Morning Prayer Service at UUCF Board Retreat

Thursday evening the retreat began with common meal and with Taize service; Friday morning we worshipped with this morning prayer service below, borrowed mostly from the one used at The Welcome Table missional community in Turley, OK; Friday noonday prayer we used a Quaker Style worship service; Friday evening we had a Vespers service; Saturday morning prayer, noonday prayer, and a closing communion.

Morning Prayer at UUCF Board Retreat, Oct. 26, 2012

Invocation
Today is the day which God has made:
Let us rejoice and be glad therein.
What does the Eternal require of us?
To live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. (from the Psalms and Micah)

Covenant
This is our covenant as we walk together in life in the ways of God known and to be made known, following our mission to make the radical compassionate Jesus visible in the world, wherever we are, together or apart:
In the light of truth, and the loving and liberating spirit of Jesus, we gather in freedom, to worship God, and serve all.

Response For The Morning Hour of the Day:

The day is lit.

Our hearts pound in Your rhythm.

Syncopate my life, O God

Let my soul rise up to meet you, as the day rises to meet the sun.

Lift up our hearts and prepare us for all that the day will bring.

Be with us in our humble and deliberate beginning of the day, in work as in prayer.

O Come, let us sing to the Lord, let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

We Come into God’s presence with thanksgiving. Awake my soul.

Morning Song :

O God Our Help and Hope
Community Prayers

Eternal Spirit, we come with hungry hearts, waiting to be filled: Waiting to be filled with a sense of your presence; Waiting to be filled with the touch of your spirit; Waiting to be filled with new energy for service; We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

Loving Creator, we confess what seems always with us: broken things within us that seem never to mend, empty places within us that seem always to ache, things like buds within us that seem never to flower.

God of everlasting hope and forgiveness, help us to be open to your Presence within us, mending and tending to our aching hearts and to our hurt and wounded land. Help us to listen to others, and empower us to be your hands of action and healing, sowing seeds of compassion and justice into our families and communities and to support all those in need in our one world which you made and called good.

Let us pray for those who weep even in the morning, and for those who cause their weeping. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who are without food, clothes, and a place of shelter this day and everyday. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who live without hope and meaning. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who live in fear or sickness. Hear our prayer, O God. For those who make gods of things and of themselves, Hear our prayer, O God. For those who are working to serve others this day, Hear our prayer, O God. For those travelling today, Hear our prayer, O God. For those in harm’s way, in homes and on battlefields, Hear our prayer, O God. For those who are finding their way again to love and laughter, Hear our prayer, O God. And for the great mission of God to bless the poor, to pardon the imprisoned, to bring sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to provide hospitality to the resident aliens, to clothe all, to visit the sick, and to proclaim the year of the Lord and end all debts, Hear our prayer, O God.

Lift Up Names For Prayers

Eternal Spirit of Life and Love and Liberation, may we be open to your presence in our lives, in all our joys and sorrows, fears and faith, dreams and disappointments, hurts and hopes, those shared openly with others, and those shared only with You.

Everlasting Hope that holds us up, so that we may go hold others, we give thanks for all that has blessed us, and all that has brought us to this day of Life’s Celebration.

Universal Love, continue to show us the way home to our own true hearts, our duties, and to the service of creating a better world for all. Help us to see anew the sacredness placed right before us, right beside us, right within us.

Deepest Source of All, may our prayers be times of listening as well as speaking. May we be open to what Life yet speaks to us of truth, joy, and goodness. And as Jesus taught to all those who would follow in his radical, inclusive, compassionate and transforming way, we pray with him: Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen

Song of Response

Leaning on the Everlasting Arms

Reading and meditation:

“Where Shall We Go From Here?” 1968 article by Rev. Harry Hoehler (see post below on this blog)

From “October: Formation in the Way of Christ, in Common Prayer: A Liturgy For Ordinary Radicals” by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haws

“For many of us, the judgmental, arrogant, legalistic Christianity we knew growing up has created a suspicion of discipline and order that can lead to a pretty sloppy spirituality. Reacting against the institution’s sickness, we easily find ourselves with little to help us heal from our own wounds, create new disciplines, and carve out a space where goodness triumphs. People who are afraid of spiritual discipline will not produce very good disciples. Community is pretty hip these days. The longing for community is in all of us, to love and to be loved. But if community doesn't exist for something beyond ourselves, it will die, atrophy, suffocate. Discipline and disciple share the same roots, and without discipline, we become little more than hippie communes or frat houses. We easily fall short of God's dream to form a new humanity with distinct practices that offer hope and good news to the world. Like any culture, we who follow the way of Jesus have distinct ways of eating and partying, different from the culture of consumption, homogeneity, and hedonism. Our homes, our living rooms, even our parties can become places of solace and hospitality for those with addictions and struggles. But it doesn’t happen without intentionality. As Dorothy Day said, "We have to create an environment where it is easier to be good. St. Francis of Assisi is a model for us not only of what it looks like to follow hard after Jesus but also how we can celebrate the disciplines that have been handed down to us and become the church that we long for, even among people who’ve given up on “church.” Our communities should be places where people can detox, whether that be from alcohol, tobacco, gluttony, shopping, or gossip. We long for a space that tips us toward goodness rather than away from it, where we can pick up new habits—holy habits—as we are formed into a new creation, transformed by God.”

