Bulletin – Sunday May 11, 2025 – Fourth Sunday of Easter / ReDress Observance / Mother’s Day
Sunday, May 11, 2025
Fourth Sunday of Easter / ReDress Observance / Mother’s Day
We Gather as People of Faith
Welcome
Lighting the Christ Candle
Announcements
Minute Person
Call to Worship
All: We come together today as one voice.
One: We come to say their names: Dinah, Tamar, Bathsheba, Vashti, Suzannah, Ruth, Hagar. The Hebrew Scriptures do not hide the truth, about these women subjected to violence. The Bearers of the truth, the downtrodden, and marginalized. It is a lineage of names reaching back in time.
All: We come together to remember.
One: We come to remember violence against women and girls remains today, disproportionately experienced by Indigenous families, through racism, and classism, by relegating worth and dignity to a few even amongst God’s People.
All: We come together to worship the Creator
One: who reaches out to those most marginalized, whose compassion is moved to act by the tears of the oppressed. Who provides comforts to the grieving and harmed. We come to join our hearts to Creator’s heart. So that healing and hope flows through us arm and arm with others walking the road toward dignity, equity, and justice.
Hymn – “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” (VU #602)
Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in Christian love;
The unity of heart and mind
Is like to that above.
Before our Maker’s throne
We pour our ardent prayers;
Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one,
Our comforts and our cares.
We share each other’s woes,
Each other’s burdens bear;
And often for each other flows
The sympathizing tear.
This glorious hope revives
Our courage on the way;
That we shall live in perfect love
In God’s eternal day.
Prayer of Approach and Confession
Oh Loving, Compassionate God, Oh God that weeps with your most suffering, we cry with you at the systems of oppression that continue to alienate, isolate, and dispose of so many. We lament with you the systems that privileges some, disregarding others. We say “We see you” for all your lost and forgotten Indigenous women and girls.
Words of Assurance
Oh God of the Suffering and Liberated we ask your courage and resilience so often shown us through the very victims of violence. That we may walk with each other as co-creators of peace and justice that all your people may know respect and dignity. We ask this in the name of Christ who defeated death from violence and shows us the way of life for all. Amen.
Sung Response – “How Deep the Peace” (MV #95)
How deep the peace, the confidence, of those whose wrongs are forgiven.
How deep the peace, the confidence, of those whose hearts are healed.
A Story for All
Background Video
We Hear God’s Word
Scripture Reading: Genesis 16:1-16
1 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.
When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”
6 “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.
7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.
9 Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” 10 The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”
11 The angel of the Lord also said to her:
“You are now pregnant and you will give birth to a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. 12 He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”
13 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: “You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” 14 That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi; it is still there, between Kadesh and Bered.
15 So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.
May God speak to us through these readings of scripture.
Thanks be to God!
Hymn – “Spirit, Open My Heart” (MV #79)
Spirit, open my heart to the joy and pain of living.
As you love may I love, in receiving and in giving,
Spirit, open my heart.
God, replace my stony heart with a heart that’s kind and tender.
All my coldness and fear to your grace I now surrender.
Spirit, open my heart to the joy and pain of living.
As you love may I love, in receiving and in giving,
Spirit, open my heart.
Write your love upon my heart as my law, my goal, my story.
In each thought, word, and deed, may my living bring you glory.
Spirit, open my heart to the joy and pain of living.
As you love may I love, in receiving and in giving,
Spirit, open my heart.
May I weep with those who weep, share the joy of sister, brother.
In the welcome of Christ, may we welcome one another.
Spirit, open my heart to the joy and pain of living.
As you love may I love, in receiving and in giving,
Spirit, open my heart.
Sermon – “El-Roi: The God who Sees”
Anthem – “Song of Community”
We’ll weave a love that greens sure as spring,
Then deepens in summer to the fall autumn brings.
Resting still in winter to spiral again,
Together, my friends, we’ll weave on, we’ll weave on.
We’ll weave a love that opens our eyes
To see one another beyond all disguise,
Where our trust like water will wash away lies,
Together, my friends, we’ll weave on, we’ll weave on.
A love that heals, friend, that bends, friend,
That rising and turning then yields, friend,
Like the mountain to rain, or frost in the spring,
Or darkness that turns with the dawn.
It’s by turning, turning, turning, my friend,
By turning that love moves on.
We’ll weave a love that touches our pain,
That come like the water to drought-fevered plains,
So the roots once withered sing praise to the rain,
Together, my friends, we’ll weave on, we’ll weave on.
We’ll weave a love that holds the despised,
The stranger who wanders, the focus of lies,
We’ll stand sure as mountains with earth’s victimized,
Together, my friends, we’ll weave on, we’ll weave on.
A love that heals, friend, that bends, friend,
That rising and turning yields, friend,
Like the mountain to rain, or frost in the spring,
Or darkness that turns with the dawn.
It’s by turning, turning, turning, my friend,
By turning that love moves on.
We’ll weave a love with roots growing deep
And sap pushing branches to wake from their sleep,
Bearing leaves burnt amber with morning’s full sweep,
Together, my friends, we’ll weave on, we’ll weave on.
A love that heals, friend, that bends, friend,
That rising and turning yields, friend,
Like the mountain to rain, or frost in the spring,
Or darkness that turns with the dawn.
It’s by turning, turning, turning, my friend,
By turning that love moves on.
We Respond to God’s Word
An Invitation to Share
Offering Sung Response – “Your Work, O God, Needs Many Hands?” (VU #537)
Your work, O God, needs many hands to help you everywhere,
And some there are who cannot serve unless our gifts we share.
Because we love you and your work, our offering now we make:
Be pleased to use it as your own, we ask for Jesus’ sake.
Offering Prayer
Prayers of the People
The Prayer Jesus Taught Us
Let us pray to God who is like our Mother and our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
Passing of the Peace
We Go Into God’s World
Hymn – “Would You Bless Our Homes and Families” (VU #556)
Would you bless our homes and families,
Source of life who calls us here;
In our world of stress and tensions
Teach us love that conquers fear.
Help us learn to love each other
With a love that constant stays;
Teach us when we face our troubles,
Love’s expressed in many ways.
When our way is undemanding,
Let us use the time that’s ours
To delight in simple pleasures,
Sharing joys in gentle hours.
When our way is anxious walking
And a heavy path we plod,
Teach us trust in one another
And in you, our gracious God.
From the homes in which we’re nurtured,
With the love that shapes us there,
Teach us, God, to claim as family
Ev’ry one whose life we share.
And thro’ all that life may offer,
May we in your love remain;
May the love we share in families
Be alive to praise your name.
Let us reach beyond the bound’ries
Of our daily thought and care
Till the fam’ly you have chosen
Spills its love out ev’rywhere.
Help us learn to love each other
With a love that constant stays;
Teach us when we face our troubles
Love’s expressed in many ways.
Commissioning
On the Celebration of this National Red Dress Day, let us go out into the world with God’s grace to remember, to lament, and to commit to social change and building right relations so that we can work together to bring dignity, wellness, and respect to all.
Benediction
May God bless us with a broken heart responding to vulnerable truth-telling so that we may live from deep within our hearts. May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of our kin. So that we may walk the good way of peacemaking. May God bless us with tears shed for those who are hurting so that we may offer comfort and solidarity. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Companion, One God, who Mothers us all. Amen.
Sung Response – “When You Walk from Here” (VU #298)
When you walk from here, when you walk from here,
Walk with justice, walk with mercy, and with God’s humble care.
