We rotate some of the prayers in our liturgy seasonally, using certain forms for a time, then switching to another. This summer we’ll be using some of the prayers provided by the book Enriching Our Worship 1, which—although it was published nearly a quarter century ago—is still not as familiar as our slightly-older Book of Common Prayer.

I thought I’d spend a few weeks this spring reflecting on some of the new prayers, in the hopes that these reflections might, well, enrich your worship when you hear them on a Sunday morning.

The Eucharistic Prayer we’ll be using begins as they all do, with the opening dialogue (The Lord be with you. And also with you. Lift up your hearts… and so on), a preface, and the Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy Lord…”)

Then it continues, like all Eucharistic prayers do, by telling the story of salvation, of our creation, fall, and redemption.

I’m struck by that first paragraph, by the words about our creation:

Blessed are you, gracious God,
creator of the universe and giver of life.
You formed us in your own image
and called us to dwell in your infinite love.
You gave the world into our care
that we might be your faithful stewards
and show forth your bountiful grace.

The prayer begins as traditional Jewish blessings and some early Christians prayers begin: with some variation on the phrase “Blessed are you, O God, creator of the universe.” The Eucharistic Prayer is, more than anything else, a prayer of thanksgiving. (That’s what Eucharistia means in Greek, “Thanksgiving,” and indeed if you travel to Greece today and order a sandwich, you can tell the cashier Efcharisto when they give you your change. “Thank you,” the same word in modern pronunciation.) And what we being by thanking God for is simply being God: “You are blessed, O God, creator of the universe,” could be an entire prayer.

But out of God’s goodness and grace flows something else. God, of God’s goodness, chooses to give us life. It’s in God’s very nature to share that life with us. So God “forms us” in God’s own image, giving us life. You don’t have to adopt some kind of creationist view to think that this is true; it’s all perfectly compatible with evolutionary science. To say that God forms us in God’s image is not about biology: it’s to say that on the moral and spiritual plane, we are creatures built to show forth the nature of the God who is Love, to be visible images of God’s own self-giving love.

Like a potter, God is shaping and forming us for a purpose. And like lumps of clay, we can sometimes be hard to work with. God has a very clear vision for the things we are becoming, but God works with and through the material of our lives to do it.

So what’s that shape?

Just as God forms us into new shapes, I sometimes like to form words into new shapes; so here’s a paraphrase, reorganized a bit:

God formed us and called us
            to dwell in God’s infinite love.
God gave the world into our care, that we might
            be God’s faithful stewards
            and show forth God’s bountiful grace.

God does three things, and we do three things. God forms us, calls us, and gives us the world. We dwell in God’s love, practice faithful stewards, and show forth God’s grace. God’s action and our response are in a continuous interaction, a constant shaping and reshaping like a bowl-to-be on the potter’s wheel, always beginning with what God does for us.

God formed us in the shape of love; may we dwell in that love.

God gave the world into our care; may we care for the world in love, treating it as stewards and not owners, as people who have the responsibility to tend to God’s garden but not the right to destroy it.

God calls each one of us by name, speaking to us in love; may we share that love with the world, showing forth the signs and telling the stories of God’s grace in our lives.

And what God has done for “us” as a human species, God does for each one of us. So may each one of you reading this know that you are the beloved child of God, being gently and carefully formed, day by day, into a vessel of God’s love for the world; into the very image of God.

        …he ascended into heaven
            and is seated at the right hand of the Father…

The Feast of the Ascension, which we celebrate today, is one of the stranger days in the church calendar. The Ascension seems simultaneously to make no sense and to capture a fundamental truth. It’s a day of paradox and mystery, a day about an event in the past that’s really about our lives in the present.

The Acts of the Apostles tell us that Jesus remained with the disciples for forty days after his Resurrection, appearing to them and teaching them even more about the kingdom of God. (Acts 1:3) And then, on the fortieth day, “as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” (Acts 1:9) The same Jesus of Nazareth who had descended from heaven and who had risen from the dead now rises again, lifting off from the face of the earth to return into heaven.

