Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Maundy Thursday 2022: An Alternate Introduction to Confession and Absolution

Friends!

I made this alternate introduction to the confession & forgiveness for Maundy Thursday (or Good Friday, if you'd like). Copyleft. Use it freely as you wish. Feel free to correct any typos. 

Peace. 

CENTERING MEDITATION 

INTRODUCTION TO CONFESSION

Friends, in this season of Lent, we have fixed our attention upon the cross of Jesus Christ. Bringing the cross to the center of our worship space, we have, with intentionality, listened again for Christ’s call to recenter our hearts and our minds.

“Pay attention,” Jesus has called to us from the scriptures. “Pay attention to the marginalized and crucified ones of this world. Remember the poor. Care for the abandoned and hurting among you. Strive to create a place, a community, a world, a moment, where the last become first, where the hungry feast, where Love alone reigns, and where poverty and oppression are no more.”

Our call to works of love never ends. And yet, if our life is long, our work is seasonal. Sometimes we transform our neighborhoods. Sometimes we change the world. Sometimes God changes us, renewing our hearts and minds. Sometimes we ask God only for relief—from pain, from hurt, from anxiety, from sadness, from urges to harm ourselves or others. Sometimes we ask only for healing or for God’s abiding presence as we mourn and grieve.

Struggling for a more resurrected world or striving with all our might to live one day at a time, God remains constant, with us, in every step and season. As parents who would neither abandon nor forsake their child, their daughter, their son, so God wraps us always in grace, in care, in joy for who we might yet become.

This God, our parent, the God who is Love, we approach now, trusting in Love, and in God’s free and abundant gifts of grace, of goodness, and of life.


CONFESSION & FORGIVENESS

Insert your favorite one here.

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