An order of morning prayer for All Saints Day

Morning Prayers in the Ecumenical Centre
All Saints Day Monday 1 November 2010
Praying with the peoples and churches of
Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo

Greetings and call to worship

I will bless the Lord at all times;
his praise shall continually be in my mouth.
My soul makes its boast in the Lord;
let the humble hear and be glad.
O magnify the Lord with me,
and let us exalt his name together. (Psalm 34)

Sing:
Bless the Lord my soul and bless God’s Holy name
Bless the Lord my soul, who leads me into life

Prayer of confession
Compassionate God, forgive us for the times we do not follow the path of your son Jesus Christ and forget or despise our brothers and sisters.
Lord, have mercy
Lord, have mercy

God of Forgiveness,
Help us to treat everyone fairly and with dignity. Teach us your way of love.
Christ, have mercy
Christ, have mercy

Loving God, have patience with us even when we make wrong choices.
Clothe us with your righteousness.
Lord, have mercy
Lord, have mercy

Words of forgiveness
Hear and believe the good news of the gospel:
God is love, and in Jesus Christ we are forgiven.
Thanks be to the triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit! Amen.

Sing: Bless the Lord my soul and bless God’s Holy name
Bless the Lord my soul, who leads me into life

Ephesians 2:19-22
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God.

Please rise to sing Haleluya! Pelo tsa rona – Thuma Mina 114 –
and remain standing for the gospel reading

Gospel reading Matthew 5: 1.12
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Sing Haleluya! Pelo tsa rona – Thuma Mina 114

Reflection By Canon John Gibaut

Prayers of remembrance and intercession
God of mercy and compassion
As we gather our hearts and minds in prayer grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may be united in prayer with the peoples of Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As we remember them we pray for healing:
of memories, of injured bodies and minds, of relationships.
O Lord hear our Prayer

God of peace and justice
We pray for all victims of war, for the living and for the dead.
In the face of genocide, of rape, of grinding poverty and outrageous greed
We pray for peace, for transformation and an end to weeping
O Lord hear our prayer

God of eternity
We remember and give thanks for all who have inspired us on the journey of life and faith. For their love and work and witness we give you thanks. In the silence of our hearts and aloud we name them: (names are read – please feel free to add names)

The Lord’s Prayer said in our different languages

Sing: La Paz del Señor – Thuma Mina 187
verse 1 in Spanish, verse 2 in German verse 3 in English verse 4 in French

Closing responses
On our hearts and our houses
The blessing of God
In our coming and our going
The peace of God
In our life and believing
The love of God
At our end and new beginning
The arms of God to welcome us and bring us home. Amen
(From the Iona Community)

An All Saints and All Souls Day sermon by the Venerable Colin Williams, general secretary of CEC

Chris has taken up rowing again. Back home in Canada it was his main leisure activity. But since he came to Geneva to work as an intern at an ecumenical agency there’ve simply been too many things going on. But these last couple of weeks he’s found his way into the Geneva rowing club. And so it was that last Saturday morning he found himself up early and rowing all by himself on the Rhone. Quite unexpectedly, he found himself caught up with the beauty around him. The intense autumn colours, the silence, the blue sky, the mist rising from the river – it was he said awesome. The beauty of his surroundings took him out of himself and beyond himself He was somehow caught up in something much bigger than himself.

It was the sort of experience captured two hundred years ago by the English poet William Wordsworth. In one of his best known poems he writes about the intense effect that his native surroundings in the English Lake District in the North West of England had upon him:
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light ,
The glory and the freshness of a dream

There are moments when particular places particular circumstances take us out of ourselves and point us beyond ourselves. In the Celtic spiritual tradition – the spiritual tradition which goes right back to the first arrival of Christianity in Britain in the decades after Christ’s death and resurrection – places that give us an opening into the wonder and glory of God revealed in his creation are called 'Thin Places’ . There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are always only three feet apart – but that in thin places that distance shrinks so that the two almost touch each other. The present day Irish poet Sharlande Sledge has written about thin places:-

‘Thin places’ the Celts call this space
Both seen and unseen,
Where the door between this world
And the next is cracked open for a moment
And the light is not all on the other side.
God shaped space. Holy

Today is All Saints Day – the day when we give thanks for all the saints who from their labours rest.
And so it is a day when we celebrate the thinness of the divide between heaven and earth. We are reminded that Gods will is that the divide will become so thin that it will be broken down by the power of his love. Isaiah expresses that in our readings this morning:………..

