Great Thanksgiving for Black History Month (Liturgy)

God of hope and grief,

God of power and strength,

God of the widow and the orphan,

God of the imprisoned and impoverished,

God of the poor in spirit, the merciful, the mourning…

God who sees the proud and arrogant,

God who does not forget those who turn away from the one in need,

God who waits to be greeted in prison, in hunger, in hospital, on the corner,

God who grieves the word spoken in hate and the action that excludes…

You are the one true God and it is our gift and right and duty to call upon you here.

We praise you for your faithfulness in history.

We praise you for your prophets who have shouted the truth.

We praise you for your saving action in leaders, in the church, in the community

And for what You have done sometimes in spite of them.

With all faithful people of Christ, with all your children across the world, with all the saints we name now [insert names appropriate to your congregation regarding Black History Month and local observances], with the whole creation, we praise your name and join the unending hymn.

[Insert whatever form of Holy, Holy, Holy you may choose]

God, with our sighs to deep for words, we come to this table

And we remember when it has been closed.

We remember when the invitation was not open.

We remember when the feast was in part, but not the whole.

With gratitude and thanksgiving, we celebrate in our spirits and our bodies that the barriers people erect cannot withstand the Holy Spirit.

With gratitude and thanksgiving, we celebrate in our spirits and our bodies that the prejudices that people hold will not withstand the Holy Spirit.

With gratitude and thanksgiving, we celebrate in our spirits and our bodies that the ignorance people profess will not withstand the Holy Spirit.

We gather here today and we remember Jesus gathered with those whom he loved.

They celebrated the first Passover, that event that marked the move of the people from slavery into freedom.

As they ate and drank their celebration, their actions anticipated the second Passover- from death into life, from fear into joy, from resignation into resurrection.

Jesus took the bread, a food that they as Jews had in common with all people,

gave thanks to you, O God, broke it, gave it to his disciples, and said:

"Take, eat; this is my body - given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me."

After supper, he took the cup- filled with wine-

A drink they had in common with all people.

He gave thanks to you, O God, gave it to his disciples, and said:

"Drink from this, all of you; this is a new covenant in my blood,

 shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sins.

Do this in remembrance of me."

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,

You have brought us thus far and we trust that you will not leave us.

Pour out your Holy Spirit on these gifts

That they may strengthen us in the faith, in the fight, and in our freedom in Christ.

Draw us together and bring us ever more fully into being the people you have created us to be.

Through your Son Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in your holy Church,

all honor and glory is yours, almighty God, now and for ever.

This is free and open for use in any congregation with attribution to Pastor Julia Seymour, Lutheran Church of Hope, Anchorage, AK. 

Copy and paste to other electronic formats is only permitted WITH inclusion of the blog link. 

Please comment if you use this in your congregation so I can pray for you and your church. 

Rend the Heavens: Advent Day 3

This prompt was originally scheduled for 11/29, but I'm catching up.

Text: Floodwaters will never again destroy all creatures. Genesis 9:15b (CEB)

...and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. Genesis 9:15b (NRSV)

Prompt: FR(ACT)URED

You can add up the parts 
but you won't have the sum 
You can strike up the march, 
Every heart, every heart 
to love will come 
but like a refugee. 

Ring the bells that still can ring 
Forget your perfect offering 
There is a crack, a crack in everything 
That's how the light gets in. 

Anthem- Leonard Cohen

There's a fancy church word for the moment in communion wherein the presider asks God to send the Holy Spirit into the elements: epiclesis. It is in this invocation or calling down that one asks, in front of all gathered, for power of the Holy Spirit to come into the bread and the product of the vine (juice or wine) and to bless them. 

Even though epiclesis is part of my (Lutheran) tradition, it is not something that I think of that often in presiding. There's a fair chance that when I utter the words of institution themselves, I may not

actually ever invoke the epiclesis. This is because I am not sure that God is ever actually apart from what God has made. 

I believe that God is the ultimate farmer- having given blood, sweat, tears, and love to all that has been made. Destruction of any part of creation weighs heavily on the divine memory. In as much as I believe the flood was God's decision to start over (which is to say that I don't really think that), I also think that those who told this story perceived that action was deeply out of character for One in whom all creation exists and moves and lives and has being. 