Song of Commitment: Blessed Assurance

Benediction: Draw us ever closer into your community, O God, that we might love one another and work with one another in ways that mirror your care and unending love. Amen.

Where Shall We Go From Here? A 1968 article published by the UUCF; it was presented today during worship at our UUCF Board Retreat

As we look at new visions for how to incarnate our mission in the world, and as the Board of the UUCF is meeting in retreat in Boston, here is a prophetic article that seems to be still timely, though some circumstances have changed, and though gender-inclusive language is now our norm in the UUCF; still wanted to use the language of the original. This was also at the time when the Unitarian Christian Fellowship became the UU Christian Fellowship....The Rev. Hoehler is minister emeritus of the First Parish of Weston, MA.

Where Shall We Go From Here? An article by the Rev. Harry Hoehler in the Summer 1968 UU Christian Journal, soon after the release of the UUA Report of the Committee on Goals.

The most serious criticism which could be leveled at the UUA’s Report of the Committee on Goals is that the committee failed to see the mission of Unitarian Universalism as being anything more than the establishment of more and more churches. After two years of study and the expenditure of ten thousand plus dollars, the committee concluded that the long range theological and sociological goals of the religious liberal movement could be summed up by the word growth. Its meager list of recommendations were all concerned with assuring the Association that it will be able to call 500,000 white, middle class, well educated, technically trained suburbanites its own by1980, providing, of course, the UUA does exactly what the Goals Committee suggests. Absent from the report was even an outline of a program of how the UUA might creatively use its funds and resource pool of talent to meet and try to heal some of the wounds of an ailing society. Absent was any vision which could have enabled us to look to goals which transcend the exclusivistic, self-contented, self-congratulatory style of life which permeates our churches. Absent was any sense of what it means in this revolutionary age to be churches in the world responsible to the world’s renewal and betterment. This was the Report’s gravest sin and the source of its irrelevance.

When asked to express my views about  the future of the Unitarian Christian Fellowship, I could not help thinking about such an assignment except against the total absence of significant mission which characterizes our denomination. The UCF, it seems to me, possesses a golden opportunity in this period of denominational myopia. The UCF could, if it would, become the radical “underground church” in the Association. It could, if it would, by explicating the concept of Christ as God’s man for others, bear witness to a faith which takes seriously its responsibilities to the world. It could if it would make clear the implications of such a concept for the establishment of a free but genuine servant church in our midst. It could if it would hold high the vision of a church flexible enough to shape and reshape its structures around the moving and varied shapes of mankind’s needs. It could, if it would, become a small example to those individuals and churches in our  Association who understand the mission of the church to be more than growth figures, budget evaluations, and the creation of happy suburban ashrams for sophisticated sectarian minds. The UCF could if it would exhibit what it means for an institution in our denomination to take as its mission Christ’s command that it become the gracious neighbor to a needful humanity.

Now in order not to be misunderstood let me make it clear that I am not suggesting that the UCF become a miniature UU Service Committee. What I am suggesting is that it develop a worship life, and educational life, a community life established around the dual concept of gathering regularly to celebrate what we believe  God is doing to reconcile our world and of scattering to do what is required of us to make this world of ours a more liveable and human place. Granted many of us would stand on the fringe of such an organization. We would participate in its worship and corporate life only when able; but still it could stand for us as an example of a form which a true servant church might take. Thus I am suggesting that the UCF become more than a loosely knit association of individuals who gather yearly to celebrate past glories and frustrations. I’m suggesting that it adopt some of the structures of a church, not a residential church to be sure, but rather a church of dedicated persons who are committed to performing specific tasks for the renewal and reconstruction of their world and who come together to celebrate that fact and learn from one another.

The UCF could do such things, I believe, if it only would. But to do so, it must stop concerning itself with such rearguard and fruitless battles as the humanist-theist controversy. It must give up its own concern for growth, with hearalding itself to the outside world, with enlarging its political power base within the Association, with making the denomination “Christian “ and respectable. It must ends its reactionary tendencies, that is, its almost unfailing negative response to anything the UUA does. Instead let it do the things it can do best.  Let it do the careful theological analysis which apparently the UUA is incapable of doing and discern what it means in our day to be a church in and for the world. Let it select those tasks by which it can demonstrate its style of operation as a group willing to let the world’s need determine its structure, as a group concerned more with healing and redeeming the life about it than it is with its own self-aggrandizement and self-perpetuation .

What the UCF is called to do in these critical times is to become radical for the first time in its existence, to rethink its priorities, to align itself with those groups outside the UUA who have a vision of the church as mission, to sell its headquarters building and use the money received plus its annual dues to sustain the religious life of those Unitarian Christians who are working to alleviate some of the pain of our common life, and who need to gather, reflect upon, clarify and celebrate with one another what it means to heed Christ’s call to become servants in the affairs of men.