entities, as well as plants and animals, and all peoples and cultures–then all day long on a Christian college campus we study the praise and lament that all creation offers. Public worship simply gives explicit expression to this praising and lamenting. It does not generate the ‘vertical’ or ‘God-ward’ orientation of things. It simply helps us to recognize it and articulate it.”

–Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, John Witvliet, director

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