Here you'll find liturgy, scripture, and preaching for the 6th Sunday of Eastertide.I f you'd like to recite this along with a recording of it, click here.
Call to Worship Psalm 66 Adapted
One: Bless our God, O peoples!
All: Let the sound of his praise be heard,
who has kept us among the living, and has not let our feet slip.
One: For you, O God, have tested us; All: you have tried us as silver is tried. One: You brought us into the net; All: you laid burdens on our backs; One: you let people ride over our heads; All: we went through fire and through water; One: yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.
All: I will come into your house with burnt-offerings; One: I will pay you my vows, those that my lips uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble. All: I will offer to you burnt-offerings of fatlings, with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams; One: I will make an offering of bulls and goats.
All: Come and hear, all you who fear God,
and I will tell what he has done for me.
One: I cried aloud to him, and he was extolled with my tongue. All: If I had cherished iniquity in my heart,
the Lord would not have listened. One: But truly God has listened; All: he has given heed to the words of our prayer.
One: Blessed be God, because he has not rejected our prayer or removed his steadfast love from us. Let us pray.
Prayer of Invocation (in unison)
Eternal and abiding God, in whom we live and move and have our being, we pray to you that we might abide in you and you might abide is us--each as we are isolated in our homes and all as we seek yet to gather together in your Holy Spirit.
We pray to you also as we are awash in time, with often little to do and much to worry about and left to our own thoughts which are so often bereft of faith. We pray that we might instead be filled with your faithfulness, redeemed in your good purpose, charged with your divine energy for the living of our days and the renewing of our strength.
Grant us hope that we might not merely sit and sigh but might breathe in your presence and breathe out your persistence, breathe in your beauty and breathe out your resilience, breathe in your Spirit which is a sigh too deep for words and breathe out your Shalom that it might be the all in all.
Heal us of sickness and bless all whose vocation in life is so to do.
Restore us in vitality and bless all whose livelihood is earned in providing us what we need.
Set us once again on your path that is all our paths, which together wend from your loving beginning of all that is to your glorious end of all that shall have been.
Grant that together, in this grand story of all creation, we might be as lost in wonder, love, and praise.
This “lost” is to be found in you, to whom and in whom and for whose presence we pray. Amen.
