Easter 6 2023

Hallelujah, Christ is risen.

The Lord is risen indeed.

Hallelujah.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God.

You all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you the secrets are hidden.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit.

That we may perfectly love you and will be magnified your Holy Name.

Through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, who truly to know is everlasting life, grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the ways that lead to eternal life.

Through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

As you're being seated, our children are invited to children's chapel and the bathroom as your house.

A reading from the book of Acts.

Filled with the Holy Spirit.

Stephen gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

Look, he said, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.

But they covered their ears and with a loud shout all rushed together against him.

Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him.

And the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.

While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.

Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, Lord, do not hold this sin against them.

When he said that, he died.

Hear what the Spirit is saying to God's people.

We can read responsibly by the half verse.

To you, O Lord, have I taken refuge.

Let me never be put to shame.

Incline your ear to me.

Be my strong rock, a castle to keep me safe.

For you are my crag and stronghold.

For the day of the rain.

Leave me to die.

Take me out of the net they have secretly set for me.

For you are my power of strength.

Into your hands I commend my spirit.

My times are in your hand.

Rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from those who persecute me.

Make your face shine to shine upon your servant.

So that by it you may grow into salvation.

If indeed you have hasted that the Lord is good, come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals, yet chosen and precious in God's sight.

And like a living stone, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

For a stand in scripture.

See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone, chosen and precious.

And whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.

But for those who do not believe, the stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner.

And a stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them tall.

They stumble because they disobey the word as they were destined to.

A royal creature, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness and to his marvelous light.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people.

Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Believe in God, believe also in me.

In my Father's house so are many dwelling places.

If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.

And you know the way to the place where I'm going.

Thomas said to him, Lord, we don't know where you're going.

How can we know the way?

Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

If you know me, you will know my Father also.

From now on, you do know him and have seen him.

Philip said to him, Lord, show us the Father and we'll be satisfied.

Jesus said to him, Have I been with you this all this time, Philip, and you still don't know me?

Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

How can you say, Show us the Father?

Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?

Words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does these works.

Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me.

But if you do not, believe me because of the works themselves.

Very truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact, will do greater works than these, because I'm going to the Father.

I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.

The gospel of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Well, I missed you last week, but uh just a reminder we have seven weeks to think about not just the resurrection event as a reality in the life of Jesus, but an invitation for us not only to perceive what faith might be like, but to pattern our lives after him.

The last two weeks, last week and now this week, uh, the writers of the lectionary are asking us to go back before Holy Week to read the scriptures again, but with resurrection in front of our eyes.

They want us to update our read of the story in light of the resurrection.

So, uh, this is what I want to offer to you.

And there's a couple of uh thoughts that come to me this week, particularly at the end of the phrase.

Do you notice this line?

Whatever you ask for in my name, my father will give you.

Now, I have to say, I've been a part of faith traditions that took that so literally we forgot to think about what it means to pattern our lives after that.

So, what we would do is we would use the name Jesus like it was a magic word.

And we would pray like this Lord Jesus, we are driving Jesus to Galveston, and Lord, there is traffic on the road.

Jesus, keep us safe.

Just keep us safe, Jesus.

We ask you this in your name.

See, the more we said Jesus, the more we were going to get what we wanted.

That said, I mean, it was like punctuation mark.

I don't think that's what the Lord had in mind.

I just want to be really, really clear.

And sometimes what we forget is that in the Hebrew Bible and in the world of the New Testament as well, when you hear about the name of somebody, that's the totality of their being.

So the invitation is not to name-drop Jesus in prayer to get what you want, it's to approach God through the way of Jesus.

Somehow we also forgot when I was a kid, Thomas says, Lord, we don't know where you're going.

How are we know the way?

Jesus doesn't say, I'm the end of faith.

He doesn't say I'm the end.

He says, I'm the way.

So it was really important to us in the church I grew up in that we prayed the sinner's prayer and asked Jesus in our heart.

And to be honest, more often than not, it was like, well, once you've done that, that's it.

That's the end of faith.

Jesus is not inviting us to end our faith.

He's inviting us to walk the way with him.

To walk with truth and with new resurrected life.

We need to keep this in mind.

We're not done.

We're invited to walk the way.

And the truth is, I don't know where Jesus is going.

You notice?

Thomas doesn't know either.

You don't need to know where he's taken you, you need to know how to walk the way.

That's our invitation into resurrected life.

How do we walk the way?