There’s just one problem with this picture. (Not the Rembrandt, but the idea.) Heaven isn’t “up,” at least not in any sense we can tell. It may’ve made sense to think so, thousands of years ago, but we’ve built telescopes and spaceships, put astronauts on the moon. As the classic Space-Age Soviet propaganda poster put, cosmonauts have scoured the heavens, and look—“No God!” To say that Jesus “ascended” into heaven and “is seated at the right hand of the Father” seems to make a spatial claim that simply doesn’t fit with what we know of physics, at least as it exists in three-dimensional space.

And yet at the same time, the Ascension captures a simple, daily truth. Christians have always expressed a belief in the Resurrection, in the idea that Jesus rose from the dead. And it’s obvious enough that he’s no longer walking around on the Earth. And yet—while it’s not so common in our tradition as in others to talk about our faith in terms of a personal relationship with Jesus—it’s equally true that many people, from the earliest disciples to the most modern people of faith, seem to experience his presence in their lives. The Ascension is one way of expressing that truth: Jesus is no longer with us, and yet he is.

And in fact, the same modern physics that make this make no sense, start to make sense of it, too. Heaven can’t be “up,” in the sense that it’s some point in the universe found by going in one direction or another from our planet’s molten core. If heaven is a place at all, if it’s a reality can be found somewhere, it must be something else—something like another dimension, another reality that can be moved into and out of, another world that overlaps with and interpenetrates our own.

And in fact, that’s quite good news. Because if heaven and earth are two separate things, one up, and one down, and Jesus has gone away, then Jesus is gone. But if heaven is another dimension that exists across our three, then Jesus is still here. He is with us. He can still teach us, and guide us, and comfort us. And that heavenly reality in which he lives is not a realm completely different from our own. It’s one that we can see, sometimes, hidden within our own. And at the Ascension, Jesus didn’t leave us to go somewhere far away. He left off existing in a particular point in space, so that he could return to being everywhere at once; as one of the collects for the day says, he “ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things.” He leaves the realm of ordinary space and time, becoming timeless and universal; giving each one of us the chance those few disciples had to see him face to face.

Almighty God, whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ
ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things:
Mercifully give us faith to perceive that, according to his
promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end
of the ages; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory
everlasting. Amen.

On Saturday, we headed up I-93 for a journey deep into the wilderness of New England. We packed up a big bag of snacks and drinks, put on our shorts and walking shoes, and piled into the car for the drive out to the woods for our hike. And then, after about ten minutes, we piled back out of the car; not for a bathroom break or a flat tire or snack, but because we’d reached our destination.

Yes, your three city slickers had made it to the parking lot at the southernmost point of the Middlesex Fells, and that was about as far into the wild as we were going to go.

I grew up around the Fells—walking on the trails as a kid, running on them as a teenager, being rescued by an ambulance on a hot summer day for heat exhaustion in college, and so on. And I’ve always been amazed at their dual nature. We used to get lost in there, inexplicably turned around, emerging from a run two miles further down South Border Road than we thought we were. You can fit a whole cross-country course in there—a whole water supply, a zoo, for goodness’ sake!—and at times, it feels as if you’re deep in the woods. But then you hear the ever-present hum of traffic driving by, and remember that you’re never more than about a mile from an interstate highway. You could wander on those winding trails for days, living on roots and berries, creating a miniature Man vs. Wild experience without ever leaving Medford.

Or you could do what we did and just walk up the trail to Wright’s Tower and enjoy the view.

The coolest thing about this particular view, I think, is how different the place feels when you’re looking in two different directions. If you stand next to the tower, and look southeast, you see Boston’s whole skyline, in all its glory, stretching practically from Chelsea to Brookline and everything in between, and in the foreground, the long stretch of I-93. If you squint through your binoculars, you can almost see Saint John’s! (Well… maybe if we put it on stilts.)