In truth, I think the fracture- the lifting up and breaking of the bread- is the true epiclesis moment of holy communion. Not any words that I might say, but the moment where there are no words. The moment in which all our eyes are drawn to something that God has created from air and soil and seed and vocation... and which we break. The fracturing is where the light comes in, where the Spirit's power is most visible, where we comprehend that things all apart, but God- and God alone- brings the healing. 

God allows creation the full run of the leash of free will, much to God's regret (in my opinion). But the flood promise, the covenant after the receding waters, says that there are limits to how much destruction God will allow. When we see the fracture in the clouds- the mix of light and mist that creates the rainbow- we remember God's promise. More importantly, God remembers God's promise. God remembers that there is too much, too far, a pain too great- for the Divine to bear. And so never again. 

When we look at the fractured world, do we see and perceive the grief of the Divine being? Are we speaking rotes words, believing we are calling upon the Spirit... when, in truth, the Spirit is always with us- pouring through the cracks in everything, revealing how the Light gets in? 

Corpus Christi

Thirty-five days ago, I left Poland. It has not yet left me and I don't really expect that it will. I am still sorting through what I saw, felt, heard, and experienced. Some of these things may take years to put together and some I may have already forgotten. Only God knows how these things will finally take shape or root within me.

There is one experience that I actually continue to think about almost daily. Going in, I thought about this with almost anthropological interest, but very little emotional attachment. Yet, now, I think of it constantly. When I think of this situation, I feel grief and frustration, sadness and hurt, impassioned and, yet, paralyzed.

By Manederequesens (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

On Thursday, May 26th, Roman Catholic Poles, along with Roman Catholics around the world, celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi. In Krakow, the Friend of Calvin who came to visit me and I were interested to see the observance of this feast. It is a national holiday in Poland with many shops and places closed for observance. There is a procession from Wawel Castle to Krakow's Main Square and St. Mary's Basilica.

The procession involves a priest carrying the Host, the consecrated bread of communion, in a monstrance under a canopy, which is itself carried by deacons. Behind the priest is a procession of hundreds, if not a thousand, people. There were soldiers, nuns (so many nuns), monks, priests, bishops, first communicants, town elders, town leaders, church leaders, Roman Catholic bishops and archdeacons, and probably several groups that I missed or don't know how to classify.

Krakow's Main Square, one of the largest in Europe, was filled with people who were not in the procession, but who came to see it, to honor the Host, to hear the sermon (presumably about Holy Communion and the presence of Christ. It was in Polish), and to receive communion. People stood(!) on pavement and cobblestones to listen. There were young men in dress shirts, ties, and dark slacks, wearing portable speakers to broadcast the sermon all around the square so that all could hear.

As the sermon concluded, the priest carrying the host (at the very front of the procession), began to move again- toward the Basilica and the altar. As the monstrance passed, people knelt. Some bowed deeply, but others fully knelt on the cold stones, crossing themselves. Some wept and stayed down. Others stood again after the Host had gone by. These people were acknowledging what they believe is the Presence of Christ, the Real Presence, in the wafer framed in the monstrance. (See the pic above for an example of an empty monstrance.)

I was pulled along in the crowd until I realized I was very close to where communion was going to be celebrated. Suddenly I realized that not only was I not in the right frame of mind to observe this, but that there were people behind me who would like to be closer. So I moved through the tightly packed crowd back to the more open air of the square, toward the clock where my friend and I hurriedly gestured that we would meet.

In chatting, we decided to go for a coffee, but when we sat down at a table in the square, I ordered bison grass vodka and apple juice. In a rare moment of actually feeling my feelings at the time they were occurring, I realized that I was mad. By this time in my trip, I had toured Jewish history sites in Warsaw. Friend of Calvin and I had gone to Auschwitz and Birkenau just two days before Corpus Christi. In all my reading, I knew that Poland (not alone in this) has not ever dealt fully with its anti-Jewish history (or present). Due to Germany's attack on Poland, most Poles felt/feel that they were more sinned against than sinning in World War II (and preceding), despite the complicity of Polish men and women in turning in their Jewish, homosexual, Roma, and "political" neighbors. Poland does not acknowledge complicity in the Holocaust, despite making money through "dark tourism"- the thousands of people who travel to see the concentration and death camps each year.

Additionally, Poland is currently struggling with government leaders (and communities) who want to keep their borders closed and reject immigrants. Anti-Jewish activities have seen a rise in the past few years, as well as anti-immigrant displays and commentary. All of this knowledge, of this awareness, of all the grief, came swirling into a head as I poured cold vodka down my throat and thought about the procession I had just seen.

