Thank You, GBOD

The United Methodist Church's General Board of Discipleship (GBOD) makes worship and teaching resources available through their website (which, by the way, is confusing since they changed the design/layout). Their lectionary resources for this coming Sunday (July 4) point preachers to blessings and prayers for the military and veterans, but they also include this paragraph:

"Always remember that the Scriptures for the day should set the theme for worship, and special commemorations should happen within and related to the context of the overarching biblical and Christian seasonal themes. God's word and our common baptism tell us who we are in Christ and so establish the underlying norms for our worship, not our national, ethnic, or familial ties or current station in life."

What a great way of putting it. I know some people (myself included) get worried when they have to preach on a day like Independence Day--I was dreading the possibility of singing "America the Beautiful" in worship. It's a delicate balance that I think we mess up quite frequently--many of us want to offer a counter-narrative to patriotism that sometimes can blot out our unity in Christ, but there is nothing wrong with praying for the troops or honoring veterans. The GBOD website is trying to encourage worship planners to put our identity in Christ first, but that where recognition of human achievements and national holidays are appropriate to the Christian season, they can be included in the appropriate time and space. I'd just as soon ignore the 4th of July holiday and take up the issue of war another time, but I know the parishioners are probably going to go straight from church to a cookout and to watch fireworks. There has to be some sort of continuity and point of contact between what happens in Sunday morning worship and what's going on in the rest of the lives of the congregants. That doesn't mean unilaterally supporting cultural phenomena--the Gospel should be subversive of anything that detracts from its singular position in our lives--but it does mean finding the connections and making space for transformation. Anyway, I'm sort of thinking out loud, but those are just some of my musings on the subject, which I'll be refining in my own head over the course of this week.

Back to the lectionary. I'm thinking 2 Kings. I really like the Naaman story.