♫
Well hello, welcome to worship at University
Christian Church. We're thrilled that you
have chosen to be with us today
my name is Russ Peterman. I am the Senior
Minister here and it is my deep joy
and great privilege to welcome you to
worship here at University Christian
Church. We are
all about hope and we are looking for
ways to point each other towards God
because we believe that the story of God
is bigger
and wider, more inclusive, more loving
than any of us can imagine.
And so we want you to know that wherever
you are on your spiritual journey,
no matter what your story is, that there
is room in the family of God
for you and that you are welcome here.
Before we begin, I want you to take just
a moment if you would,
and go to our website and register your
attendance with
us. Whether you're joining us on Sunday
morning or
another time throughout the week, it's
important for us to know
when and where you're joining us. And so,
we would love for you to do that.
There, you will also find an opportunity
to download the worship bulletin
let us know of any prayer concerns that
you may have as well
as share any gifts and tithes and
offerings that you may wish to bring
on this day. We also want to let you know
that during this time
of this pandemic, when we are doing
everything online-only,
that we are making some changes to our
church staff
as we adjust to this new way of doing
and being church.
first, because our Outreach Ministry is
such an important part of what we are
doing, the way in which we are serving
the community around us,
we have adjusted Rev. Jessica Vacketta's role.
She has been doing not only Outreach, but
also College Ministry, and
now we are allowing her to focus fully
and completely on
Outreach and developing partnerships
with
ministry partners around Fort Worth.
That opens up a role then, for our
ministry with college students in
particular, our students across the
street at TCU.
And so, we have created a Coordinator of
College Ministry
position. And that position has been
filled by Mason Wagner,
who had joined this church as a high
school student
and attended TCU and graduated several
years ago and is now
a student at Brite Divinity School and
he will be working with our college
students. We're thrilled to welcome
Mason to our staff. We've also created
another
position that will be thinking about
ways in which we can create
opportunities for the entire UCC
experience
to be experienced online, so that
wherever you are
physically, that you can be a part of
this congregation
and so that role is being filled by
Monica Bradley who is a third-year
student at Brite Divinity School.
She comes from a social work background
and is doing some incredible things for
us to rethink the way that we make this
move from
being analog to digital. And so,
in this new way, we are excited to
welcome both Mason
and Monica to our church staff.
And now, Church, as we begin worship,
I hope that you will come fully,
that you will lean into this time of
worship, that you won't just watch it on
your screen,
but you'll participate fully and
completely, that you'll
sing the hymns, that you'll pray the
prayers that you'll share together in
communion,
and that we can worship together so that
we can, indeed,
point each other towards the wholeness
that God intends for our lives.
So let us worship God together.
[Tower Bells Ring]
Hear now this call to worship
Let us worship together.
♫
As we turn to God in prayer this morning,
I want to share with you a few sentences
from John O'Donohue's book "To Bless the
Space
Between Us". He talks about the rhythm of
prayer,
rising in the morning with prayer in our
hearts, and he writes:
"May I have the courage today to live the
life that I
would love. To postpone my dream no
longer,
but to do at last what I came here for
and waste my heart on fear
no more." Brothers
and sisters, let us go to God
now in prayer. 
Gracious God, we are amazed
by your presence here with us this
morning,
by the assurance that we have that you
are as close to us as the next breath,
that you have walked beside us during
this
very difficult time
and you've made us aware of things that
we had been neglecting.
We thank you for blessings great and
small. We thank you for your example
of faithfulness. We thank you that when
we rise in the morning,
when we rest at night,
you are with us in those moments and
every moment
in between. You are with us in the middle
of the night
when sleep is hard to find.
Thank you, God
for being our rock,
for being with us as we navigate a new
path,
for loving us, for your grace
that is so amazing, in all these things
we are grateful. Now hear our voices
joined in the prayer your son taught us:
amen
so we are continuing today our sermon
series
on the Psalms that we're calling "God is
holding your life
and if you were to take your Bible and
basically open it right to the middle,
that's where you'll find the book of
Psalms.
In many ways, that is sort of indicative
to the role
that the Psalms play in the Bible. They
are the heart and soul of the Bible. They
sort of capture the heart and soul of
God's people.
