Call to Worship
One: Friends, we come to worship our God who surpasses all human understanding.
All: As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are God’s ways higher than our ways and God’s thoughts than our thoughts.
One: The Lord God created the Heavens and the Earth.
All: Yet God walked among us as Jesus Christ, and left the Holy Spirit to be our comforter.
One: Our faith is strong, yet we see through a glass dimly, and cry out the prayer of the centurion.
All: Lord, we believe, but help our unbelief.
Prayer of Renewal
One: Lord God, we humble ourselves before your overwhelming mystery.
All: We struggle, daily, to understand our own actions, and so we know we have no hope of understanding your ways.
One: Lord, you are mighty and mysterious, the source of all life and goodness.
All: So we surrender to you with complete faith in your justice, mercy, and abundant love.
One: Lord, we know we have sinned, but our forgetful minds cannot remember all of the times we have strayed from your path.
All: So we repent and ask for your forgiveness.
One: Lord, we know you have blessed us, but we often do not appreciate all that we have.
All: So we thank you and ask for your continued blessing in our lives. Amen.
Scripture Acts 17:22-31
22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26 From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ 29 Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. 30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”