Joyce Borger

The main page for the "Grounded and Growing—A Series for Advent and Christmas." This includes links to service outlines for each week of Advent and Christmas which include an Advent candle lighting as well as additional resources and creative ideas. Ahead of each service you will find a reflection to aid you in your worship and sermon planning.

“O LORD, you have searched me and known me” begins the familiar words of Psalm 139. The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE) titles this psalm, “An Inescapable God.” To me the word “inescapable” has negative connotations. We’ve been taught to value freedom and privacy. Being known, really known, is a scary notion. There is a part of each of us that is afraid of being known because we fear the anticipated rejection, certain we aren’t good enough. But yet, God knows us. All of us. Parts of us that we ourselves don’t even want to acknowledge. God knows us. All of us. Even the parts that we manage to hide from others.

As a parent and educator I relate to Psalm 81. How often haven’t we thought or said, “if only my child or my student would listen to what I say, this would be so much easier for them.” And yet again and again you feel like your voice is little more than that of an adult in a Charlie Brown episode—noise in the background. In Psalm 81 we hear the heartwrenching cry of God about God’s people, “If only they would listen!”. The unspoken question for those hearing the psalm today is whether we will unstop our ears or treat God’s voice like annoying background noise.

What follows is a re-praying of Psalm 71. It isn’t so much a paraphrase as a prayer based on the psalm. Like the psalm, this prayer uses the single personal pronoun, but that doesn’t preclude it from being a communally articulated prayer. The refrain “Life is full of trouble —yet I trust in you, my God” is not a part of the psalm but added as a rhetorical device.

Many of us can resonate with Psalm 80’s plea to God to “hear us,” “restore us,” and “save us” intermingled with the gut-wrenching question “how long?”. It doesn’t take much pastoral imagination to think of ways in which members of our community relate to this psalm and what occasions have brought the lament “how long?” onto their lips. For that reason it is an important psalm to turn to again and again and worth exploring in its entirety.

Who of us wants to hear words of critique even when they are true and spoken in love? Our natural instinct is to rebuff such words and deny their veracity. At the same time, few of us know how to offer true words of critique and prefer to avoid them. We often do the same in worship, especially when it comes to the prayers of confession…However, words of hope and grace are meaningless if we don’t understand just how mired we are in sin. What’s more, calls to live lives of justice and grace are missing their mark if we leave the bar too low.

We need to dwell on difficult passages like Psalm 50. We need to hear God’s words of judgement in order to change our ways and receive God’s message of hope and abundant grace.

Is there anything worth celebrating?

When the news cycle is increasingly horrific and our communities are being torn apart, the church needs to be a carillon ringing out the good news of salvation and hope. Use Psalm 107 as an opportunity to share the good news by giving opportunity for those gathered or for pre-selected folks to share their testimony of how they have experienced the redemptive power of God. And may all God’s people join together in praise, for God’s love is steadfast and endures forever.

These resources for the opening movements of a worship service use language from Psalm 85 and develop the themes of that psalm as well.

“Listen to the promises of our Holy God—
God has covenanted with us
that all who are faithful will flourish.
God will not let us remain in our sin,
but, through Christ, all who believe will be saved.
More than that, God remains with us.
God is with us here, now, and forever!”

We speak Psalm 52 in solidarity with all who are experiencing the treachery of unjust people and systems. We speak it today as a warning to ourselves to choose the way of righteousness because a life of injustice leads to eternal death. We speak it today to remind ourselves that though the unjust may seem to have the upper hand, “The steadfast love of God endures forever."

Psalm 82 is a psalm for all those who are victims of injustice and those who stand in solidarity with them…Psalm 82 is a message for all people who hold power, which I would argue is the vast majority of us. Each of us has spheres of influence whether or not we have an official leadership title. And, therefore, all of us have the responsibility to speak loudly to those who are in leadership and have unjust practices, lest we become complicit.