A SERVICE FOR THE HEALING OF EARTH CONCERNS

Gathering music

Welcome. (Leader): We come together as people who have concerns related to Earth, our home. May this space be sacred, calling to mind our unity with all of Creation.

As we open our hearts to the whole Earth community, we open ourselves to God and to God’s caring for the whole. In this service we will observe four seasons of awareness, each with a brief ritual to help us move into that experience. Ritual and ceremony invite our deeper selves to participate – the self of the body that binds us to Earth and to its communion of subjects.

(Leader) We will enter a season of mourning for the suffering in us and around us.

(Speaker 1) “We are spiritual being participating with other spiritual beings in a fallen system that needs redemption. I, for my part in this system, need my church to recognize my grief and be present for me while I grieve the loss of trees; the spoiling of the land, water, and air; and the apparent denial by many that there is anything that can or needs to be done about it. The Jews call it “sitting shiva,” i.e., being with someone when a loved one has died. I need church name to sit shiva with me while I watch what our consumer culture encourages me and all of us to do to our environment for the sake of more.”

We wish to be ready to sit shiva with those who care for Creation, and today we can minister to each other in this way. I invite you to join now in a ceremony of mourning. If you are grieving about something in the natural world that has been damaged or destroyed, I invite you to express briefly your sense of loss.

Naming Earth-related grief and losses by the members of the circle.

Soloist: “Come You Disconsolate” (page 502 Chalice Hymnal)

(Speaker 1) Prayer of Grief

“God, we come to You as a prosperous nation enjoying technological benefits that we have been taught to value above all else. We’ve been told that we are more blessed than any other people in our day or any era, and we are careful to give You thanks for these advantages. And yet there is a cost that we have paid for modern convenience. Born to touch, see, smell, taste and hear the beauty, texture and song of the natural world, we spend our days in buildings and cars. Even where we are in contact with soil, sun, waters and air, often we must protect ourselves from them, due to human-made pollution. Sweet meadows and cool woodlands are almost gone now, replaced by concrete, and these are losses that we suffer with more and more awareness. Poorer in these ways than our ancestors and more lacking than the indigenous people they dispossessed, we weigh our kind of wealth against another kind that has slipped beyond our reach. We have sold our inheritance for a bowl of plastic and steel. Be with us as we mourn what we have lost. Amen.”

(Leader) We will enter a season of confession and repentance

(Speaker 2): We will read statements from “Prayers of Personal Confession,” a chapter from In God’s Presence by Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki. (Each paragraph read by a different member of the circle.)

“There are two types of prayers of confession: personal and corporate.. . . In prayers of personal confession we name ourselves before God as we truly are, owning to God and to ourselves the harm that we have done to others. The work of naming is at the same time the work of contrition and release toward the transformation that is yet possible for ourselves and others.”

“Prayers of corporate confession deal with the web of ill-being in which we together participate. Together we exploit the earth, we subtly or openly despise the poor through actions that ensure their continued poverty, and we engage in massive national exploitation of weaker nations. Let us pray together the confession sentence in the Lord’s prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

“The petition is both corporate and personal. The plural indicates the universality of sin. It assumes that we have sinned against others and that others have sinned against us. It is a daily prayer, assuming that we live each day in need of the forgiveness of God and forgiveness received from and extended to each other. Daily we name who we are before God; daily we are called to live from this confession and its forgiveness.”

“The world’s very structure is one where there is a natural competition for goods. Life itself depends upon the destruction of other modes of life; we eat to live. Because it is so natural to take other life for our daily food, we too easily justify the extension of such behavior. We go beyond the simple need for sustenance. These natural instincts to sustain ourselves and defend ourselves are not sinful, but they can easily turn into instruments that contribute to the ill-being of others, and this is sin.”

“What can even God do? Impulses toward confession are God’s way of leading us past the block of our own sin toward a richer and deeper self lived within communal interdependence. Thus confession, which is the contrite naming of who we really are, unblocks us, opening us up for our good. Honesty before God brings us into greater conformity with God’s knowledge of us.”

“Contrition is important, because unless we can name the ill quality with some sense that it is in fact ‘ill’, we will not be ready to let it go in favor of the transformation God can make possible. There is no transformation for a false self until it leaves off its falseness. God’s leading toward confession is God’s invitation to transformation.”

“In a world where God feels the world, all acts or intentions that work pain in the world work pain in God as well. Therefore, all sins against the world are also sins against God. We have sinned against others, and in so doing, we have sinned also against God. Confession therefore requires not only a naming of the harm we know we have done, but acknowledgment that there is a wider sphere of injury known to God.”