In Revelation too the vision is of a new heaven and a new earth meeting and mingling as the home of God is set among mortals ‘and I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying ‘ See the home of God is among mortals. Visionary poetic language – expressing a profound reality – that in Jesus Christ the things of heaven touch the things of earth and transform them – water is transformed so that it has the power to reshape our lives, bread and wine are transformed so that in and through them we may feed on Christ.

And in the story of the raising of Lazarus, we see Jesus too demonstrating how in him the thinness between earth and heaven is dissolved. To his dead friend he calls ‘Lazarus come out’ And the barrier between earth and heaven breaks open And the dead man comes out and is set free

All Saints Day is all about remembering that there is no unbridgeable gulf between the things of earth and the things of heaven. In strict Catholic theology the doctrine of the saints itself declares that. The saints spend eternity making intercession for us to the Father so that through their prayers for us in heaven our earth-bound brokenness may be healed. Some if us will buy into that theology. Many of us will not. But whatever our theology there is a much wider agenda on this day. All Saints Day is all about proclaiming that we are called to play our part in revealing the glory of heaven in the humdrum existence of our everyday world – the glory of heaven which admits of no division, the glory of heaven which admits no foes nor friends but one equal communion and identity, the glory of heaven where there is no sound of warfare but the harmony which comes from profound fellowship. In and through the Christian Gospel the boundary between earth and heaven is so thin that that glory bleeds into our world – and our calling as servants of the Gospel is to play our part in making that thinness even thinner

The Christians of the city of Leipzig in the East of Germany knew that 20 years ago. 20 years ago Communist rule in the east of Germany was in its death throes. We know that now with the benefit of hindsight. The Christians of Leipzig don’t know that then. They had no reason to know that within a very few weeks the Berlin Wall would fall and oppression would be at an end. In those October days of 1989 Christian Fuehrer was the pastor of St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig. His church had become the focus of hopes and yearnings of many citizens of his city for a new beginning. Every Monday evening since 1982 there were prayers for peace at 5.00 in St, Nicholas Church. They couldn’t be publicly advertised. But everyone knew about them. Sometimes the numbers of those attending became very low. But in 1989 the numbers began to grow. At the beginning of September, though the negligence of the authorities, western TV camera teams were able to get footage of what was happening. The following Monday people traveled from all over East Germany to join in.

But there were dangers attached to this. Already in September police had brutally attacked people emerging from St. Nicholas Church, And this was the year of the brutal repression of demonstrators by the Chinese authorities in Peking, an action expressly praised by the East German Leadership.

The crucial date was Monday, October 9 1989. It was known that extra army units had been drafted into Leipzig. 2 days before, demonstrations in Leipzifg had been violently put down. It became known that that weekend beds had been cleared in the Leipzig hospitals in advance of Monday. That Monday during the day many who were known to be participants in the peace prayers received threatening phone calls. Someone rang from one of the local barracks to say that the Communist party chief had given orders that St. Nicholas Church was to be cleared. Schools were closed early. Factories were closed and the workers told to come and occupy St. Nicholas church. The prayers went ahead . There was great anxiety about what would happen as the congregation emerged from the church. Whether they would be fired on. What they discovered as they emerged astonished them. Despite all the threats, 70,000 people had gathered outside the church to offer their support for those making prayer for peace and to protect them by their presence. What struck Christian Fuhrer was that they each held a candle. They were holding it with one hand and shielding the flame with the other. ‘For that he wrote ‘they needed both hands, so that the option to take hold of a candle became the option for powerlessness.’ Together the 70,000 walked the ring road of the city, past the St. Thomas Church where Bach had made his name, past the famous Gewandhaus from which the city orchestra took its name, right round the city. And the message was clear. On that night, the glory of heaven the glory of God’s Kingdom, was too bright to be extinguished by the shoddy power politics of a discredited regime. The boundary between the things of earth and the things of heaven seemed very thin indeed. Through the courage and determination of those people, Leipzig at that moment seemed a thin place .

Our calling is no less clear than it was for those followers of Jesus Christ twenty years ago in Leipzig. To make our community, our city, our world, the whole of the earth a thin place. A place in which not just through the beauty of his creation but also through our action, the things of heaven touch the things of earth and the glory of God’s Kingdom is revealed. Through our action, the poor cared for, racial injustice opposed, the hungry fed, the good ness of God’s creation preserved, the sick and the lonely comforted, through our action demonstrating that heaven is indeed no more than three feet away from earth - and need in fact be no distance at all.

Copyright (c) Colin Williams