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.
