HERE WE ARE... INTERSECTION... WE REMEMBER

Today as we remembered those lost in war... and Jesus death in the sacrament of communion... I preached on the intersection of what we carry from the past and how live from here. I used a James K A Smith quotation from his book How To Inhabit Time:

"Contingency means that of every history wench say "It didn't have to be this way" and " This is the way it is." The question at the intersection is, Now what? How to live forward."

I then wrote this prayer/poem to lead us into communion.

 

Here we are

We carry the past to here

It didn’t have to be this way

But

This is the way it is

Let us look around

 

We remember

The effects of a broken world

Wars

Hate

Violence

Loss

Grief

Trauma

 

We remember

Our faith

God as one of us

Loving us

Demonstrating his love in this

While we were still sinners

He died for us

 

We remember 

Redemption

Forgiveness

New birth

The lamb of God

Taking the sins of the world

 

We remember

A call to follow

To pray

God’s Kingdom come

On earth is in heaven

 

We remember

We are here

We come with what we are

We come with what we’ve done

We are a beginning

 

At this intersection

God use this bread and wine

To give us faith in the brokenness

To give us love in the presence of hate

To give us peace in the every absence of it

To give us hope when it is against ALL the odds

To give us resilience in the long hard slog

To give us joy in spite of it all

To give us a vision 

Of how live forward

To where lions lie with lambs

And wolves eat with lambs 

And swords are made into ploughshares

And people study war no war

 

Here we are

At the intersection of history

We remember