In the various seasons of life that we
find ourselves in,
there are times when the psalmist is
happy--filled with joy
and the Psalms are all about
thanksgiving and praise and gratitude.
But yet, there are other times when life
has fallen to pieces and the psalmist is
angry and frustrated;
sad. And we know what that's like,
don't we? We've all experienced those
different emotions, those different
seasons in life.
And I think the psalms are powerful in
part because they are the
the heartfelt response to the ebb
and flow of life, that the heart of all
of these expressions, from our most
elated praise, to our deepest lament, is
this sense that God
is holding our life. Today, we're going to
be looking at Psalm 63, which is a little
bit different than the first two Psalms
that we've looked at in this series.
Now, you've heard me say before that
there are several different ways, several
different
schools of thought on how to categorize
the different Psalms, different schools
of thought have different insights on
how they can be grouped together, but
basically,
Psalm 63 is referred to as a lament.
And laments are those passionate
expressions of grief
or sorrow or anger.
And oftentimes, that is born out of that
anger, is born out of
sorrow or regret.
Now, Psalms of lament make up over
half of the Psalms in the Bible.
And as you'll hear, Psalm 63 portrays
this
vast wasteland, the desert of life,
if you will. The psalmist, who is believed
to be David,
is expressing that there's got to
be more to life than this.
But yet, through it all, you'll hear he
maintains the sense that no matter what,
that we can
trust God. That we can trust God to bring
new life to our dry and parched
souls. So listen now to Psalm 63.
The word of God for the people of God.
Thanks be to God.
There is an old Billie Holiday song in
which she sings soulfully:
 
 
Now if you love blue jazz, you love that song. In the blues, blue jazz, blues,
I would argue, is one of the best forms
of lament that we know.
The Psalmist David has the blues. He's
in the wilderness, he's in the
desert, he's in the middle of nowhere, he's all
alone. Scholars believe that basically
this is referring to a time when he was
afraid for his life,
running from Saul.
He's in the wilderness and he's lonely.
He's looking for God. He feels the pain
of God's absence in his soul and flesh, he says.
He might as well be singing "I'm all for
you." like Billie Holiday. Body
and soul. You know, there's
something about the Psalms; not just this
one,
but I would say all of them, that invite
us to be
vulnerable and honest,
that remind us that we can be our fully
selves. That we can show up as we are, that we
can bring, all of us, our joys and our sorrows;
all of it, that we can show up as we are,
not
as we think we should be, and to trust
that God,
no matter where we are on life's journey,
where we are,
that God is holding it all.
It's amazing sometimes that we find the
courage to show up at all,
given what we're going through, given
what's going on in the world around us.
There was a woman in my last church who
always sat in the far back pew and I asked her one
time, "Why do you always sit in the back pew?"
And she just smiled and she said "Because
they don't have any pews
in the parking lot."
I think about all that she went through
in life;
a broken marriage that came as a result
of a betrayal,
a painful divorce, the loss of both of
her parents,
it's amazing that she came at all.
The back pew was as close as she could
get and she was only there
because they didn't have pews in the
parking lot.
I think of all the people that are
sitting this morning in the proverbial
back pew.
You may be lonely, you may be isolated,
you
may be dealing with something; a
difficult diagnosis, a broken
relationship,
feeling the weight of the pandemic,
dealing with grief
and loss, it's amazing that you showed up
at all. 
And I just want to commend you for that.
I mentioned earlier that there are
different schools of thought on how to
categorize the Psalms. Most people
say that there are basically four
categories. There are
Psalms of thanksgiving. There are Psalms
of praise.
There are Psalms of ceremony, which are
sort of liturgical or worship Psalms
that people would use
at different times in their life, and
then there were Psalms
of lament. You may remember, not long ago
I told you about Walter Bruggeman, who
was one of the preeminent scholars in the
psalms. He says that essentially, there are
three.
He says there are Psalms of orientation,
disorientation
and reorientation.
Richard Bruxvoort Colligan is a
full-time composer and hymn writer
and he's known for teaching about the
the juxtaposition and the
relationship between
music and spiritual formation.