Now, this particular scripture, I'll tell you, is the one that shows that probably 90% of the funerals I do.

In my father's house, there are many rooms, many dwelling places, many mansions.

If it were not so, I'd have told you.

And if you've been to a funeral with me, you maybe have heard me say, and I think this is really important.

This is part of the way of faith.

The truth is, in my house, rooms are real small.

And uh, hey, I may, I don't know if you're like me like this, but sometimes I really like somebody, and then I found out they voted a particular way, and I don't have room for them anymore.

That isn't how God's house is.

In God's house, there's room for all of you.

There's room for your politics, there's room for your wacky sense of humor, there's room for your own spiritual way of walking, which frankly might be very different from my own.

This is part of the resurrected life that we make increasingly more room for one another.

You've maybe heard me say this before, but I think it bears repeating this week.

If any of you knew JB Fox, well, the guy used profanity like punctuation marks.

In fact, many days I'd say, hey, JB, good morning, and he'd look at me and he'd say, hell.

I mean, I guess when you're 98, you can say what you want.

Um, but the truth is, God makes room for even our grumpiness.

And if I'm really honest, the thing I missed most about JB was his gratuitous use of profanity, because that's exactly who the man was.

And God did not need to whitewash that.

God can make room for that.

God is able to make room, whether, frankly, it's a funeral or a Thanksgiving meal with somebody you'd rather not eat with, God can make room for our quirks.

God can make room for your doubts.

God can make room, frankly, for your anger.

We're invited to pattern the rooms we live in after the mansion God is building and increasingly make room for one another.

And if you're like me, sometimes the hardest person to make room for is yourself.

God doesn't need you to clean up and make room for you.

God doesn't need that.

We're invited to pattern our lives in those ways.

We get this lovely uh thought about making room.

And I do want to jump forward and I'm gonna come back for a second.

If you've read Mere Christianity by C.S.

Lewis, he talks about how often we have a tunnel vision and we often confuse being righteous with being right.

And this is part of our Protestant heritage, honestly, is we get real concerned about whether or not we got it right.

And if you don't got it right, there's no room for you in God's house.

And what C.

S.

Lewis does with this passage is he says, look, consider that whether if you're Lutheran, there's a room for you.

And if you're Roman Catholic, there's a room for you.

And if you're Baptist, there's room for you.

It'd be really great if we get out of our rooms a little bit and share meals together.

But C.S.

Lewis encourages us, look, we live in the same house of God, even if we live in different rooms.

It's important to start there with an acknowledgement, and then it's important that we leave our rooms and enjoy one another.

I want to take C.

S.

Lewis even further than he took himself.

If you're Muslim, God's got room for you.

If you're Jewish, God's got room for you.

You're gonna hear it in a few moments.

It's a beautiful part of the oldest Eucharistic.

Prayer in the prayer book.

For those whose faith is known to you alone.

God's got room for them.

You might call those people atheists.

God knows their faith.

And God makes room for them.

Boy, that's a holy invitation about how to pattern our lives, isn't it?

I find it really darn difficult.

I want to make it a little bit harder, if you don't mind.

Because we show up a couple of titles this week.

Son of man.

This is what Stephen says before we stoned.

I see the Son of Man.

I don't know if y'all realize this.

Jesus never says he's the Son of God.

Not once.

No, the reason for that is because the Emperors Tiberius, the Emperor Augustus, the Emperor Julius, they said they were sons of God.

They were sons of God.

And they were to be worshipped in temples.

The genius of the emperor was to be sacrificed to.

I'm not saying Jesus isn't God's son.

What I'm saying is Jesus refers to himself exclusively as the Son of Man.

Now I read a book about this recently that was really helpful.

It's written by a scholar called Gaza Vermes.

It's got a weird title called Jesus the Jew.

I was taking it out in public, and my wife was like, you really should like put that in a bag or something.

I don't know if you want people to see that.

But what he does is he tracks these two titles, and again, in contrast to the emperor's claims that they are above everybody else.

See, when they said they're son of God, what they were also saying is, y'all aren't.

Jesus says, I'm a kid of a human being.

I'm a kid of a human being.

It's what Vermes calls a circumlocution that probably existed in the Galilee region in which Jesus was referring to himself.

But I would invite you to consider taking it a little bit seriously to say that Jesus said, God is fully present precisely in our humanity.

Jesus says to Philip, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

I'd like to encourage you to consider that if you have seen my friend up here, Jim, you have seen the Father.

