Alternative
Guided Meditation
If you are unable to incorporate the “cards meditation” used in
the Board of Directors Meeting
Worship Service outline, here is a written version that can be
adapted to be read just prior to a sermon or reflection.
Each of us has
a name… My name is Greg. But that’s not
the totality of who I am. Even though
you know my name, now, you don’t know all the stories that have shaped the
person in front of you today. I have
different jobs (student, student minister); I have different roles (brother,
son, uncle, friend); and I have different attributes (passionate, talkative,
stingy, aggressive, beer-drinking). Each
of these pieces makes up the wonderfully complex person before you.
We each
carry many different pieces with us always.
But we don’t bring them all to every place we go. I am an uncle; I have no qualms about
bringing that forward to this congregation.
But there are other roles that I have that I am more hesitant about, and
I may not necessarily feel comfortable bringing them into the church. I like to drink beer on the weekends. Now this is something that may a little
striking for some people—some people may be wondering if I’m of legal age; I
am—so I’m a little hesitant to talk about it, because I’m afraid of what you
might think about me. And there are even
more things that I just won’t bring in to the congregation because I know that
someone will not like me if I talk about it.
Later in the
service we will be having communion. We
will be asked to bring our pieces before God, not just into the congregation,
but all the way up to God’s table.
Whether we ever physically move or not, there will be some pieces that
we will be able to bring all the way up to the table; there will some pieces
that we will leave in our seats; and there will be still other things that we
have left well outside the walls of this congregation.
I’d invite
you in the next few moments of silence to write in your bulletin, or just think
about some of your pieces: they can be roles, attributes, jobs, anything.
[pause]
Now that you
have a small list of some of your pieces, I want you to think about where you
would place those things in this congregation.
Think about each piece, is it something you would bring all the way to
the table with Christ, is it something you just bring into the church, or maybe
you leave it at the back of the church, or maybe it’s something you leave
outside the church.
[pause]
Sermon—Gathering up the
Pieces; Inviting the Outcast