And he has written and produced three
different albums
on the Psalms in various musical forms.
Each album is broken into what he has
identified,
how he categorizes the different Psalms.
There are Psalms of wonder, he says,
Psalms of desolation,
and Psalms of thriving.
Wonder is where we spend a lot of our
time. There's nothing devastating going on;
life is basically normal and ordered, and then,
there are Psalms of desolation. Those are
the psalms
of lament; the lament of loneliness, of
anger, of rage,
sorrow. And then, there are those
Psalms of thriving, which we sing with
gusto, loudly filled with joy and gratitude
and praise. But Psalm 63, he says,
is one of those Psalms of desolation,
and he sings it as a blues song.
Like I said, David has the desert blues,
and he sings "I'm waiting, I'm searching
there has got
to be more than this." You could hear the
longing
in his voice.
You know, sometimes it's important for us
to show up, even if all we can do is
slump down in that back pew and admit
that the world
isn't as we wished it were;
to acknowledge that we don't have as
much control
as we would like, as much as we claim to
have, that there is sorrow and grief and anger,
and rage, and that
these emotions are so big that they are
hard for us to handle
at times. I wonder if part of the reason
that it's so hard for us
is that we aren't often given the
permission to simply show up as we are;
that we feel that we have to put on this
happy face, that we have to
to pretend that things are different
than they are.
Lance Pape is the Granville and Earline
Walker professor of homiletics. It's a
name that many of us should know.
Granville was the former Senior Minister
of this congregation.
So Lance teaches preaching across the
street at Brite Divinity School
and he led a conversation recently on
preaching in the midst of crisis.
And given everything that's going on in
the world around us right now, it was an
important
conversation. And I'm really glad that i
took part in it.
And lance says that that by and large,
life exists between two extremes.
There are seasons of praise and there
are seasons of lament,
and in those seasons of praise we can we
can feel the presence of God, that we
sing songs and we pray prayers of
gratitude and thanksgiving, of
of praise and adoration.
But then, in those seasons of lament,
where we can feel the absence of God deep in our
bones, and we sing songs and we pray prayers of
of petition. Please, God, I need you.
And life, Lance says, is like a pendulum;
it swings back and forth
between these two points, between these
two seasons.
And we wish, don't we, that life was
always lived
in a season of praise. But yet, we know
that's not how the physics of
spirituality work.
But yet, if you go to most churches,
what do you hear? What is reinforced?
That if you just believe the right
things, if you just pray the right
prayers, if you just
live the right way, then you'll live
over here. Most of those churches have
praise bands, don't they?
But yet, i've never seen one that has a
lament
band. But yet, I wonder if that's what we
need, because so much of life
is lived over here.
Rob Bell wonders how many people, if you
were to ask them
honestly, why they left the church,
that they would say some form of it was
just so small.
You see, so many of us were raised, that
we were
taught to be polite when we pray.
But if the Psalms teach us anything,
it's that there is more to prayer than
being polite
and asking nicely. But yet, our culture
doesn't
know what to do with lament, that that we
live
in a culture of denial, that there
are some things that we just don't want
to talk about. We don't talk about those things.
But the power of lament is that it
speaks to that which is oftentimes
repressed. Judith Lewis is a psychiatrist. She has taught
for 30 years at the Harvard Medical School And she is
a specialist dealing with traumatic stress.
And she said, one time,
 
 
 
But yet, how many families,
how many families would have been better
off if someone would have stood up at
some point
and simply said "We have to deal with
this."
How many marriages--if one person
were to say "You know what?
We're not moving on from this just yet."
How many churches, how many institutions,
how many businesses, how many
offices, would have been so much better
off if someone would have said
'You know, we need to deal with this."
How many family systems, whatever that
looks like,
would have been better off if someone
were to stand up and say
"There are some things that we need to
work through."
You think about the things that are
going on in the world around us right
now, things in our country, things that we
just don't want to deal with, things that
we would rather not talk about,
things that we would rather not admit or
acknowledge,
the injustices that are taking place
that we would just as soon
turn a blind eye towards, just turn our
heads--
You see, that's why I think that these
Psalms are more relevant now
than ever, that we have to 
reclaim the ability to grieve,
we have to reclaim the power of lament.
