Covenant Church
an ecumenical liberal baptist congregation
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A Service of Worship for
​Evolution & Transfiguration Sunday

February 14, 2021


We go about our daily lives
understanding almost nothing of the world.
We give little
thought to the machinery
that generates the sunlight that makes life possible,
to the gravity
that glues us to an Earth
that would otherwise send us spinning off into space,
or to the
atoms of which we are made
and on whose stability we fundamentally depend.
Except for
children
(who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions),
few of us spend
much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from,
or whether
it was always here;
if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes;
or whether
there are ultimate limits to what humans can know.

Carl Sagan

Worship Order
Worship notes are included at the bottom of this page and in the Worship Order located at the link below.
With this link you can make a donation to Covenant through PayPal or a credit card. 
Adult Education - TODAY, 9AM
​This Sunday, Bill Kline will present "Pumps & Pipes: How I came to discover Houston, love my neighbors, and have more fun than the law allows."
​
​​Zoom link is available on the Online Gatherings page on our website: https://www.covenanthouston.org/covenant-gatherings.html

Full worship service video:

COFFEE TIME Gathering on Zoom
Today, 11AM

We will begin as a large group before we transition into “rooms" for coffee time. 
​Log in details on the Online Gatherings page. 

Prelude
"Praise to the Lord, the Almighty" by Johann Gottfried Walther; Andrew Bowen, organ.

​Call to Worship

Opening Sentences
Our task, like Thomas Aquinas’s, Thomas Jefferson’s,
or Martin Luther King’s,
is to take the many parts of a complicated
social and conceptual inheritance
and stitch them together into a pattern
that meets the needs of the moment.
It has never been otherwise.

​Scripture Lesson: Mark 9:2-10
​
​Hymn

"O Wondrous Sight, O Vision Fair”; Translation by John Mason Neale; led by Karen Kline, piano and The Covenant Singers.

​Time for Children

Confession
Unison Confession
I can't reconcile the way that the world is jolted
by events that are wonderful and terrible,
the gorgeous and the tragic.

Except that I am beginning to believe
that these opposites do not cancel each other out.

I see a middle aged woman in the waiting room of the cancer clinic,
her arms wrapped around the frail frame of her son.
She squeezes him tightly,
oblivious to the way he looks down at her sheepishly.
He laughs after a minute, a hostage to her impervious love.

Joy persists somehow and I soak it in.

The horror of cancer has made everything seem like it is painted in bright colors.
I think the same thoughts again and again.

Life is so beautiful.
Life is so hard.
​Music
"Gavotte I” from Suite No. 1 in C Minor by J. S. Bach; Susan Wegner, cello.
​
​Proclamation
​
​Prayer

Boundless Sea of Love and Energy, our God,
may all your dreams for us come true:
your motherly imaginings, and your fatherly hopes,
your creative purposes everywhere in nature.
Guide us to our truest selves, co-creators of this environment.
​

Make us worthy inheritors of the astonishing evolutionary reality in which we live.
May it be so.


Prayer by William Cleary and Diarmuid O’Murchu from Prayers to an Evolutionary God.

​Invitation
​
​Prayer of Dedication

Blessed be the tie that binds. It anchors us.
We are embedded in the great evolutionary story
of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process
of mutation and selection, and bricolage.
And this means that we are anything but alone.
​

Doxology

Affirmation of Faith
Science is not only compatible with spirituality;
it is a profound source of spirituality.
When we recognize our place
in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages,
when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life,
then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation
and humility combined, is surely spiritual.
The notion that science and spirituality are
somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

Benediction

Postlude
"Praise to the Lord” Lobe Den Herron, arr. Vernon Charter; Karen Kline, piano.

Worship Notes

The worship leader is Laura Mayo.

The guest proclaimer is Kristy Kyle.

The prelude is played by Andrew Bowen, organ.

The Call to Worship is from The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

The Opening Sentences are from Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents by Jeffery Stout.

The Unison Confession is from Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved by Kate Bowler.

"Gavotte I" from Suite No. 5 in C minor is played by Susan Wegner, cello.

The Prayer of Dedication is by Carl Sagan.

The postlude is played by Karen Kline, piano.


Honoring Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021, with Covenant Church
Covenant is offering two ways to participate in marking Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021:
Noon - 1:00PM in the color garden at Covenant ashes will be available in individual cups. You are invited to come by yourself or with your household and place ashes on your own forehead or on each other’s foreheads if you come with your household. There will be members of the Worship Committee present. They will be masked and at a physical distance. If you come alone, these members will offer the ritual words of Ash Wednesday: “From ashes you have come and to ashes you will go.” Please wear a mask and maintain 6ft of physical distance from everyone not in your household. If you arrive and there are many other people already present, please feel free to make use of the labyrinth or walk among the vegetable garden while you wait.

7:00PM - 8:00PM Zoom Ash Wednesday Service and small group discussion (using Zoom rooms). We will begin and end our time together with a ringing of the Buddhist singing bowl. We will hear scripture and poetry. We will all be invited to impose ashes on ourselves and/or on our households. Please use anything you have as “ashes” (you might use glitter, a washable marker, lipstick, dirt, etc). After the service we will transition into small groups using Zoom rooms. In our groups we will be asked to reflect on our experiences of Ash Wednesday in a pandemic and to simply be together. We will return to the large group for a final blessing. The Zoom information is on our online gatherings page:
https://www.covenanthouston.org/covenant-gatherings.html. You will need a password to open this webpage. Please let the office know if you need help with the password.
Sunday schedule for today: 
9:00 - Adult Education with Zoom
10:00 - Worship via videos on the Worship Page
11:00 - Transition from worship to coffee time with Zoom

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Covenant Church
4949 Caroline St., Houston, TX 77004
[email protected]
713-668-8830
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