(Speaker 2): “Our sins block us from receiving our own good. The sin is itself punishing, whether from felt misery or the impoverishment of character. Confession does not therefore take place in order to be followed by a period of punishment. To the contrary, confession clears the way for the suffering to stop. However, when confession is but the beginning of turning from sin, or when the effects of our sins have caused great harm not easily healed, then confession only begins the process of healing the suffering. But God’s forgiveness does not wait for all the effects of our sin to disappear, any more than God’s leading toward transformation waits. Rather, through confession God’s will toward our well-being is immediately released.”

(Leader) Ceremony of confession: We will now enter a ceremony of confession. We will write our own failures and offenses that trouble us on the slips of paper we were given at the beginning of the service. Confession leads to repentance, which is a change of heart that leads to transformation. If you are ready, take the next two or three minutes to write a few words of confession to God, or to the earth, or to the children of the future. If you are not prepared to participate at this point, take the slip home with you as a reminder of your concern.

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(Leader)We will enter a season of forgiveness, accepting the healing of our grief and guilt.

(Leader) Anointment with oil is an ancient practice that brings honor and comfort. The 23^rd Psalm says, “Thou anointest my head with oil.” We will now minister to each other’s mourning by anointing the forehead... If you will participate in this ceremony, come to form a circle around the candle. We will pass the cup of with healing oil around the circle from the left, pressing a fingertip of oil onto the forehead of the person to your right. When the circle has been completed, we will pray.

(Leader) Speaks prayer of thanksgiving for forgiveness.

(Speaker 4): We will read responsively selections from Psalm 32, a psalm of forgiveness. These ancient words have been spoken by thousands of lips in the Hebrew tradition. (Psalm 32: 1-7; 36: 5-9; 37: 23-24 NRSV) You will read together the words in BOLD. (Speakers 4 and 5 lead)

“Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.

Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heart of summer.

Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity;

I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Therefore let all who are faithful offer prayer to you; at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters shall not reach them.

You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.

“Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds.

Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your judgments are like the great deep;

You save humans and animals alike, O Lord. How precious is your steadfast love, O God!

All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.

For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.

Our steps are made firm by the Lord, when he delights in our way;

Though we stumble, we shall not fall headlong, for the Lord holds us by the hand.”

(Speaker 3): Ceremony of The Burning Bowl. Now we will bring our confessions and drop them into the fire, signifying that our sins are forgiven.

Participants bring confession slips, dropping them into the bowl at the center table. Speaker 5 represents the priestly people by placing the confessions in the larger “bowl,” lighting the match to several strips, and allowing brief burning. After a few seconds, she places smaller “bowl” over them to extinguish the flames and limit the amount of smoke entering the atmosphere.

(Leader): We confess our failures and then we let them go.

(Speaker 3) Reading from “Distance and Depth” by Pattiann Rogers

“. . .there are fields and fields,

and fields aplenty, more and more

space than is needed, ample space

for any kind of sin to be laid down,

disassembled, swallowed away, lost,

absorbed, forgotten, transformed,

if one should only ask

for such a favor.”

(Leader): Priestly voicing for the people a Prayer of Confession and Repentance

God, we ask for Thy favor. Hear our prayers. Having confessed and repented, we accept your forgiveness and are ready to be transformed

(Leader)We will enter a season of celebrating the gift of life on Earth.

(Leader) Given the suffering we have joined together to acknowledge, how can we move now into joy? A better question might be, “How can we not?” In the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins,

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.”

“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

(Speaker 6) In the book of Job we read, “Go to the animals and they will teach you.”. John Terborgh tells his experience with one of the last of the now-extinct Bachman’s warblers. In May 1954, as an eighteen-year-old birder (now a foremost ornighologist), he learned of the sighting of a male Bachman’s on Pohick Creek in Virginia. He writes, “To my astonishment I walked up to the place that had been described to me and heard it! I had no trouble seeing the bird. A full-plumaged male, it sat on an open branch about 20 feet up and gave me a perfect view while it sang. It hardly stopped singing during the two hours I spent there. Reluctantly I pulled myself away, wondering whether this was an experience I would ever repeat. It was not.” (p. 230 The Diversity of Life, Edward O. Wilson.)

(Leader): From the animals we learn that life is a gift to be sung, tasted, celebrated from the first moment to the last. Given the color, music, fragrance, splendor and might of our Earth existence, how can we keep from singing?

(Speaker 6) Reading: A Summer’s Day by Mary Oliver

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean –

The one who has flung herself out of the grass,

The one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down,

Who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to fall down

Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through

The fields which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t every thing die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

(Speaker 6) Reading: The Metta Sutra (Buddhist scripture)

May all beings be happy.

May they live in safety and joy.

All living beings, whether weak or strong, tall or stout, medium or short,

Seen or unseen, near or distant, born or not to be born,

May they all be happy.

(Leader) Go forth in peace!