Because if we don't,
whatever that pain is, whatever that
frustration, whatever that
longing is, it'll go
somewhere. It will express
itself somehow.
Isn't that what the protests are all
about,
that people are saying 'We need to talk
about this. We need to deal with this.
We need to right this wrong, deal with
this injustice.'
You see, that's the reason that we need
to practice
lament, that we need to acknowledge, we
need to give permission to admit that
sometimes, shaking a fist at God,
that that is prayer; that we don't always need to be
polite when we pray.
The Hebrew scriptures know how to do
that. There are laments
all through the Old Testament, not just
in the Psalms,
but all throughout a big part
of the Bible are complaints to God,
but too many of us are afraid to
complain to God.
But Church, if I have learned anything in
my life,
and if you only hear me say one thing
today, hear me when I say this:
That God is big enough to handle our
frustrations,
and our longing, our anger, our sorrow, our
grief. That God is
big enough to hold all of it.
We don't need to be afraid to show up as
we are.
Now you may have noticed that in the
Psalm there is this longing.
You heard David say "I'm waiting. I'm
searching. That my soul
thirsts for you, God, because your
steadfast love is
better than life."
You could hear that longing, that lament,
that absence
of God. But yet also, there is a level,
there is an affirmation of trust.
"My soul clings to you, God.
Your right hand upholds me."
In other words, I can't see you.
I can't find you right now, but yet I
know that you are there.
You can hear the loneliness of the
writer,
but also the affirmation of trust.
You know, sometimes the most that we can
do,
the most that we can muster, is just to
slump down in the back pew
and to hear the promise that God is
holding our life, that
that God is holding it all together.
But if you're in a place, a time in your
life
that you can't hear that, that you can't
believe it that, you can't
trust it because of something that's
going on, that something that has happened,
because of something that is that you
just
can't wrap your head around it, you can't
believe it deep in your heart.
If you can't believe that right now,
I would just simply invite you to let
other people believe it for you.
You see, that's what the community of
faith is all about,
that in those moments when we show up,
that we can't believe the good news, that
we
allow other people to believe it for us,
that we allow other people to hold our
pain and our sorrow because it's just
too much for us to bear.
And yet, we gather together around one
another
and say together, we will get through
this.
And so, if you need to get angry,
if you need to shake your fist at God,
do it. Because God
is big enough to handle it.
Let us surround you, let us
believe that for you now, even if you
can't believe it for yourself.
You see, that's what it means to be
church,
that's what it means to be people of
faith,
to show up for others when they can't
show up for themselves.
To believe and to have faith for others
when they can't believe when they don't
have faith for themselves.
And so, if you can't hear it right now,
if you can't know it,
let us know it for you.
Amen.
♫ Hear my prayer, O, Lord, give ear unto my cry ♫
♫ Thou art my refuge and my
hope ♫
♫ Thou shalt tread down ♫
♫ my enemies ♫
♫ I will dwell forever in Thy tents ♫
♫ and hide me in the shadow
of thy wings ♫
♫ Lord, thou art indeed ♫
♫ my God, yea, I will seek thee early ♫
♫  My soul is faint, my body longeth after thee ♫
♫ In a barren desert ♫
♫ where there is no water ♫
♫ Now I will bless Thee daily and lift my hands in pray’r and adoration; ♫
♫ Yea, my lips shall praise thee
all my lifelong ♫
♫
It is that time we look forward to every
week,
when we greet each other with a very
special greeting. So,
whether you greet the person worshiping
with you this morning,
or you text someone who's important to
you,
let us pass the peace of Christ. May the
peace of Christ be with you.
The peace of the Lord be with you
And also with you.
The peace of the Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Good morning UCC, my name is Bainbridge
Allen. I'm one of our youth sponsors.
Two weeks ago, we hosted a drive-through
blessing for our eighth-graders
to celebrate their transition into high
school.
All of our eighth-graders and their
parents were invited to drive through
under the porte cochère,
where they received a gift, as well as a
note, written to them by an upperclassman. Our youth
sponsors then prayed with each
individual youth.
