Lent is a period of 40-days leading to Easter when we practice letting go in order to receive from God. Sometimes this letting go looks like giving up something very specific - sweets, coffee, etc - and our cravings for those things might draw us to God. Sometimes the letting go is a more internal, daily practice as we listen to the Holy Spirit. Regardless,  Lent is both a time of more intense spiritual practice and a season of open-handed surrender rather than tight-fisted discipline.

During Lent, Sundays are feast days. Days when we celebrate mini-resurrections on the way to the resurrection of Christ. For Lent this year at Timberline Old Town & Everyday Joe’s, we will enter into these mini-resurrections through the five senses in a series called Awakenings. The senses are signs of life, and we wonder what would happen if we were to be intentionally awake to them. This week, we enter into the sense of sight.

This particular Sunday as also a Movement Sunday. When a month has a fifth Sunday, we take it as an opportunity to break our normal pattern of worship, with the hopeful fruit being a breaking of tired patterns in our lives.

  

INVOCATION

The following poem by Malcolm Guite was inspired by the account in Mark of Jesus healing the deaf & mute man. Please receive it as our Lenten invitation to practice resurrection:

"Be Opened" by Malcolm Guite

Be opened. Oh if only we might be!
Speak to a heart that’s closed in on itself:
‘Be opened and the truth will set you free’,
Speak to a world imprisoned in its wealth:
‘Be opened! Learn to learn from poverty’,
Speak to a church that closes and excludes,
And makes rejection its own litany:
‘Be opened, opened to the multitudes
For whom I died but whom you have dismissed
Be opened, opened, opened,’ how you sigh
And still we do not hear you. We have missed
Both cry and crisis, we make no reply.
Take us aside, for we are deaf and dumb
Spit on us Lord and touch each tongue-tied tongue.

 

ORDER OF SERVICE

HOPES FOR THE DAY:

• Beautiful Trinity, may this day be retreat and rest for each of us.
• Beautiful Trinity, may  this day be a pattern interrupt - may something might catch our eyes, pass through our line of sight - and cause us to pause and notice and wonder.
• Beautiful trinity, may this morning be a moment of pause - may this feast day, this mini-celebration of aliveness through sight - that would cause a movement of newly alive, newly refreshed sight during the week.

SONG: Beautiful by Phil Wickham

MOVEMENT 1: What Do You Want Me To Do For You?

Text: Luke 18:35-43

Quote: "The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision." - Helen Keller

Prayer: 

Close both eyes see with the other one.

Then we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments

our ceaseless withholding

our constant exclusion.

Our sphere has widened and we find ourselves quite unexpectedly in a new, expansive location

in a place of endless acceptance

and infinite love.

Amen.

(Father Gregory Boyle)

SONG: Be Thou My Vision

MOVEMENT 2: How Do You See?

Text: Matthew 5:3-8

Prayer: 

Close both eyes see with the other one.

Then we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments

our ceaseless withholding

our constant exclusion.

Our sphere has widened and we find ourselves quite unexpectedly in a new, expansive location

in a place of endless acceptance

and infinite love.

Amen.

(Father Gregory Boyle)

SONG:  I Lift My Eyes by Loud Harp

MOVEMENT 3: Who Do You See?

Reading:

"What this means is that even if you are socially shy and generally inarticulate about spiritual matters -- and I say this as someone who finds casual social interactions often quite difficult and my own feelings about faith intractably mute -- you must not swerve from the engagements God offers you. These will occur in the most unlikely places, and with people for whom your first instinct may be aversion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that Christ is always stronger in our brother's heart than in our own, which is to say, first, that we depend on others for our faith, and second, that the love of Christ is not something you can ever hoard. Human love catalyzes the love of Christ. And this explains why that love seems at once so forceful and so fugitive, and why, "while we speak of this, and yearn toward it," as Augustine says, "we barely touch it in a quick shudder of the heart."

Prayer: 

Close both eyes see with the other one.

Then we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments

our ceaseless withholding

our constant exclusion.

Our sphere has widened and we find ourselves quite unexpectedly in a new, expansive location

in a place of endless acceptance

and infinite love.

Amen.

(Father Gregory Boyle)

SONG:  Brother by The Brilliance

 

RESOURCE

This TED talk about how we learn to see

and this TED interview about how going blind gives you vision

BENEDICTION

May your soul beautify

The desire of your eyes

That you might glimpse

The infinity that hides

In the simple sights

That seem worn

To your usual eyes

Amen

John O’Donohue