‘God of All Promises: A Poetic Pilgrimage through Genesis’

Other Prayers Addressed To The Same Holy Listener

A Prayer: You Three Times Holy

The vast company of heaven—

cherubim, angels, seraphim, archangels—

gather especially to sing your praises loudly.

Their constant refrain is,

“Holy, holy, holy,”

Three times, not more, not less than three.

So we are able to echo their singing as we join in,

“Holy, holy, holy,”

Three times, not more, not less than three.

We sing that you are ineffable,

incomprehensible,

undecodable,

inaccessible,

a “tremendous mystery.”

In Christian parlance, we take this threefold articulation

to match

our three ways of knowing you to be God.

We say “holy” to the Father,

the source and ending of all our being,

you before time, after time, in, with, and under

all times,

Alpha and Omega who loves the world into existence

It is your will that permits our world to be.

We say “holy” to the Son,

the one born in a barn,

the one who had nowhere to lay his head,

who went about doing good,

who healed the disabled and restored the

disadvantaged,

who bested empires and the rulers of this age,

who humbled himself to die on a cross,

executed as a common criminal,

executed and now risen to authority.

We say “holy” to the Spirit,

The wind that blew back chaos,

the force of freedom that made an escape path

in the sea;

the agent of instruction, guidance, and transformation,

the disturber of our easy peace,

the one who stirs our lives to new witness

and new duty.

We chisel away at your unutterable holiness . . .

we add modifiers . . .

love, justice, faithfulness, compassion, steadfastness,

all true, all good, all important for our life,

but then, yet again, none as thick or daring or bewildering

as “holy.”

In singing this three times, we acknowledge that you

do not fit our categories,

you do not participate in our equations;

you do not accommodate our explanatory yearnings.

You three times holy!

Yet you elude us;

we catch glimpses and yearn to touch and taste

and know;

and you are there, beyond our control, overwhelming

us in awe. Amen.

A Prayer: Your Cosmic Pledge of Disarmament

The report of the flood you caused is not forgotten.

We remember well the torrential rains that swept all

before them,

torrents that swept away so many of your well-beloved

creatures.

Walls of water overran the good order of your

creation.

Your flood lasted so long—

some said forty days,

some said 150 days,

after so much water, the length of the threat

does not matter very much.

We also remember the end of your flood,

the emergence of dry land,

the recovery of creaturely life around the world.

You uttered your lordly assurance:

that the rhythms of the world would not be

disrupted,

we could count on

summer and winter,

cold and heat,

seedtime and harvest,

day and night.

Beyond that, we remember your attentive gesture

of assurance:

The appearance of a rainbow;

you hung up your bow;

you retired your weapon;

you engaged in disarmament,

signaling the end of hostility between

you and your creation.

In that moment of your disarmament,

you decided you would govern in a “more excellent

way,”

by the generosity of love,

by the reliability of restorative justice,

by the lavishness of your forgiveness.

You would not govern by fear;

rather you would run the endless risk of the excellent

way of self-giving.

We see your more excellent way all through your

history:

We see it in the exodus and your solidarity with

the enslaved;

We smell it in the manna bread of wilderness;

We know it in the pathos of the prophets.

Finally, we see your self-giving agency embodied

in Jesus of Nazareth

who required his own leader to put up his sword,

yet more disarmament.

The savagery goes on

amid the predatory superpowers,

amid the brutal struggles for territory and resources,

amid our ignoble disputes with our neighbors.

Your weapon has been retired and suspended in

midair for a long time,

lingering for us to decode its meaning.

You have renounced violent ways.

Peace indeed!

Peace not “beginning with me,”

but with the Lord of the flood.

We are awed by new possibilities. Amen.

A Prayer: You with the Long Nose

Among the best-loved and most-often-reiterated

recitals concerning you is first on the lips of Moses:

“The Lord, the Lord,

a God merciful and gracious,

slow to anger,

and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,

keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,

forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.”