Ucc's youth programming became a big
part of my life
starting in eighth grade. I remember
contemplating how youth group
felt different than school. In both
places, I found myself
in a community of kids my age that I got
along with.
But something stood out about youth
group. There was another
dimension of connection within the
community at UCC,
and that stuck with me to this day.
Our youth programming continues and will
throughout the fall semester
and we have a place for you. When I think
about all the transition
that's in our lives right now, especially
settling in for a new socially-distanced
school year, I bet that many of us have
felt like something's missing
in one way or another, despite
our most diligent efforts to say 'no it's
still there, it's just on hold'.
Well, if you can't deal with the hold
music anymore,
perhaps I can offer another tune. One of
my favorite songs
is by Alan Jackson, which goes like this:
"The older I get,
the truer it is; it's the people you love,
not the money and stuff, that makes you rich."
Thank you, UCC, for investing in our youth.
Your offerings and gifts help to create
the community
that supports them on their journey.
♫ Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise God all creatures here below.
♫ Praise God above, ye heavenly hosts ♫
♫ Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost ♫
♫ Amen ♫
Food is a ritual. How we eat, where we eat,
what we eat, who we eat with, even how we
clean up that meal;
it's all a ritual. It guides our lives. It
fills us with the nutrients we need
physically to go into the world, to live,
to feel well.
I have been fortunate to never
experience the hunger pains
of true hunger. Yes, I've been hungry, but
I've always known
that that hunger will be satiated with
another meal that's coming.
But when we come to the table, it's a
little bit different sometimes.
For we come to this table, this ritual,
Christ's meal, for something very different.
The psalmist, so long ago, reminds us that
God is with us always. Our Psalm today
says "God, you are my God, and I love you,
so, and I have traveled. And through those
travels, I have become
so hungry and thirsty for you.
And now, here I am in this place of
worship, with my eyes wide open,
drinking in your strength and glory,
and now I am filled with your love at
last."
That's Christ's table; a place where we
come when we are completely
depleted, when we have nothing left,
to take in Christ's love and grace
with a simple meal, with simple bread and
simple cup,
and yet we are filled with grace and
love, to take part in the work that God is
doing in this world
and to go out and share that love with
all. We were reminded that on that night that
Jesus gathered with his disciples
that he took the bread he blessed it and
broke it saying
"This is my body, broken for you.
Take and eat, and when you do so,
remember me." In the same way, he took the
cup, blessed it and poured it out for them
saying, "This cup is the New Covenant
in my blood, poured out for each of you.
Take and drink, and when you do so,
remember me." Let us pray.
It is good to give thanks to you creator, God,
to sing praises to your name.
We rejoice in your steadfast love in the
morning, your faithfulness at night,
in all our hours, all our days you are
there. When we would forget this and become
anxious and concerned for our own
security,
let this table teach us the way of trust
and commitment
and that the love of Christ is constant
and ever-giving,
even to the point of death itself. Let us
seek
first your rule over our lives and to
trust that all our
other needs will be granted as well, in
the fullness of your love.
In Jesus' name we pray, amen.
Take the body of Christ
and share the cup of grace
Again, I want to thank you for joining us
today and hope that this service has
been spiritually meaningful for you and that
you have sensed the presence of God in a
very real way as we have worshiped
together. Before we go, I want to invite
you, if you have children in your home,
to join us this afternoon between 1 and
3. Our children's ministry is going to be
doing a drive-through Blessing of the
Backpacks and Devices,
since so many of our students are going
to be schooling online
for awhile. And so, simply drive through
our parking lot and our porte-cochère
where we will be doing that. You will
have an opportunity to pick up
a backpack tag and a t-shirt, as well
as a
family faith packet for opportunities
and ways for you to worship and to
engage and to grow spiritually
together as a family. I hope you'll join
us for that next week. We will share some
photos and
and videos from that, and so I hope you
will join us again next week and you can
see yourself
be a part of that. And now, Church,
as we go out into the world, even if we
are staying home,
may we know beyond a shadow of a doubt
that we
are being held by God. And as we go, may
God bless us
and keep us, may God's face continue to
shine upon us
and give us strength, now and forevermore, amen.
♫
