On Friday, when I got on the bus to go to work, I sat down opposite a young man (thirties, I'd guess) in a somewhat robelike white garment. I asked him if it was religious garb, and if so, of what religion. He said, yes, it was Muslim. I told him about my 52-in-52 project, and asked if he could suggest a mosque for me to visit. He said that as a matter of fact he was on his way to the mosque right then. I asked him which one, and he told me the address. I hadn't been aware there was one there, it's quite a bit closer to home than the ones I'd been considering, so I'll probably go there one of these Fridays.
Today, to make up for not having gone to church last week, I wanted two services. I had been planning already to attend Ned Parker's ordination service at Seattle First Baptist, and I decided to stay in town for the evening and take in the service at .
Ned Parker is the Pastor for Children, Families, and Young Adults at SFBC. It was a very good service. The ordinand's old seminary buddy from Andover Newton, Joel Kemp, flew in from the east to preach. Here's the order of worship:
I should mention that one of the hymns, "May This Be What I Do", was new (originally written for the ordinand's 14th birthday by his father, and revised for use at his ordination). I think it is a very good hymn, and I look forward to including it in the songbook I'm working on for Evergreen's 10th birthday. The tune is ST. THOMAS (SM), probably best know as "I love thy kingdom, Lord".
SCUM's gathering was scheduled for 6 pm; I got there at 6:20, but the worship per se didn't start till 7. There were four or five songs, theoretically congregational but the words were not supplied, and most of the congregation didn't appear to know the words by heart any more than I did. (All except the last song, "I Love You, Lord" (... and I lift my voice ...), which I know well and so did most of the others in attendance.) The accompaniment was quiet, folk-style guitar with occasional clarinet interpolations. The preacher was rather distracted and lacking in focus. He allowed as how all the Tweets yesterday about the 9/11 anniversary distracted him from sermon preparation. Most of the talk ended up being a planning session for the church's 6th birthday party, with focus (such as it was) on how to invite the scum of the earth (1 Cor 4:13; Luke 14:13). Nice people, mostly quite young, and not too tightly wrapped.
Not as many extravagant piercings as I had anticipated. I had a conversation before worship with a man, Doug, who turned out to be the clarinetist and a woman, Karen, who wanted to recruit me for a book study on Karen Armstrong's
A History of God. We talked about AA, and about the Bible, and about Esperanto (since the Bible I was carrying was in that language). Nice people, hardly scum of the earth, no matter what the Apostle Paul said. (I notice NRSV uses "rubbish" and "dregs", not "scum". 1 Cor. 4:13)