(Exod. 34:6–7)

This often-repeated formula witnesses your eager

solidarity with us and with your entire creation.

Among the reassuring terms of your recital is the

phrase “slow to anger.”

The phrase is a flat, uninspired translation of a compelling

phrase in Hebrew,

a phrase declaring you, our well-beloved God, to

have long nostrils,

a long nose.

Your long nose requires you to inhale and exhale at

great length to renew your breath.

You are, sometimes, the God who breathes the fire

of anger and indignation,

and we can imagine a flow of fire from your nose.

Except that your nostrils are long;

the fire cools,

the anger subsides;

the indignation wanes.

By the time your flame of rage reaches outside your

nose,

it has cooled.

It has cooled so that you can recover your balance.

It has cooled enough for you to reassert your long-

running resolve to be

a God who practices steadfast love and faithfulness.

We are glad for your long nose;

We are glad for your cooling nostrils;

We are grateful that the rage and indignation do not last,

not for long,

not through the night,

not into the next day.

We are thankful that we know you at your best,

free from anger beyond a short temper,

patient even with our recurring waywardness.

The myths are filled with tales concerning gods who

manipulate and goddesses who deceive;

But you are not like that;

You are not underhanded or secretive in your

governance;

You are your own true self every time;

You are a reliable presence in our common life.

You move among us with equilibrium and great

resolve on our behalf.

And we are on the receiving end of the breath of

life you give.

In our inhaling we become capable of generous fidelity.

Your long nose of fire is but a mere footnote to your

long life-giving commitment to the world that you love.

It turns out that we — not unlike you — are capable of

forgiveness when we have cooled from our indignation.

Move in and through our anger, cooling us enough

to participate in your life-giving breath.

We are grateful that we may be alongside you as

we cool enough to care in generative ways. Move us

past our hot noses to do the good work cooled noses

make possible. Amen.

A Prayer: Fresh from the Word

(On Reading Isaiah 55:10–13)

At the outset there was the silence of despair.

And then You spoke:

You said, “Let there be light.”

You said, “Let my people go.”

You said, “Comfort, comfort my people.”

Your word became flesh before our very eyes:

Light became creation;

Emancipation became covenant people;

Comfort became homecoming.

Your word is not empty, but full of futures.

You said, “Love God,” and we are summoned.

You said, “Love neighbor,” and we are implicated.

You said, “Follow me,” and we are on a different

way with you.

Your word, in its life-giving power, addresses us

every day.

Your word, in its life-dispatching force, empowers

us every day.

Your word, in its restorative passion, makes new

every day.

We are creatures of your word;

we cannot be otherwise;

we would not choose to be otherwise.

It is because of your faithful word that we are on our

way . . . rejoicing;

on our way in freedom, mercy, compassion, and justice,

on our way to neighborly well-being,

on our way rejoicing. Amen.

Excerpted from “God of All Promises: A Poetic Pilgrimage through Genesis” by Walter Brueggemann. Copyright 2026. Used by permission of Westminster John Knox Press.

The question itself was not a total surprise.

“When you think about presiding over the Eucharist, what comes up for you?”

I’m in the process of discerning ordination for the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. Some variant of this question during discernment interviews was to be expected, especially since consecrating the sacrament is one of the roles which distinguishes ordained ministry from lay ministry.

But something about how the interviewer worded her question felt different than expected. She wasn’t exactly asking me to explain my theology of the Eucharist or to precisely name what role the priest plays at the altar, although those understandings might inform my answer. Whether her exact intention or not, her question allowed me to engage my imagination, to picture myself in that role.

And I was able to consider what the prospect of ordination might feel like in my body.

I’ve often envied peers who had such solid evidence of a call to vocational ministry: who audibly heard the voice of God or whose calling responded to an undeniable community need. I longed for something strikingly clear and seemingly irrefutable as evidence of God’s will for my life. Moses, I’ve mused to myself, got a burning bush as an obvious sign; why wasn’t God lighting any shrubbery on fire to get my attention?

