Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. — Shakespeare
Ken Sehested
Prelude. “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” —Annie Moses Band https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9-1thLeoaI
Invocation. “. . . the world is erupting around us, Christ is very often offering us the scars in his side.” —Christian Wiman
Read more ›Prelude. “Fey Oh Di Nou” ("Oh Leaves Tell Us") by the Creole Choir of Cuba tells of a group trying to invoke the divine power of medicinal plants to heal a sick person.
Call to worship. “Resurrection Blues.” —Otis Taylor.
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Read more ›Ken Sehested
Prelude. “This world is so profane, / I can hear the earth screaming, / screaming in pain. / Everywhere; / There is not compassion left in us. / Why is it that so much pain is caused? / and so much injustice is done in the name of God? / Why have children stopped dreaming? / and why is it that mothers won't stop crying; / I just ask myself how can God look at us.” —English translation of lyrics in “¿Porque?” (“Why?”), Yasmin Levy
Call to worship. "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" —Aramaic phrase spoken by Jesus on the cross, translated to "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Quoting Psalm 22:1, recorded in Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34.
Read more ›Ken Sehested
Prelude. “Lullaby.” —Together for Palestine
Invocation. “The War Prayer,” by Mark Twain, presented as an animated film by Markos Kounalakis. Twain’s work is a short story written in the heat of the Philippine-American war of 1899-1902 offering a poignant reflection on the double-edged moral sword implicit to war. (14:02 video.)
Read more ›Ken Sehested
Prelude. Sufi dance, featuring Rana Gorgani, Farid Sheek, Mirtohid Radfar
Call to worship. “Gordon Hempton, acoustic ecologist, considers silence to be not the absence of sound, but the absence of noise. As I’ve been dwelling on silence in preparation for this reflection, I’ve thought about this definition and tried to figure out, then, what noise is. Last week, during a hike, I sat by Deep Creek in the Smokies, my feet in the water, not able to hear anything but the thundering sound of the water over the rocks. I wondered: Is that noise? Is noise just loud sounds, or is it a word describing things that assault our senses in an unpleasant, unsettling, or undesirable way? If so, then for me, noise would not just refer to sounds, but also to billboards, and to those videos playing at gas pumps. It would be the words scrolling endlessly on news shows, and a riot of perfumes wafting from the centers of 
department stores. It would include the garbage piled up by the river after the hurricane, and the lies coming from amplified voices of power in our society.
Ken Sehested
Prelude. “Mozart y Mambo.” —Rondo alla Mambo, which combines the music of W.A. Mozart and Cuban Mambo, was featured in this flashmob on the streets of Havana, Cuba and was the grand finale of the Mozart y Mambo project. Inspired by W.A. Mozart and written by Joshua Davis and Yuniet Lombida Prieto, it is performed by Sarah Willis and the Havana Lyceum Orchestra.
Call to worship. “Hope is not denial of reality, but defiance of inevitability.” —Brent Barry, Stout Creek Farm, Saltillo, Texas
Read more ›Compiled by Ken Sehested
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“. . . they traded their wisdom for their splendor.”
—Ezekiel 28:17
Ken Sehested
Under cover of sham “negotiations,” in an attempted denial of political gravity, likely setting the stage for triggering the 1976 National Emergency Act for an electoral takeover leading up to November’s mid-term elections, and the threat of being found culpable in human trafficking, our president has started another g*dd*mmed war.
The fundamental lie at the root of our nation’s crisis is a theological heresy: That the US has a “manifest destiny,” that we are the one “exceptional” nation, and we are so because God has “anointed” us as such. Which is why people on the Way of Jesus must collaborate with all people of conscience, of faith or no faith, to stand in the face of our nation’s presidential psychosis to say a clear, unambiguous, and vehement NO to this military adventurism.
Read more ›Ken Sehested
Hail, O human one, progeny of the stars’ dust enlivened by the Breath of the Most High. Stand and be accounted.
Do you enter the portal of Heaven’s presence with open hands and penitential heart? Or do you come to bargain?
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