Each Sunday we gather to worship having spent the week scattered at different places of work.
Worshipping together reminds us of God’s overarching story of salvation and enables us to find a place in the story. Often it can be difficult to transition from the structured order of worship on a Sunday into the chaos of the rest of the week. Just as we do not leave our work experiences at the door as we gather to worship neither should we leave our Sunday worship at the door as we scatter to our places of work.
The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah was someone who lived out his calling in the public arena. He chose to speak God’s words faithfully despite serious pressure from those who questioned his calling. As the people of God we gather in worship as the called ones (ekklesia). In order to inhabit the liturgy of corporate worship faithfully, a good passage to remember is from Nicholas Wolterstorff’s work on liturgy ‘As we gather, we bring the trumpets of praise, ashes of repentance, and tears of lament on behalf of our everyday parishes of neighborhood, workplace and city before God in worship. And through the liturgy, we are then nurtured in God’s story and can carry hope, strength, and courage back to those people and places to which God has called us (‘Liturgy and Lament’ Perspectives June/July 2012).
God wants us to live with His words first hand in our mouth: to speak light and truth to others. Our theme for our series in Jeremiah is light in the city as a challenge to reflect on how you live your calling out in the city the rest of the week. To help enable some of these connections, during our intercessory prayers, we will be praying and making connections between God’s word and different vocations using the theme: – ‘Trumpets tears and ashes’
Trumpets: What can we celebrate in this vocation?
Tears: What brings tears and lament?
Ashes: What issues that cause injustice in this workplace do we need to repent for corporately?
What we do during the week is important to God yet can often seem disconnected with a beautifully structured liturgy. Why not as one of our members, Cory Wilson suggests in the article below make the trumpets, tears and ashes arising out of your workweek be part of your car ride conversation to church as a means of connecting vocation and worship.
Ultimately, we pray this short series deepens our desire to be whole-life disciples in life and work where we experience: success and failure, value and futility ultimately to bring us to our fullest maturity in Christ.
For further reading:
https://www.reformedworship.org/article/march-2017/heart-worship
https://www.reformedworship.org/article/march-2017/sunday’s-prayer-and-monday’s-work
https://www.reformedworship.org/blog/prayers-people-work-people
Written by Karen Campbell