And if you've seen Glenn Gleneki, you have seen the Father.

And if you have seen Graciella Kabula, you've seen the Father.

Now these three make it real easy.

They make it really easy to see God's presence.

So the radical part that comes next, and this comes through Peter, is that if you've seen anybody, you've seen the fingerprints, and you've seen the father.

Which is to say, if you look at another human being and you say God's not present in that person, that is a call for you to repent, not for God.

Peter makes this so clear by saying the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

We could say that's just about Jesus, but to our own peril.

This is a pattern of life.

Who do you reject?

Who do you reject?

The invitation this Easter season is for them to be the keystone in the house of faith that God would build.

I got a picture.

I want to share it with you because I found it really helpful.

When I was most recently in Athens, which was like four days ago, you know, the Acropolis is this wonderful symbol of Western civilization.

And if you've ever been to Athens, you can see it from like 10 miles away.

I don't know if you all know.

This is the Temple of Athena, right?

Up in Athens.

Huge.

It's in something called the Acropolis, which means the city that's above the city, because it literally is.

I don't know if y'all know, but it mostly got destroyed in an earthquake.

And then there was a big explosion that happened in the 1600s that kind of blew the building to pieces.

So what they decided to do is put it back together.

And sure enough, they're putting it back together.

This is a basic picture.

I'm not a professional photographer, but I want to speak to you about how they're doing it that I think is pretty fascinating.

Obviously, the Acropolis is held up by a bunch of columns, and look, the columns are so tall, no single piece of stone is going to make one.

So what they do, right, is they cut segments and they're all fluted and they stack them up.

And what do you know?

Some of the pieces they can't find because they blew up.

Some of the pieces are extremely damaged.

Like split in half, or they've got asymmetrical cracks.

You know, like it's really hard to repair a column stack that's got a V in it.

I mean, you need to fill that in.

And y'all are engineers in general.

That's inefficient.

That takes a lot of work.

It'd be a lot easier just to build a new column, right?

What they decided to do is use every single old piece because it belongs, whether it's efficient or not.

So I want you to look at a color, and I'll bring this up and down the aisles even as I speak about it.

What you'll see here is that the oldest pieces of the Acropolis are indeed yellowed, and then the new pieces they've carved out of white marble.

And what I hope you'll see when you look at the picture is that there's some pretty clever carving going on here.

They're not all cylindrical.

What they've done is they've taken pieces that you would never build upon and they've filled them in.

Boy, don't you think that's what God's got in mind for us.

God doesn't really care, more often than not.

If you've read the Bible, you'll notice.

God's not all that worried about being efficient.

God's not worried about doing it the easiest or fastest way.

What God would really like to do is use every single stone, no matter how flawed, to knit us together into a mansion that can hold everybody else on the planet.

Think how hard that is to do.

Now I'm pretty confident that one of the reasons Christianity's on decline throughout the world, particularly the Western world, is we don't do this.

We don't.

We say that's too much work, that takes too much time, you're not fit for this, you don't believe the right thing, you fill in the blank.

We don't do it because it's inefficient, it's hard.

What I hear is that Jesus challenges us to take the most broken of stones in our families, in ourselves, in our communities, and dress them up.

And dress them up so that we can build, frankly, a city on a hill.

Wouldn't it be amazing if people said, oh, you go to St.

Thomas?

Isn't that the place where every God is not only included in the house of faith, but is a keystone in the house of faith.

Boy, I think we'd be visible from more than ten miles away, don't you?

Talk about assembled for resurrection.

This is assembled for resurrection.

It takes more work.

I'm sure they did that with a computer and an algorithm.

And I think it also takes work not only at the Thanksgiving table or when we're watching the news, but I think it takes a lot of room when we look in the mirror to say, oh look, I've just seen the father.

Oh, look, I've seen the father.

I have to be honest with you, it isn't always easy for me.

I can't always say, God, I hope that person's happy.

Now, when I'm doing well, I can say, look, we disagree.

Regardless of that, I hope you'll be happy.

I can't even always do that.

Sometimes the start is, you know, I just hope you don't suffer.

I hope your life will be free from pain.

We don't, God knows we need ramps.

Right?

God doesn't expect us to take these huge jumps.

But I would like to suggest to you, Jesus is inviting us to start walking that ramp.

Because after all, what he says, I'm the way of faith.

And here's the truth of faith.