But as I’ve heard more people narrate their calling or describe a period of discernment before entering a field, I’ve noticed individuals — especially women and people of color — emphasizing a form of embodied knowing that requires deep attention to perceive. I’ve heard stories like, “The moment I felt called was when I watched someone leading worship and I knew I wanted to do the same thing.” Or “When I’m preaching, I feel a deep sense of joy.” Or “I’ve always felt so close to God through the sacraments.” These moments provided a foundation for them to explore their calling more deeply.

In her book “The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making,” Catholic sister and scholar of discernment Elizabeth Liebert lifts up this “body sense” or “felt sense” as a valid source of information for discernment. A body sense is a type of intuition, akin to using one’s imagination or gut sense to make a decision, but one grounded in physical sensations. It’s a kind of immediate knowing without a conscious use of reason.

To foster greater bodily awareness, Liebert asks readers to contemplate a discernment question and to notice their body’s response: whether adrenaline hits their bloodstream and fills them with energy, whether their stomach knots up or their shoulders tense up or relax, whether they frown or smile, whether they’re filled with a sense of well-being or a vague foreboding that locates itself in their body.

Practitioners may find new insights from this close attention or may even find that their body feels out of sync with their initial thoughts about their decision. By attending to this physical and emotional dimension, looking at a question less directly than through rational processes alone, we can uncover knowledge we might not even know that we have.

That said, we live in a cerebral culture that often values logic and reason as the most valid sources of knowledge, and so being attuned to our bodies is not necessarily natural for many of us. That reality makes it hard to perceive this information as a clear sign. 

Embodied knowing can also be ambiguous. We can find ourselves questioning, Did I truly feel that? Sense that? It can be frustratingly contradictory, offering different senses at different times. 

Sometimes, we avoid curiosity about our bodily knowledge for understandable reasons; increasing physical awareness can unlock trauma that’s been held in the body over time. Releasing this trauma can cloud discernment or require more skilled assistance to navigate. 

Still, like all sources of knowledge, bodily awareness is a data point that someone can choose to act on or not. It’s of course still important to confirm what you’re sensing by seeking out the wisdom of others, examining your sense of discernment over time and asking whether it matches up with Scripture. And we can use logic and reason to confirm the truth we feel first in our bodies. 

I initially wondered if I was called to be a priest when I saw a woman preside for the first time. Seeing her preach and then serve at the altar, I was able to picture it and to feel it in my body. A flutter of joy blossomed in my gut. But that sense felt so insubstantial. I didn’t know how to explain it to myself, much less others. 

As I’ve reexamined Moses’ call story in Exodus 3, I’ve discovered that a burning bush in the desert actually wouldn’t have been an obvious sign; small fires occurred in such arid regions all the time. What was peculiar about this bush was that it burned without being consumed. The fire did not destroy it. 

Moses would have had to be attending to his physical surroundings rather closely to see this sign from God. He would have experienced a bodily sense that something unusual was happening that made him draw near, take off his shoes and only then encounter the voice of God. Instead of an irrefutable sign of his calling, his story is a model of listening for the quiet and less obvious voice of our own embodiment. 

While considering this source of knowledge can help us make decisions, it can also shape how we guide others and broaden the questions we ask them as we help them discern. 

Lyndsay Cogdill Clark, a clinical social worker and spiritual director, stresses the importance of teaching young people to recognize “how stress, how anxiety, how sadness or grief or loss feel in their body the same way we would say ‘How do you know?’ or ‘How do you feel when God is close to you?’” 

As we approach conversations with others about calling and life purpose, what would it look like to allow bodily knowing to enter the conversation? To ask not only “How do you know?” but “What does it feel like?”

In 2007, when he was a young pastor at a church plant in Salem, Oregon, the Rev. D.J. Vincent noticed that a group of unhoused people had been living in Cascades Gateway Park. He and his parishioners wanted to do something to help them out and settled on a simple idea: They’d host a potluck.

