Prayers of the People: Basic Litany 2

Trusting in the incarnate God who weeps when we mourn and dances when we rejoice, let us join our bodies and our minds in prayer, saying:
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

We pray for the church and all who encounter it:
    We pray for all those who have been nurtured by the church
        and found life and joy within its walls,
        and for all who have followed your call
            into positions of leadership.
    We pray also for all who have been rejected by the church,
        who have seen only pain and grief within its walls.
    Heal our brokenness and bring us ever closer
        to truly being the body of Christ for the world.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Prayer of Adoration for Easter Day

Holy Jesus, Almighty God, Creator and Redeemer of all life,
On this Easter day we praise you with our whole heart, mind, and voice,
As we celebrate the mysterious Passover
In which you yourself are the Paschal Lamb;
For by your death and resurrection you have freed us from our sins
As once you freed your people from slavery in Egypt.

What might have been a day of mourning after your death
You have made instead a day of rejoicing and a feast,
For in the very night we thought all hope was lost
You saw fit to work your transformation of the world.

This is the day/night when you brought our ancestors
Out of slavery, leading them through the Red Sea on dry land.

This is the day/night when you delivered us from the bonds of death and sin,
And brought us to life with you as you rose victorious from the grave.

How wonderful is the mystery of your unfailing grace, O God,
That you would give yourself in exchange for your mortal creation.

How holy and blessed is this day when earth and heaven are joined
And all creation is reconciled to you who love us even unto death.

O God our Savior, look favorably upon us your Church and continue in us the live-giving work you began in the hours before dawn on that first Easter day. Make us a beacon of your eternal love and grace; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, that things which had fallen to disrepair are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Amen. Alleluia.

Based in part on the English text of the Exsultet chant.

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Prayers of the People: Lent

O Lord our God,
We turn to you in this penitential season of Lent acknowledging the brokenness of our world and the little ways in which we find ourselves contributing to that brokenness each day.

We ask for your guidance
    in learning how to walk as Christ walked,
    how to love our neighbors and our planet as ourselves,
    and how to be the Church in a world
        that has been harmed so often by Christians.

refrain: Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.
or: Lord, in your mercy— Hear our prayer.

We pray for our bishops,
    and for the leaders of all denominations,
that they may find themselves ever more open
    to your Spirit’s work through them,
    and may lead as you lead.

[Refrain]

The Church’s Biggest Question

“The question the church desperately needs to face right now is this: Is our religion the religion (the institution with all of its dogma and rituals and such), or is the religion in service to something else? I firmly believe that Christ’s teachings are not about having the answers, but about asking the right questions. Christ was a contrarian, a dissenter. He lived that the status quo might be changed and he fought it every day of his life. What I feel that many denominations now, particularly the rather legalistic ones, are missing is the realization that their legalism is diametrically opposed to the way that Christ spoke and acted. We have seen the Pharisees, and they are us.”

–Rachel Stuart

Epiphany III

It’s Good Friday–have an Epiphany post! 😉

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I Corinthians 1: 10-18

Sometimes I think we get a little too attached to our denominations. Not that there’s anything wrong with having a different opinion from someone else, per se, but when we use our disagreements as a reason to keep ourselves separate from other Christians, we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face.

…

Ah, the Corinthians. The dissidents. The troublemakers. There’s something so quintessentially Pauline in the palpable exasperation we read in this letter, perhaps because it’s one of Paul’s most quoted. He just wants to help these people grow, and they just keep getting caught up in their arguments, and all he can think is that it’s like dealing with middle school levels of drama all over again. He just wants to teach them, and they just keep missing the point, and he’s starting to wonder if they’re doing it on purpose, just to mess with him.

So, when he gets a letter from them, some time after he leaves to start another congregation, it’s no surprise that the main content is request for help solving a dispute among the congregation. Apparently, everyone’s been taking sides on various issues and it’s starting to get a little heated.

We know how they feel. Little did Paul know, that would kind of be the story of the Church’s life for…pretty much all of its life. A large percentage of the theology we profess in our creeds found its way into the creeds because of some big argument in the early Church. Council after council was held to resolve the debates among the early Christians, and creed after creed was put forth explicitly defining the new orthodox position to make sure no one got it wrong.

