Election Day Communion

This year, the Washington DC Christian Reformed Church is trying something different.
This is an opportunity to partner with many other churches around the country and an opportunity to extend fellowship to many in our own city & community.
It's called:

Election Day Communion.

On November 6 at 6pm, we will gather in the sanctuary at 5900 New Hampshire NE for a short service of prayer and fellowship at the Table.  With everything else going on in our city, as Christ-followers, we will choose to stop and remember.  We remember that our unity is not found in political party.  We remember that our unity is not even found in our citizenship.  Our unity is created for us in Jesus Christ and no earthly election can ever serve as a referendum on His Kingdom.

Please consider attending this event.  Stop in after work.  It will be brief -- 30-45 minutes.  And please get the word out to friends and colleagues who might be interested in joining us.  More information can be found at  electiondaycommunion.org

To Begin

I'm not sure if the title for this blog will stick permanently, but for now, it seems to say what I hope to communicate:

DC
The DC part is, of course, fairly self-explanatory. These musings come to you from the nation's capitol: Washington DC.  More specifically, the come to you as the musings of one pastor in the nation's capitol, serving at The Washington DC Christian Reformed Church. "Christian Reformed" is a label that could require some explanation: with our historic roots in the Netherlands, we are a denomination active in Canada in the United States that, well, oh here.  Just check that out and get back to me with any questions.

Liturgy
A word that has, sadly, fallen out of favor.  I have heard "liturgy" used as a synonym for boring. "Liturgical" as the antithesis of "contemporary." Literally, liturgy is the compounding of two Greek words: work & people.

Liturgy is, rightly understood, The work of the people.

Whether that work is call and response between cantor and congregation, whether that work is lifted hands and jamming out.  All of it is liturgy -- the expected work of the people of God gathered in worship.  So there is no such thing as a church without liturgy.  (There is plenty of evidence, however, for church with thoughtless liturgy.)
How the church gathers, what is expected and required of worshippers is a church's functional liturgy. While not unique to Reformed Christianity, there is a strong accent within our tradition, that the work of the people, the liturgy, does not begin with a prelude and end with the benediction.  The work of the people properly belongs on the streets, in the cities, in our homes, throughout our culture, institutions of higher education and marbled halls of governance.

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: "Mine!"- Abraham Kuyper

On Sunday we remember who we are so that we may live ever attentive to the claim of God's calling in the midst of vocation, family, friendship, errands, neighborhoods and recreation. The intention of this blog, however, is to insert reminders of our Christian identity into the work week.  And it is an opportunity for those immersed in liturgy to argue, clarify, distill, illustrate and buttress the liturgy of Sunday morning with the liturgies we each cultivate all week long.  

Neighbors In Pain

(a prayer by Stanley Hauerwas, 

originally offered after Hurricane Fran in 1996. 

Published in: Prayers Plainly Spoken.)

God, give us Jobian humility. Help us stand awestruck - silent- before the mystery of your creation. Help us understand the wildness of your creation, wildness at once terrible as it is beautiful. Help us see you in the terror and the beauty, knowing as we do the agony of our sin in your life. We have seen the agony in your Son's cross. We know his agony continues still so that our unbelief might not damn us.

Help us claim to be Christ for one another, defeating the loneliness in which sin cannot help but clothe us. So freed, make us neighbors for one another. In the pain, in our fear of being out of control, may we discover our ability to need help and in that discovery be enabled to help others. We know normality will quickly return and we will again be OK, not needing anyone else. But sear into our memories the moments when we discern we are not our own and, thus, come close to perfection. AMEN.

The work of the people seems clearer today, closer to the surface than at other times. There is no partisanship in first-responders. Hurricanes are no respecter of politics. And from the muddle of academic minutia where we have shunted Christian ethics and moral theology, a plain-spoken voice is heard above the high-minded rhetoric: Oughtn't we to do unto others as we would have them do unto us?  

So, just for today, let us care for ourselves 

but also for our neighbors as ourselves.

For "normality will quickly return" and we will be caught up again in distinctions and quandries and exceptions to the rule that only privilege and convenience and comfort can afford.

So, just for today, let us care for ourselves 

but also for our neighbors as ourselves.

Excuse me, I have some phone calls to make...