That impulse to share a single meal started a ministry that has grown into a multimillion-dollar nonprofit called Church @ the Park. It now offers outreach services, workforce development, emergency shelter and permanent housing to the area’s unhoused population. In 2024 they served nearly 2,000 people across six locations.

As Church @ the Park evolved, so too did Vincent’s approach to ministry. From his conversations with unhoused folks at the meals, he gained a new perspective about dignity, humility and relationships. He felt he needed to change the way he was thinking about his service work; in looking for guidance he came across Street Psalms, a faith-based organization committed to developing strong community leaders.

The organization, a network of more than 40 organizations in 100 cities around the world, was formed to help create “communities in mission” that foster human flourishing in urban spaces. Street Psalms is based on “theology from below” — that is, learning alongside people at the margins rather than imposing solutions from above. This approach aligned with Vincent’s experience at the potlucks.

“Street Psalms created a bubble of belonging for us,” Vincent said. “They value connectedness and relationship, and our organizational values are the Street Psalms values. We aren’t just a place for people to get resources, but where they can find value and dignity and responsibility.”

Learning to be peacemakers

Street Psalms calls itself a “sodal” expression of the church, as opposed to a more traditional “modal” one. “Sodal” comes from the Latin “sodalitas,” meaning “companion” or “partner.” The organization uses this description to explain how it seeks to develop leaders who are embedded in vulnerable urban communities, people who are trying to enact meaningful change in their cities.

“We’re an urban monastery without walls,” said Sarah Moore, Street Psalms’ senior fellow for applied research, who came to the organization after a career as a psychology professor. “We prepare people for the challenges they face out in the real world of service.”

Forming leaders who serve communities

Thompson has been with Street Psalms since it was founded in the 1990s. The organization initially served urban youth workers in Philadelphia and was an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trust. Kris Rocke, the current executive director, had written a curriculum for World Vision, a youth mentorship organization, and he realized that the leadership skills it cultivated could be applied to anyone looking to share the “good news in hard places.” In 2023, Street Psalms officially became a religious order.

“Our charism has crystallized, especially over the past eight years,” Thompson said. “We’re committed to the formation of leaders who are serving their communities. It takes a special kind of spirituality to do this work, and we realized people weren’t getting the training they needed in a more formal seminary.”

While Street Psalms has always mentored leaders in their specific contexts, its programming and curriculum has become more formalized and refined over the years. Its nontraditional seminary is not affiliated with a denomination and does not ordain pastors for local churches. Instead, it trains people to lead communities in mission. It ordained its first cohort of leaders in 2010.

“We say we’re joyfully unaccredited,” Moore said. “While we do not believe, not at all, that this replaces formalized and accredited seminary training, we do believe that this offers the type of transformational experience that prepares leaders to serve the sodal form of the church.”

Street Psalms offers a one-year novitiate program that ends in ordination. Through daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms and practices, as well as synchronous and asynchronous classes and workshops, ordinands learn the Incarnational Framework and how to employ it in their communities. Nearly 40 people around the globe have been ordained. The organization also has a one-year fellowship program that finances specific community projects. Funded by grants from large and small benefactors, it gives all of its materials away for free.

The program is rooted in a specific hermeneutic, a way of reading the Bible that prioritizes and centers the most vulnerable people in Bible stories and parables.

“What you practice with Street Psalms is a way of reading Scripture from below, from the perspective of the marginalized,” Thompson said.

“During my formal training for my M.Div., nobody helped me see that the context of Scripture is about people who were oppressed,” she said. “It’s written to tell that story, but you very rarely hear that. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, came about during the context of the Roman Empire. When you think about it like that it gives it a new resonance.”

Learning to read with this lens prepares leaders in urban communities to ask questions of the text that might unlock new significance for its constituents and to be open to new and surprising interpretations.