We’ve been arguing ever since. First, the Schism between the West and the East, then Luther and the other Reformers leave the Catholic Church, while Henry VIII invents a new denomination so he can get a divorce. We’ve argued over slavery, women, gays, over mysticism, war, hierarchy. We spend so much of our time waving our own banners that the one banner that unites us is decaying in the dust of our closets.

We don’t belong to Apollos or to Paul or to Peter. We don’t belong to Luther or Wesley or Calvin or Augustine. We belong to Christ.

That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have our own, genuinely well-considered opinions about what the Bible means or how to lead a Christian life. But it does mean that we don’t need to draw battle lines because we disagree. There are enough enemies to face outside our congregation–poverty, injustice, hate–that if we turn each other into enemies, we’ve lost before we can begin.

Paul says later in this same letter that all the members of the Church make up the body of Christ. When we fight each other, we tear apart that body. We need each other. The feet need the hands to tie their shoelaces. The hands need the feet to go where work is needed. And so on. A body united can accomplish far more than each arm and leg crawling off to complete their own agendas.

We don’t need to be clones to be one body. We just need to love. And that is good news.

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Loving Christ,
Teach us this day and always to live together in peace, to treasure our differences as the beauty of the kaleidoscopic tapestry that is your Church. Unite us, that we may face the worthier foes of poverty, cruelty, and injustice in the world. Make us one with you and one with each other, that as one body we may be a light to a dark world. In your holy name we pray, Amen.

On Holy Communion

Before we begin, this isn’t going to be an explanation of the origin of the ritual in the Passover seder or a debate on the theology of transubstantiation versus consubstantiation versus real presence versus symbol, etc. Neither is it going to be a soap box on why we observe it and what we get out of receiving it as far as our spiritual lives go. You’ve all heard it or read it before, and if you haven’t, you probably will at some point. What I want to talk about today is what happens when we serve communion.

Depending on your denomination, you may or may not be accustomed to having lay members help serve communion once the priest or pastor has said the Words of Institution. It’s a fairly common practice for a lot of Protestant denominations, when you’re not in one of those massive churches with a bazillion pastors or one with several deacons. Usually the pastor will carry the bread and the layperson will carry the wine/grape juice, and they go down the line at the communion railing or stand at the end of the aisles while the congregation files past one at a time.

More than likely, you’re at least familiar with the responsive formula that many churches say while serving communion. There are slight variations from congregation to congregation, but usually it’s something along the lines of, “the body of Christ, broken for you” and “the blood of Christ, shed for you,” to which people tend to respond “thanks be to God” or “amen.” And if you’ve ever been the one serving the wine/juice, you’ll know that saying the same phrase over and over again to every single person gets really dull after a while, and it starts to become very mechanic and detached very quickly.

I want to encourage you to pay attention next time you serve communion. Promise yourself you’ll make a point of speaking to each person as if they’re the first person you’ve served this week, or ever. Pretty soon you’ll start to notice something–that the ritual is as much for the servers as it is for those served.

You see, when you’re going along and trying to make sure your words mean something every time you speak them, you start to realize exactly what they do mean.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you who are my best friend.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you who always mock my clothes.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you whom I have known since our childhood.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you whom I’ve never taken the time to meet.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you who always follow your father everywhere.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you who never had a father to follow.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you who fearlessly speak your mind.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you who cannot bring yourself to speak.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you who are in the prime of life.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you who are nearing the end of your days.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you who just married the love of your life.
The blood of Christ was shed for you, you whose heart was just broken by the love of your life.
The blood of Christ was shed for all of you–not all of you, the congregation, but all of you, Mary and Jack and Lisa and Allie and Sayyid and Ping and Arya and Kofi and Khairtai–all of you.

How often do you say “hi, hello” and “have a good day” to the people at church? How often do you say it to everyone else? How often could you walk away and say what those people were wearing, or whether that was a new barrette or if that smile was sad or joyous?

Maybe when we serve each other, we can truly see the person standing in front of us. Maybe when we see them, we can truly love them. Jesus told us to be each other’s servants. Maybe he was really on to something.