This is the lesson and sermon from Sunday, March 30th, 2008
John 20:19-31
March 2008 Archives
"Christ is Risen! He Is Risen Indeed!" These words that we spoke in greeting to one another on Easter Sunday morning are alive in the scripture, liturgy, and music through which we worship on this Second Sunday of Easter.
The liturgical season of Easter, which is also called Eastertide, began on Easter Sunday and lasts for 50 days until Pentecost Sunday (May 11). Just as we increased our focus on confession and heightened the reflective spirit of worship during the Lenten season, in Eastertide our worship is purposefully more celebratory in its spirit of praise. During the Easter season, our prayer of confession is replaced by a liturgy that focuses on God's grace, through which we are saved.
The liturgical color for Eastertide is white. During Eastertide, the artwork by American folk painter and Quaker Society of Friends minister Edward Hicks (1780-1849) that hangs on the brick wall of the sanctuary serves to evoke the memory of our spiritual journey through God's peaceable kingdom this Lent.
The paraments hung from the lecturn and pulpit are by contemporary Canadian artist Karen Brodie. The design of the paraments illustrates the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet: the alpha and the omega. The interior of the omega along with the curved lines of the light remind us of the open tomb and our risen Christ. The cross and the star are combined to become a symbol of Christ's birth and death. The bottom of the cross becomes one with the cup; the cup of our salvation. There you also see wheat, the symbol of the body of Christ, broken for us. Brodie's design is intended to evoke the image of a sun rising and of new life and it is this imagery that enhances our Eastertide worship of God.
This is the lesson and sermon from Easter Sunday, March 23th, 2008
Matthew 28:1 - 10
This is the lesson and sermon from Sunday, March 9th, 2008.
John 11:17 - 44
This is the lesson and sermon from Sunday, March 2nd, 2008.
Our Lenten journey, which began on Ash Wednesday, continues on this the Fourth Sunday in Lent. During this liturgical season, we seek to be an intentionally peaceful people by reflecting on and mirroring the peaceful nature of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Over the course of our 40-day and 40-night Lenten journey, we fast from those thoughts and acts that tempt us and prevent us from living out God's "peaceable kingdom" in the world.
During each Lenten worship service, we pray together the text of a prayer attributed to the 13th-century saint, Francis of Assisi as our corporate Confession of Faith. As we pray these words, we will use light from the Christ Candle to light a candle to symbolize a particular aspect of God's peaceable kingdom as described in this prayer. Our Lenten journey through these 13 aspects of the peaceable kingdom will culminate in our Good Friday Service of Tenebrae, when these same symbols of peace are extinguished as we remember and recall Christ's Passion and death on the cross for our sins.
In worship today, we will acknowledge Christ who is the light of the world as well as our personal and collective blindness to sin. The music selected for worship this morning illumines the the connectivity of our relationship to one another and our yearning for peace. The choir's two anthems, and the music during communion, are settings by the German composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). "How Lovely Are the Messengers" and "Grant Peace, We Pray" evoke prayers of thanksgiving for peacemakers and prayers of hope for a world where everyone respects one another.
The benediction response is a setting of the "World Peace Prayer," which is paraphrased from one of the most ancient scriptures of Hinduism called the Upanishads. Since its introduction at a worship service on Hiroshima Day in 1981, the prayer has been translated into numerous languages and circulated around the world.