“One of the big things the church doesn’t talk enough about, that Street Psalms does talk about, is violence,” Thompson said. “It’s not just physical violence, either. It can be the political thing and the pressure to pick sides.

“With Street Psalms, we want to curate the kind of conversations that don’t create enemies on the other side. I don’t know where I’d be as a preacher or as a spiritual leader if I didn’t have this framework.”

Building ‘communities in mission’ around the globe

Street Psalms trains leaders to love their city and seek peace in it, which entails learning how to listen to their city’s “sacred song”— the literal meaning of “psalm.”

“With the name, you have two images coming together and resonating,” Thompson said. “’Street’ says, ‘I’m here,’ ‘I’m with my community.’ And ‘Psalms’ is all the joy and lament that you find there. All the raw ways history shows up through our people.”

The organization takes different forms with all its partners; every mushroom that blooms from the network is unique. These partners do many kinds of work, from homeless outreach to after-school programs to helping survivors of domestic abuse and walking with people coming out of prison. And they’re all over the globe.

When an organization commits to following the Incarnational Framework, it becomes a “community in mission,” which in the simplest terms means that it shares the See, Do, Be, Free philosophy and can tap into a web of support when it needs help navigating challenges that can arise when doing things with people and not just for them.

“We’re kind of like the wholesalers,” Moore said. “And our partners are the retailers.”

Changing the way leaders engage with the world

In addition to the seminary, Street Psalms runs a design studio that functions as a kind of incubator for innovative social change. Partners can put their ideas through their paces before testing them out in the world.

One idea that came out of this is the Preaching Peace Initiative. At gatherings called “Tables,” partners tackle issues that pertain to their communities using the Incarnational Framework and the “theology from below” hermeneutic. Thompson visited a Table at one of Street Psalms’ partners in Kenya.

“In Nairobi there was a Preaching Peace Table with Christian pastors and Muslim clerics, and they took a common theme and discussed it from their different perspectives,” she said, adding that there had been violence between these communities in the past.

“The theme was: ‘What does it mean to love your neighbor?’ So you get in this room and you see the kind of conversation about peace. It helped foster these ideas of abundance and peacemaking and asked what it would look like for that to exist there, in that community.”

Thompson likened that work to what Vincent is doing with Church @ the Park.

“They have a clear picture of what it means to serve the most vulnerable,” she said. “They have a common language of scarcity and abundance and what it means to work across difference for the sake of the poor.”

During the early potlucks, Vincent saw problems to be solved, needs to be met, deficits to be addressed — what he regards now as classic scarcity thinking. But as he listened to the people he was serving, he learned to see differently. His perspective shifted to one of abundance and collaboration. And he understood that the community already had what it needed to flourish.

“We grew into a ministry of mutuality, where folks can find not only resources, but value and dignity,” he said. “The goal is co-creating a better reality, and we are our best selves in community, not in isolation.”

Vincent now takes all of Church @ the Park’s staff through a version of the Incarnational Framework during their training. He wants the organization to be as inclusive as possible, serving people regardless of their faith background, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other typical dividing line. More than half of the employees don’t identify as religious, but they’ve found a sense of belonging in the organization and its mission for peace and relational abundance. This kind of radical acceptance and baseline humility is what helps make Street Psalms unique.

“It’s more than a curriculum or content,” Moore said. “If you embrace the framework, it changes the way you engage with the world.”

As a pastor, I went to plenty of meetings where we wrestled with how to attract visitors. We talked about lots of ideas, but I never actually asked a visitor.

Last year, I became a visitor.

I had transitioned out of parish ministry to work with organizations representing Catholic, Orthodox, and more than 60 Protestant denominations and movements. Inspired by my new role, I began visiting different congregations. Over the course of a year, I worshipped in a cathedral and a storefront church, in the great outdoors and a retirement home. I visited one church because I noticed it while sitting at a red light and was welcomed as a guest of honor at another when I went to hear a colleague preach. Along the way, I witnessed ordinary and extraordinary moments in the lives of many different congregations through the eyes of a visitor.

