Welcome to the Canberra
Hospital Chaplaincy
UCA Service
Liturgy
August 2015
Rev Jean Shannon, Rev Robyn Triglone, Harold Small & Pastor Rosemary Myers
The Uniting Church in Australia
Chapel is held every Thursday @ 9:30 & 2:30—everyone is welcome – no matter what your faith background or engagement might be or might have been. You are welcome to join us for a small moment in community.
UnitingCare Chaplaincy
Canberra Hospital
Phone: 62443768
Afternoon chapel is cancelled for August
Call to Prayer
God of courage and light
God of freedom and choice
Father of truth
Brother of honour
Mother of faith
Lead us this day
Open to encouragement
Giving voice to our praise.J Shannon
Dear Lord, we are called to be courageous in our truth-telling; bold in our mission and humble in our receiving. Since the day we were born, you knew us. You’ve watched us grow. And now we come to the hard part, living – not just in our lives and in this world but in truth and in you. To grow is a struggle and yet to not grow is to die.
Lord be our light, our water, our soil and our food – lord be with us and we with you.Amen.
Hymn: TIS 411Filled with the Spirit’s Power
1
Silence
No one grows alone. The road we travel is crowded with others that we carry in our hearts. Let us take a moment to name those in need, those we’ve passed or have passed us by. As a community we send our prayers out for all who struggle to find shelter, health, peace and safety.
Light the care candle
Our Father in heaven,
+hallowed be your Name,[1]
your kingdom come,
your will be done, on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Save us from the time of trial,
and deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom,
the power,
and the glory are yours,
now and for ever.
Amen.
Readings from our Biblical tradition:
Hymn: TIS 647 Comfort, comfort (with musician) or TIS 569 Guide me, O thou great Redeemer
Invitation
Gomes said that most of us do not come to church to be changed but to be confirmed and yet God calls us never to be satisfied with our own status quo, spiritual or otherwise. Growth is the only infallible evidence of the life of faith and as Emerson said, not about what lies behind us or what lies before us but what lies within. Jesus has invited you to this table. He has asked that you eat with Him, that he may abide in you. He does not ask if your deserve it – only that you accept. And in accepting, you accede to change and grow.
God gives us the grace to feed and be fed.
Jesus becomes the bread of life and each time we share communion we not only renew that relationship, we are both physically and spiritually taking him in…we use the bread to ground that sensation in reality, in this world.
Let us celebrate and give thanks for these gifts.
The Lord be with you;
AND ALSO WITH YOU.
Lift up your hearts:
WE LIFT THEM TO THE LORD.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
IT IS RIGHT TO GIVE OUR THANKS AND PRAISE.
So we join our praise with all your people across the generations, saying
Holy, holy, holy, Celebrating God,
heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of God.
All: Hosanna in the highest.
Thanksgiving
Father we thank you
that you feed us on these holy mysteries with the spiritual food
we call the body and blood of our saviour, Jesus Christ.
We thank you for your assurance and love
that guides us as the living members of your body.
May the Holy Spirit be upon us now,
That as we receive the bread and wine
We may know the presence of the Lord with and within us.
Amen
And so, on the night he was betrayed, Jesus sat with his friends and shared another meal but this night he stopped and took the bread and giving thanks, He blessed it saying, this is my body broken for you…
A reminder that He was broken – we are all broken – and yet, when fed, we have the capacity to feed others.
And he took the wine, holding it high he said, this cup is the new covenant in my blood, do this and whenever you drink it do so in remembrance of me. And so when we share, as one body, this bread and this wine – we are remembering, re-promising and renewing Jesus’ promise to us – and ours to Him. Together, we can do better. Promise.
The bread of life is here for all. We only have to say, “yes”![2]
Communion
After Communion
Oh God, may this bread become in us bread for the world.
Look upon the world with your eyes of loving concern and spread a table before us all which is like a feast. Look upon us with the eyes that see into our hearts and souls and sustain us for a greater good. In your name we pray in faith,
Amen D McRae-McMahon
Words of mission
MenEver just beyond our reach,
Womenthe sacred calls us to new understandings of ourselves
Menand to new ways of embracing the world.
LeaderEver in pursuit of us
ALLIt challenges us to name each place we find,
Each corner in which we think ourselves alone, “holy”.
LeaderEver within us,
MenIt fills us to overflowing with great love so that,
WomenEver among us,
MenIt might be made known in this challenging world.
ALLAs light to light, we pray
AmenGretta Vosper from Holy Breath
It takes courage to tell the truth. It takes courage to be a banner of Christ’s vision in this difficult world. Gomes said that most of us think that faith is holding onto those few principles and ideas we first believed a long time ago. But that is not growth, it is stasis, immobility. The risk of growth, of seeing something bigger, involves letting go of something we’ve held onto.That is difficult for most of us. Growing up is not simply a process of remembering but of becoming what is meant to be in Jesus Christ. Will we be willing to open our hands and our minds and see what is out there, what adventure invites us into real spiritual growth?
The candle is extinguished
Blessing
Stand tall as the people of God,
Take the bread of life in your hands and go into the world
In courage and strength.
Stand tall and look for a new adventure of faith.
It awaits us now as the children of God. D McRae-McMahon
Hymn: TIS 547 Be thou my vision
Thank you for joining us!
Go in peace and begin this day’s journey. Thank you.
Chagall, Marc, 1887-1985. David weeps for Absalom, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. [retrieved August 11, 2015].
Watch the dough rise
John 6:24-35 Jesus as the bread of life
In this reading, the people have been wowed and they want more. They follow Jesus everywhere and to be honest, it sounds like Jesus is a little exasperated. He doesn’t want to be treated like a magic show and he suspects they are missing the point (as we often do). Maybe it was good teaching or showmanship – he certainly had their attention.
The Bible stories of my childhood focussed on the miracles and not on the teaching. Oh he cured the woman and raised the rabbi’s daughter from the dead! We were all wowed but somehow we missed the lessons like, he treated the beggar and the mayor the same as equals. He accepted the Samarianwoman without judging her, Shouldn’t we? Honestly, miracles are such a distraction.
In this story Jesus is trying to get them to look deeper to the signs that this is an eternal God involved in all their lives. He talks about food as food for the soul not bread to gorge on while being entertained. The miracle that matters is the miracle of faith, when God breaks through the misconceptions we have held about life, our pursuit of unsatisfactory answers, our self-centred (feed-me!) worlds to reveal the radical new age embodied in a new community taught and revealed by Jesus. A community of acceptance, love and forgiveness.
Where he says ‘bread’ they see food. So thinking he doesn’t quite get it, they remind him that their/our ancestors ate the manna. “He gave them bread from heaven to eat’. Jesus immediately offers a reinterpretation of the text. First it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven as the crowd thinks but ‘my father’. The 2nd is a little more subtle, he doesn’t use the past tense. He doesn’t say, ‘it was my father who gave….’. No, He uses the present tense, ‘but it is my father who gives you bread from heaven. This is a current event.
Gomes said that change is the essence of growth and growth is essential for dynamic faith. In other words, there has to be a time in our adult lives where we look beyond the stories and actually read the scriptures. There sits a series of radical ideas including equality, acceptance, forgiveness, and your responsibility to use your gifts for the betterment of this world – not for the next, but for now.
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[1]Bread of Life, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. [retrieved August 4, 2015]. Original source:
[2]Christ our Light, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. [retrieved August 5, 2015]. Original source: