A Call to Worship

Written for the Installation of Rev. Matthew McHale at the First Unitarian Church of San Jose on June 8, 2025.

A Call To Worship

 A call to worship is a call to focus our attention.

Choosing to focus our attention is countercultural.

Daily, we are called to worship

at the altar of many devices,

surveillance systems we let take lead

over our every waking moment.

We are called by headlines set purely on our activation and

by tools that gamify our every human connection.

We are not called, we are led. We are not led, we are entrapped.

Instead, here:

we practice being called.

We are called to bring our attention

to the altar of unpredictable human relatedness.

We are called by these ancestors, this wood,

the room’s particular light,

this chalice’s particular fire,

and these children.

We are called to focus all our attention on  

a foolhardy and open-hearted commitment

to share a future together we cannot cancel nor control.

In the words of the poet farmer Wendell Berry,

we are called here to do something today

“that does not compute.”

Spirit of Life:  

Call our collective attention to this precise moment,

the threshold between then and now,

the moment upon which

we hang our honest promises like portraits

chiseled and framed by our own hands,  

imperfectly, and

together.

Come, let us worship together.