tation, salute it and say: "I salute all those Americans who risked their lives for my right to vote!" Ask your friends and family members, or in a ritual in worship, asking parishioners: "With which hand will you be voting on November 8?" Take that hand and hold it with yours, and say: "May love (or the love that is God) guide your hand to vote for the common good!"

Against or Through? With or For? But or And? Skits for worship

Lover Spirit, intuition in the center of our souls, In your love we find relation. All connected, we are whole. Timeless mystery, quiet conscience, deepest values, voice inside. With the drum and with the cauldron, this we ask you: be our guide.

P: We have gathered here today to give thanks for and honor Name’s life. You have come because you are family - close family or extended family; or because you are friends – old, long-trusted friends or newer friends; or because you knew Name through other connections in his life. We have gathered to mourn his death and to grieve for our loss.

I recently conducted the funeral for my father, who died after a long episode of declining health. It was a joy and a privilege to work with my family in preparing this service. But many of our family are not avowedly Christian so I wanted to respect their spiritual traditions as well as be faithful to my own. I also wanted the theology to reflect my own liberal/progressive Christian understanding.

This body knows what it is like to have a nice house and a good job It knows what it is like to feel uneasy about being wealthy

The form of the blessing differ, but the essential message is the same: we give thanks to the Love that is God for the good that comes through our taxes. They are a special form of our "offerings" in worship. Many blessings flow from them, and divine guidance is needed for us to have the wisdom to see to it they are spent for the best purposes.

My book, BIRDLIKE AND BARNLESS: Meditations, Prayers, and Songs for Progressive Christians, is a "book of common prayer" for progressive Christians. These "Sundays" are described more fully in it.

From grains, bread connects us to soil and a three billion year old process. Photosynthesis, first begun when ocean organisms, earth's first populations, with neither brains or bibles, learned how to create a chlorophyll molecule. Since then all biological life is able to trap, store, and convert sun's energy into food that sustains both the plant and that specie's place in the food chain. Like the elements connect Christians to the nourishing ways of Jesus, food unites us to our ecology and the life-sustaining ways of nature itself. Communion, it is not only a rite of Christianity, it is the evolutionary levan in the Earth story itself.

Pentecost is perhaps the first festival appropriated from an ancient tradition to serve the purposes of the new Christian Way.