Making Connections with Feast Days and Commemorations

Yesterday I was part of a Zoom session to talk about planning the worship services for Synod Assembly September 16-18.  The tricky part:  we don't yet know if Synod Assembly will be held in person or virtually.  We won't know until the decision is made, which is expected to come in early June.

If it's held virtually, we don't know if it will be for the full 3 days or something shorter.  Again, those decisions will be made soon.

We did a lot of planning for the worship services for Synod Assembly last year--that Assembly was canceled, so we could use a lot of those elements.  But we may want to change some of the scripture and some of the music.

The worship planning group is led by one of our former bishops, and he talked about looking at the liturgical calendar and being blown away by the connections for each day.  Sept. 16 is the feast day of Cyprian, who was a bishop in Africa in the first century, who advocated for the re-entry into society of apostates.  September 17 is the feast day of Hildegard of Bingen, and September 18 is the commemoration of Dag Hammarskjold, one of the best secretary generals of the UN and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.  He encouraged us to think about how we might make reference to these days, if we're having worship services on each day.

I was so thrilled by the ways we might use these feast days and commemorations--but more than that, I was thrilled that our former bishop and leader had encouraged us to make these connections.  I thought, I am among my tribe, really and truly.