We enter the season of Advent recalling how difficult it was for the Holy Family to find welcome. It is also a moment in the church year when visitors are more likely to cross the thresholds of our sanctuaries. How might we help them find the welcome that the Holy Family was denied?

While I have taken too many theology classes and attended too many fellowship hall potlucks to be an ordinary visitor, I still take a deep breath as I walk into an unfamiliar church. Entering as a visitor, I notice things I missed when I was wearing a stole. I hope these experiences will help clergy and longtime members consider a visitor’s perspective of the place you love and what you can do to welcome the stranger this Christmas and beyond.

1. Help me find the entrance

Churches have a habit of not using their front doors. One church I visited holds its early service in the fellowship hall. When I arrived, I walked up to the door closest to the parking lot and realized it went into the kitchen. That didn’t feel right, so I walked the length of the building to the second door. Entering there would have required me to walk by the band. No, thank you!

One of the hardest parts of visiting a new church was navigating the space between the car and the pew. Clear signs helped me feel welcome, and that calmed at least one anxiety.

Take action: Starting in the parking lot, imagine a visitor trying to find the sanctuary. What doors are most obvious? Are there any turns that don’t have a sign? Bonus points if you walk through with a friend who has never been to your church.

2. Help me follow the service

It was my first time attending an AME service, and my transferable knowledge was at its limit. In this church, members of the congregation go forward for the offering and place their gifts in a small replica of the church. I have no idea how I would have navigated that moment had the woman sitting next to me not leaned over and explained what was about to happen.

Churches that used prayer books brought a different kind of challenge. There is something deeply hospitable about being handed an open hymnal or prayer book with a finger on the right line. Bulletins with explanatory notes also helped me find my way.

Take action: Consider what elements of your service are hardest to follow and encourage the congregation to look for visitors who may need some guidance in those moments.

3. Welcome warmly but gently

I have come and gone from churches without speaking to a soul and have had a member chase me down in the parking lot for a conversation. How do you welcome visitors without scaring them off? I found that the way I was welcomed back mattered.

When I visited small and aging congregations, it was common for folks to tell me, “We hope you come back.” Perhaps it was all those new-visitor conversations I had as a pastor, but I always felt some pressure with that invitation. It was clearly heartfelt. But it also felt a little wistful, as if I were the key to the future flourishing of the congregation.

One Sunday, I was given a different invitation: “You are welcome back any time.” In that simple sentence, I felt all of the welcome and none of the pressure. It said that they would continue to be the church as they always had. If I wanted to be a part of that, the doors were open.

Take action: Discuss as a hospitality committee when you have felt most welcome in a space and why. Then identify welcoming conversation starters to engage visitors.

4. The website is where it’s at …

I Googled most of the churches I visited. As with your doors, think about what questions visitors are asking as they pull up your website. Make that information easy to find. The first thing I looked for was what time services were held. It’s also helpful to say something about parking if it isn’t obvious or abundant.

A change to a church’s normal routine doesn’t always make it to the website. Sometimes the surprise was delightful, such as when I unexpectedly walked in on a combined Episcopal and Mennonite service. The theology nerd in me was in paradise. At other times, it meant showing up to locked doors or an empty parking lot.

Take action: Ask someone who doesn’t attend your church to look at your website and share feedback. Add updating outward-facing communications to the to-do list for special Sundays.

5. … AND it’s not why I came to your church

When I started this visiting adventure, I went to churches where I already knew someone. It wasn’t the Facebook posts or community events that drew me. It was a relationship. The best advertisement for your congregation is the people in the pews. Most of these folks didn’t invite me directly, but I knew where they attended. When I was ready to visit, I reached out.

Take action: Tell your members they matter! Equip them to answer questions like where to enter and whether child care is provided.

This Christmas, may we extend the welcome that the Holy Family longed for to the strangers who are sitting in our pews.