People had reverently, tenderly, carefully acknowledged the presence of Christ in pressed bread, but would they do the same to their neighbor? Had they done the same in 1942 or 1968 (Polish Jewish Exclusion) or today? The Feast of Corpus Christ is nearly 1000 years old. This means that Poles (and others) likely observed this same procession in the German occupation. There were probably soldiers and others who knelt, receiving the body of Christ in their mouth, and then rose to go back to the hideous work of the war and its atrocities.

Christ is as present in the host, in the bread and wine, as he is in the person next to us. Furthermore, He is as present therein as he is IN us as we do anything in his name.

The truth is that most people willfully ignored what was happening around them or followed orders because they either believed what they had been told or shut their minds to the cognitive dissonance of the words of their faith and the words of their political leaders

We want to believe that we would be different. That we ARE different.

At least, I assume we do.

Most of us, though, still kneel reverently at the altar and, with Christ's body still in ours, make excuses for why we do what we do, say what we say, think what we think. It happens all the time.

How do we change that? What are the words, the steps, the turning that need to be done?

If Christ's presence in communion does anything, it gives us the strength to make that change. The power is actually IN us when we commune. We just have to be willing to join into the work, to participate in the change, to bear the cross of truth and to lift it high.

It seems likely that a very, very, very tiny percentage of people present in Krakow on 26 May 2016 were also present in that same procession in, say, 1943. Yet, the repercussions of the actions against Jewish neighbors and others, before and after, still reverberate through that country. And the repercussions of what I witnessed and felt on that day still reverberate through me.

Worship Assistant: Google

An elderly woman and her son have attended church where I serve for a few weeks. They always leave very quickly, such that I've never really be able to meet them. She comes up for communion with the help of someone in the congregation, but he stays behind in the pew.

She receives the bread and doesn't eat it. A couple weeks ago, the congregation member who had helped come up waved me over and asked to give her a blessing. The older woman said her name, which I thought was French. Conjugating quickly in my head, I said, "Dieu vous donne la paix." She smiled gently at me and I felt successful.

This week, at the beginning of the service, they were back. I looked at the younger man and asked "En francais?" He said, "No, she speaks German."

That explained two weeks of blank looks!

"Guten Morgen!" I quickly offered. The congregation chuckled.

During the passing of the peace, I went back to him and asked about communion. Knowing I hadn't been speaking the right language, I asked him about the bread issue. He confided that she actually struggled with Alzheimer's, so she wasn't entirely sure what was happening. "Thank you for tolerating her," he concluded.

"Oh, no," I protested. "We aren't tolerating anyone. It's an open table for everybody, no matter what they understand. Besides, no matter what she forgets, God remembers her."

His face reddened and his eyes watered as he thanked me. I felt intensely emotional.

During the offering, I used my cell phone to Google how to say some kind of blessing. The words for "The body of Christ broken for you" were beyond my pronunciation. The smile she gave told me she'd understood what I'd gotten out.

During the last hymn, I googled "German English Bible". Word project.org offered me the page you see here in a side-by-side translation. I knew if I could find that, I could find the Aaronic blessing from Numbers 6 and offer at least a line of it.

I think it's really important for anyone visiting a church to hear a least one line in their own language. No church is likely able to offer a complete translation of anything to a new visitor. If you don't usually have non-English speaking visitors, you may not even have materials available in another language. Nevertheless, it is hospitable, kind, and generous to offer something in a language that a visitor or newer member can understand. Particularly in the case of older people or people who have difficulty processing information, words in a childhood language or song may be the most comforting thing they could hear. I've greeted people in French (correctly) and offered the Holy Communion dialogue in American Sign Language before.

At the end of the service, I spread wide my right arm and clearly announced, "Der HERR segne dich und behüte dich." Before the sound had fully died, the face of the woman at the back of the church was transformed. She lit up and grinned so broadly I could see her teeth. She heard. She understood. She felt the blessing.

I offered the full blessing- intercession, request, and promise- in English.

I will always remember how Google, my worship assistant, actually allowed me to see the blessing of Aaron take root in a woman who just wanted to feel- even briefly- welcome and at home.

Eucharist

Thanksgiving at the Table. 

At the table. 

At the bedside. 

In the car. 

On the hike. 

Where two or more are gathered...