“Do not be afraid; you are not alone. We thank our God every time we remember you because of your faithfulness in joy and sorrow. We, along with you, surrender to God in order become ever more aware of God’s grace. Our hope for you is unshaken, for our God is always faithful. We are confident that the God who began a good work in you will bring it to wholeness in Jesus Christ.”
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God is Holy Mystery, beyond complete knowledge,
above perfect description.
Yet, in love, the one eternal God seeks relationship.
So God creates the universe and with it the possibility of being and relating.
God tends the universe, mending the broken and reconciling the estranged.
God enlivens the universe, guiding all things toward harmony with their Source.
Grateful for God’s loving action, we cannot keep from singing.
With the Church through the ages, we speak of God as one and triune: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We also speak of God as
Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer
God, Christ, and Spirit
Mother, Friend, and Comforter
Source of Life, Living Word, and Bond of Love,
and in other ways that speak faithfully of the One on whom our hearts rely, the fully shared life at the heart of the universe.
We witness to Holy Mystery that is Wholly Love.
God is creative and self-giving, generously moving in all the near and distant corners of the universe.
Nothing exists that does not find its source in God.
Our first response to God’s providence is gratitude.
We sing thanksgiving.
Finding ourselves in a world of beauty and mystery,
of living things, diverse and interdependent, of complex patterns of growth and evolution, of subatomic particles and cosmic swirls, we sing of God the Creator, the Maker and Source of all that is.
Each part of creation reveals unique aspects of God the Creator, who is both in creation and beyond it.
All parts of creation, animate and inanimate, are related.
All creation is good.
We sing of the Creator, who made humans to live and move and have their being in God.
In and with God, we can direct our lives toward right relationship with each other and with God.
We can discover our place as one strand in the web of life.
We can grow in wisdom and compassion.
We can recognize all people as kin.
We can accept our mortality and finitude, not as a curse, but as a challenge to make our lives and choices matter.
Made in the image of God, we yearn for the fulfillment that is life in God.
Yet we choose to turn away from God.
We surrender ourselves to sin, a disposition revealed in selfishness, cowardice, or apathy.
Becoming bound and complacent in a web of false desires and wrong choices, we bring harm to ourselves and others.
This brokenness in human life and community is an outcome of sin.
Sin is not only personal but accumulates to become habitual and systemic forms of injustice, violence, and hatred.
We are all touched by this brokenness: the rise of selfish individualism that erodes human solidarity; the concentration of wealth and power without regard for the needs of all; the toxins of religious and ethnic bigotry; the degradation of the blessedness of human bodies and human passions through sexual exploitation; the delusion of unchecked progress and limitless growth that threatens our home, the earth; the covert despair that lulls many into numb complicity with empires and systems of domination.
We sing lament and repentance.
Yet evil does not—cannot— undermine or overcome the love of God.
God forgives, and calls all of us to confess our fears and failings with honesty and humility.
God reconciles, and calls us to repent the part we have played in damaging our world, ourselves, and each other.
God transforms, and calls us to protect the vulnerable, to pray for deliverance from evil, to work with God for the healing of the world, that all might have abundant life.
We sing of grace.
Download: A Song of Faith the song.pdf
Download: Backgrounder on Song of Faith.pdf
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