Y'all, y'all, or in good southern communication, all y'all are a temple for the Holy Spirit.

See, when you read the translation in the NIV and the NRS V, nothing wrong with them.

They say you are a temple for the Holy Spirit.

And what you may not realize is in Greek that's second person.

Y'all are a temple for the Holy Spirit.

And God can't stand to have a single one of those original bricks not make it into the building that God is constructing.

It's a pretty holy word to think about.

Which is why I think it's probably right.

I think it's probably right.

Maybe.

Maybe what we're invited to do is re-engineer the way we think the house of faith is supposed to look.

Maybe we're supposed to re-engineer whether or not we think we're worthy.

See, Jesus didn't say y'all have to earn your worthiness.

Since you already have it, let's get together and be a building that contained the Holy Spirit and invite others to join into the building that God, the master designer, has in mind.

This I put to you, well, is the call of the resurrected life.

It is how we walk the way together.

Because our journey isn't over.

Right?

Our journey isn't over until we all get at it.

Please join me as we pray our faith in the words of the Nicene priest.

We believe in one God, the Father and the Almighty, maker of the creative earth of all that is being and be.

We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only God of God, eternally God of the Father, God from God, life of God, true God from true God, the I with the Father, through the name of all things remain, earth and our salvation, be made God from heaven, by the power of the Holy Spirit, became heartened from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

For our day he was crucified and unto God, he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures.

He ascended into heaven and is needed at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have knowing.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son, He is worshiped and glorified.

He has spoken through the prophet.

We believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Amen.

Let us confess our sins against God and our neighbors.

We are thousands of lives.

You call us the life.

Who all is with each other and with you.

And we pray and make us new creation to the fruit of power and love of Christ.

In whose name we pray.

Amen.

Friends, hear this good news.

The love of God is beyond measure, and you are included in that love.

So know that you are forgiven and thus free to love and serve.

Amen.

The peace of the Lord be always with you.

Good morning, and thank you for worshiping with us at St.

Thomas today.

There are a few announcements I want to call to your attention.

First, it's the first Sunday of May.

So if you were born this month, I would like to invite you up so that we can celebrate what we call in church be the best of your nativity and offer a blessing for the year.

Do you have any questions?

Good.

Okay, as you're making your way up, our custom has been that we say our name and the day of our birth and either where or when we were born.

Somebody said to me this morning, you know, that might be like a like a scammer risk.

So share whatever you're comfortable with, and then we'll offer God's blessing.

So uh hi there, I'm Bob Triple, May 18th in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

That's Miguel, May 7th, Brooklyn, New York.

Suzanne Groneman, May 7th, Houston, Texas.

Mickey Mrosinski, born in South Bend, Indiana, May the 5th, 85 years ago.

Eastern before I'm Corley, May 16th in Victoria, Texas.

Jim Napp Bay second galvins.

Let's ask God's blessing on all of all of God's children.

Lord God, we know every year, every moment of our lives is securely in your hands.

Look with continued love and favor on these your children as they start another year.

Grant that they would continue to grow in wisdom and grace, and above all, strengthen their trust in your goodness and love all the days of their lives through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

And I do want to name this happened at 8 o'clock for the first time.

Somebody was celebrating an anniversary this month, and their partner died five years ago.

We believe in the communion of saints.

We do.

So we are very happy and honored to bless anniversaries even if somebody has departed.

So just want to make that available.

All right then.

Well, uh, then we'll move on with a few other and oh yes, sir.

Joe, you got one?

Normally what we ask is that just that you share your names and where you were joined and when.

Honeymoon was survived to uh place in uh Jack Edward James, my brother was Jack Edward Jr.

I wish named after.

Well, let's have a blessing for what their anniversary has meant and how it's formed and blessed you and Adele.

Lord God, we thank you for the gift of marriage whereby you show us your undying commitment and love for the world, and we pray in celebration, particularly for Joe's parents, and the way in which their relationship nourished and formed them.

God, that as part of the communions of saints in heaven on earth, that Joe and Adele would be strengthened in their love for one another by Joe's parents, and that all of us, married and unmarried alike, would also grow in the deep love you have for your church, for the world, and for one for one another through the sacrament of marriage.

Amen.

Okay, I want to catch you up.

A few lovely things happened this week.

So uh Kathy was so kind to share with us uh some intricacies of the coronation, which is a really, really lovely thing.

