July 26 – Sacred Space: Home, Hearth and Hospitality

When you eat a meal, do you customarily say a blessing? If someone asks you to offer a blessing before a meal, do you feel prepared or panicked? In this, the third week of our summer worship series on sacred space, we explore the sacred space of where we live and the culture of our homes.

We’ll look at the text in Matthew where Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish and feeds the multitudes. Did the fact that he blessed his meagre supplies have anything to do with it? Does blessing a meal change the nature of it? What about blessing a home? How do we name and claim the spaces where we live and our daily acts as sacred?

Part of the service will be to learn a prayer form called a collect. If you are suddenly called upon to offer a prayer, including grace, knowing this form can help you to quickly gather your thoughts and extemporaneously offer a meaningful prayer.

This Sunday, we welcome Gwen Chapman and M.E. Kish as music worship leaders. We’ll be singing some of their original songs!

In the meantime, read Matthew 14:13-21, and ponder the following:

1.       It would have been a very logical thing for Jesus to send everyone away to get their own dinner. Why do you think he chooses to offer food to the multitudes?

2.       Do you think that blessing a meal changes it?

Image: Helen Moloney, “Loaves and Fish” from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.