ciad mile failte
(One Hundred Thousand Welcomes: Scottish Gaelic)
The Congregation of Roxboro United Church welcomes you to our worship.
We are pleased you are here to come close to God and neighbour.
Here find a place to call home; here find the sacred time you need;
here find welcome for your faith and doubt; anger and joy; compassion and pain;
here find acceptance for who you are, for you are made in God’s image.
*Words printed in Bold are congregational responses *
This bulletin is sponsored by Bev Baker and Ovide Baciu
in memory of Bev’s brother Bruce
A Song of Faith, part 2 5 February 2012
Prelude
The Celebrating Community
Call to Worship
Finding ourselves in a world of beauty and mystery,
of living things, diverse and interdependent,
of complex patterns of growth and evolution,
of subatomic particles and cosmic swirls,
we sing of God the Creator,
the Maker and Source of all that is.
Processional VU79
Arise, Your Light Is Come
Each part of creation
reveals unique aspects of God the Creator,
who is both in creation and beyond it.
All parts of creation, animate and inanimate,
are related.
All creation is good.
We sing of the Creator,
who made humans to live and move
and have their being in God.
In and with God, we can direct our lives
toward right relationship
with each other and with God.
We can discover our place
as one strand in the web of life.
We can grow in wisdom and compassion.
We can recognize all people as kin.
We can accept our mortality and finitude,
not as a curse, but as a challenge
to make our lives and choices matter.
Made in the image of God,
we yearn for the fulfillment that is life in God.
Yet we choose to turn away from God.
We surrender ourselves to sin,
a disposition revealed in selfishness,
cowardice, or apathy.
Becoming bound and complacent
in a web of false desires and wrong choices,
we bring harm to ourselves and others.
This brokenness in human life and community
is an outcome of sin.
Sin is not only personal but accumulates
to become habitual and systemic forms
of injustice, violence, and hatred.
We are all touched by this brokenness:
the rise of selfish individualism
that erodes human solidarity;
the concentration of wealth and power
without regard for the needs of all;
the toxins of religious and ethnic bigotry;
the degradation of the blessedness
of human bodies and human passions
through sexual exploitation;
the delusion of unchecked progress
and limitless growth that threatens our home,
the earth;
the covert despair that lulls many
into numb complicity with empires
and systems of domination.
We sing lament and repentance.
Hymn VU708
My Lord What A Morning