And if you were here, um boy, I learned quite a bit, and there was also so much just thoughtfulness and spirituality to the coronation that I didn't always recognize.

So thank you for that gift, Kathy.

And the hospitality of the parish on Thursday night was amazing.

If you missed it, it's on YouTube on our channel, and you can watch it as many times as you like or share it.

Uh, and it truly was a lovely weekend to see.

So thanks, Kathy, for helping us start the weekend off.

There's also uh yesterday we had um I think the second highest attendance at a food distribution.

So 99 cars, 411 people.

And if you've been to one of these things, you can watch the car like get closer and closer to the tires because people drive away yesterday, it was like 20 pounds of carrots, 15 pounds of cabbage, 10 pounds of cucumbers, six loaves of bread, three gallons of milk, um potatoes.

Boy, we got dirty with those potatoes.

I mean, it's it's really incredible to see this ministry, and as I've mentioned to you before, a third of the people who do this live in Nassau Bay.

And they don't all live in apartments.

So this is a viable, beautiful ministry.

And Glenn and Liz went to a uh a celebration for all the partners of the Galveston Food Bank last week.

And what do you know?

We got an award.

So uh St.

Thomas was one of about seven people.

There's like more than 50 people that partner with them, but we got a service excellence award, which I am really proud of because I'm proud of the ways in which you serve, and in which, frankly, you invite people who may not even be interested in church to join the risen Lord in offering food to people who are hungry.

Thank you for this viable ministry to the community, and I'm glad they recognized it because I've been recognizing it for three years.

So it's nice that other people know the good work that you are doing.

Um, a couple other things I just want to name for you is that um as we come up to summer, we're getting ready to start a couple of different studies.

So, one of them will start in the middle of June on Wednesday mornings.

We're gonna read a book by Henri Nouen called The Wounded Healer.

It's a spiritual classic.

It's one of the things you might read if you got, one of the first books you might read if you took a pastoral care class either in seminary or if you took it as an undergrad.

It's a short book.

There's a lot of thought about what it means to minister out of our own.

Woundedness.

So I commend the book to you.

It's really fantastic.

We'll start that in June.

Check your e-news for that.

We're also gonna start a series at in June called The Artist's Way.

We'll be reading that throughout the summer.

The premise of a book is that creativity is a spiritual discipline.

Isn't that a lovely thought?

Not just painting, not just photography, creativity, period, is a spiritual discipline and in a way to grow our awareness of God and our self-expression, which God has designed.

So I hope you'll take some time to join us for the artist's way.

Again, you'll find information in the e-news and on the paper out there.

There's one other thing that showed up this week that is really, really kind of neat.

We're a member of what's called the Clear Lake Interfaith Council.

So these are churches, mosques, synagogues, temples throughout our area that get together and say, how do we effectively do some ministry together?

How do we honor and learn about one another's traditions, and how do we serve the community hand in hand, not despite our faith differences, but because of them?

And they put together this really, I think, thoughtful offer.

You know, we have foyer's groups here.

Foyers is a potluck you do four times a year to help connect you with other people in the congregation.

They're putting together an interfaith foyer's.

So if you're interested, you would get paired with another individual or couple from a different faith tradition to have a few meals with.

And then at the end, there would be sort of a celebratory potluck together.

It's a way, frankly, of helping us make real relationships with people we know are different from us, right?

It's an easy way to get to know somebody who you know is different from you.

So if that appeals to you, you can email me, you'll find that in the e-news.

Uh, but I think it's a lovely, lovely offering.

Continue to walk in love.

As Christ first loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.

For all the way for away, far away, far away would I roll in the wheel and filled me an last and remake for everyone made them for made them for at rest.

This is the table not of the church, but of Jesus Christ.

It is made ready for those who love him and those who want to love him more, so come.

You who have much faith and you who have little.

You who have been here often, and you who have not been for a long time or ever before.

You who have tried to follow and you who have failed, come.

Not because the church invites you, it is Christ.

And he invites you to meet him here.

Our service continues on page 372 of your red prayer book.

Page 372.

Just as a reminder, as you're turning there, there are six Eucharistic prayers in the prayer book.

This is the oldest one, uh penned by Hippolytus.

In it, the uh the intercessions are done as part of the prayer.

So we do this during Easter and we do this during the 12 days of Christmas, and the intercessor happens during the Eucharistic prayer.

When we get to Pentecost, we'll go back to right one and right two, but we're uh prayer B through Easter.

