March 25, 2007

Fifth Sunday in Lent

Preparation for Worship

Blessed Are They

Peace is every step.

The shining red sun is my heart. 

Each flower smiles with me.

How green, how fresh all that grows. 

How cool the wind blows. 

Peace is every step. 

It turns the endless path to joy.

Thich Nhat Hanh

The forty-day liturgical season of Lent began on Ash Wednesday and continues today on this Fifth Sunday in Lent.  Our Lenten journey is marked by a time of penitence and purposeful reflection.  As such, the worship leaders enter the sanctuary in a meditative spirit as a bell tolls the beginning of the worship service. 

      The Lenten season is marked by subtle, but purposeful, changes in elements of our liturgy.  These changes are intended to illumine and inspire the ways in which we experience corporate prayer of the body of Christ.  For example, during the prayer of confession, we shall sing together a “Lamb of God,” or Agnus Dei, hymn.  Our response to the Declaration of Forgiveness is a reminder of God’s grace as represented in the text of the hymn, “Amazing Grace.”  We will unite our voices in a prayerful responsive psalm to proclaim the Word of God, and we will incorporate a variety of prayer forms into the prayers of the people.  Finally, our hymn offerings and service music offer more reflective opportunities through which we can connect to God in prayer. 

     Each Lenten Sunday, the scriptural basis for our worship is taken from the Beatitudes presented by Christ in his Sermon on the Mount.  Our worship today focuses on: “Blessed are pure in heart, for they will see God.  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."  To further illustrate these beatitudes, the second gospel lesson tells of the solider whose ear was cut off when he came to arrest Jesus. The texts, hymns, and service music in worship today illumine the spirit of peace.  From the hymns, "We Are a People of God's Peace," to "O Day of Peace," we sing of our desire to experience peace in our personal relationships and in our engagements with the wider world. 

     Through the words of the Prayer of St. Francis, the Choir's anthem expresses our collective prayer that we might all be "instruments of peace."  In that spirit, the prelude, offertory, and postlude are all forms of peaceful adagio movements.  In music, the term adagio means, "slowly."  In today's worship, they are each intended to represent differing characteristics of "peace" or "peacefulness." Each work was written for a different instrument (the prelude for strings, the offertory for the organ, and the postlude for the piano).  In this sense, these three works illustrate the varied nature of different instruments of peace.  May God open our hearts and minds to receive his word for us in worship this morning, and may the Lord enfold us His peace and send us forth to be peacemakers in the world.