The Lord be with you.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our call.

It is right to give thy thanks and praise.

It is truly right to glorify you, Father, and to give you thanks.

For you alone are God, living and true, dwelling in light, inaccessible from before time and forever, fountain alive and source of all goodness, you made all things and filled them with your blessings, you created them to rejoice in the splendor of your radiance, countless songs of angels standing here for you to serve you who neigh and take, and beholding the glory of your presence, they offer who you who unsee sing praise, joining with them and giving voice to every creature under her heaven we acclaim you and glorify your whole name as we sing.

Your mighty works reveal your wisdom and love.

You formed us in your own image, giving the whole world into our stewardship, so that in obedience to you, our Creator, we might shepherd and serve all your creatures.

When our disobedience took us far from you, you did not and do not abandon us to the power of death.

In your mercy you came and come to our help, so that in seeking you we might find you.

Again and again, you called us into covenant with you, and through the prophets you taught us to hope for salvation.

Father, you love the world so much that in the fullness of time, you sent your only son to be our Savior.

Incarnate by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, he lived as one of us, yet without sin.

To the poor, he proclaimed the good news of salvation, to prisoners' freedom, to the sorrowful joy.

To fulfill your purpose, he gave himself up to death and rising from the grave, destroyed death, and made the whole creation new.

That we might live no longer for ourselves, but for the one who died and rose for us, God sent the Holy Spirit, God's own first gift for those who believe to complete Jesus' work in the world and bring to fulfillment the sanctification of all.

When the hour had come for him to be glorified by you, his heavenly Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them till the end.

Supper with them, he took bread.

And when he given thanks to you, he broke it and gave it to his disciples and said, Take, eat.

This is my body, all that I am, which is given to build you up.

Remember me every time you eat bread.

After supper, Jesus took the cup of wine.

And when he given thanks, he gave it to them and said, Drink this, all of you.

This is my blood, my life force, given to nourish your own.

Whenever you drink wine, remember me.

Father, we now celebrate this memorial of our redemption.

Recalling Christ's death and his descent among the dead, proclaiming his resurrection and ascension to your right hand, awaiting his coming in glory and offering to you from the gifts you've given us, this bread and this cup, we praise you and we bless you.

We praise you, we bless you, we praise you.

We thank you and we praise you, Lord our God.

Lord, we pray that in your goodness and mercy, your Holy Spirit may descend upon us and upon these gifts, sanctifying them and showing them to be holy gifts for your holy people, the bread of life and the cup of salvation, the body and blood of your Son Jesus Christ.

Grant that all who share this bread and this cup may become one body, one temple, one spirit, a living sacrifice in Christ to the praise of your name.

Remember, Lord, your one holy Catholic and apostolic church, redeemed by the love of your Christ.

Reveal its unity, guard its faith, and preserve it in peace.

Remember Andy, Hector, Kay, and Jeff, our bishops, Michael, our presiding bishop, Justin, Archbishop of Canterbury, and all who minister in your church.

Mentor and guide, elected and appointed officials in our world that they might pursue justice with compassion, especially King Charles.

And in this city, Sarah, Paula, and Chase.

Remember all your people, and those who seek your truth.

The congregation is invited to name their celebrations or petitions silently or aloud.

Remember all who have died in the peace of Christ, and those whose faith is known to you alone.

Bring them into the place of eternal joy and light, and grant that we might find our inheritance with Thomas, the Blessed Virgin Mary, with matriarchs, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, with the communion of saints who have found favor with you in ages past.

We praise you in union with them, and give you glory to your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Through Christ and with Christ and in Christ, all honor and glory are yours, Almighty God and Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, forever and ever.

And now, as our Savior Christ has taught us, we are bold to pray.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us the day of our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses.

And leave us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thy is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever and ever.

Amen.

God of creation.

We give you thanks for nourishment of our souls and bodies.

All as individuals and the whole energy you have here and physical union all over your earth.

That we might join you in nourishing our world.

Individual and embody a new life on even the darkest days with the radiance of your glory.

Amen.

Keep your eyes wide open, your hands willing, your hearts generous, your ears attentive, your senses awake, your feet light, your hope alive, and your faith alight.

Go and shine wherever you may be.

Go and embrace with tenderness all of life with its sorrows and joys.

Go and know what divinity expects, and what your sisters and brothers seek.

And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be upon you this day and remain with you forever.

Amen.