But if you turn in the other direction and cover your ears, you’ll think you’re in the heart of the woods: there’s nothing to meet the eye but trees on rolling hills.

So where are you, as you’re wandering through those woods? Is it a forest or a highway? A place to see the city or a place to see the woods? A weekend hiking expedition or a ten minute drive? Is it simply a matter of perspective? Or is it, simply, both? Is it, like so many things in life, all these things at the same time, more complicated and more beautiful than we could ever really put into words?

I forgot to take any pictures; but here are two, taken by someone else!

“Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”
(1 John 4:11-12)

            These verses from the First Letter of John hold a special place in my heart. I’d never read them until I was in college, a young adult trying to come to an adult understanding of faith. I was a thoughtful and naturally-skeptical person trying to reconcile everything I knew about science and philosophy with what I thought I knew about Christianity, and John’s words gave me somewhere to start: some fundamental place where heaven and earth collided, where humanity and God intersected. And that place was not in a book of theology or in a quiet chapel or in cathedral filled with song. It was in love.

            That’s not to say God isn’t present in the rest of these. Of course God is. But John puts God, first and foremost, in love: in God’s self-sacrificing love for us, and in our love for one another. “No one has ever seen God,” John admits, acknowledging the fears and doubts of every faithful person who’s ever searched for God. But “if we love one another, God lives in us.”

            On Sunday, we lit the fourth Advent candle, the one that symbolizes love, and it remains burning this week. But this theme of love does not end with the season of Advent—any more than hope, peace, or joy end. It finds its fulfillment, in fact, in the season of Christmas. This passage from 1 John becomes the epistle for Morning Prayer on Christmas Day, as God’s love becomes manifest in Christ, as the God who is love becomes one of us. And God’s love does not just inspire us to love. God’s love is not just reflected in us. God’s love is perfected in us.

            Our world is full of God, because our world is full of love. Even in the most difficult and desperate and painful situations—you might even say especially in the most difficult and desperate and painful situations—we human beings persist in loving one another, and God persists in dwelling in us. We often wonder where God is in those dark moments, and that’s the answer: God is with us, in the love and care we offer one another.

So “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” (1 John 4:7)

“For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Romans 8:24-25)

“We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered,” (Hebrews 6:19–20)

I’m reminded of the countless Christmas-morning scenes in which all the overfunctioning spouses who’ve taken on the responsibility of Christmas shopping for the whole family—themselves included—claps their hands with delight at the sight of a perfectly-wrapped box among the presents they’d wrapped the night before, exclaiming with anticipation: “Ooh, I hope it’s that new novel I’ve been waiting for!”

When you bought the presents yourself, this can only be play-acting or amnesia.

Hope isn’t hope, after all, if hope has been seen. And yet this means that hope comes with an element of paradox. It is “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul,” the thing that keeps us steady in the stormy seas of our lives, and yet it is and must remain unseen. The Christian hope—that God has redeemed us and will save us from our own fragility and death, that the end of our lives in this world is not the end of the stories of our lives, that we will one day rise again and see God and one another face to face—will always be for us a kind of certain uncertainty, or maybe an uncertain certainty.

If we somehow really knew that it was true, if we had irrefutable evidence that our hope would be fulfilled, our hope would not be hope. It would be something more like the anticipation of opening a gift you wrapped for yourself. But we do not know: we hope. Our struggles and our doubts and our uncertainties are to be expected, because our hope has not been seen, and it’s an incredible hope.

But anchors are rarely seen, at least by most of us. Unless you are the sailor who threw it overboard, you have no reason to be certain there’s an anchor there at all. It could just be a length of rope, trailing down into the water, leaving you adrift. And yet you trust that the anchor is there. And even better yet, the anchor works, even if you doubt it’s there at all, because its effect is governed by the laws of physics, and not by your belief in the laws of physics.

The hope that anchors your soul is not your hope, after all. It is God’s gift in Christ, who was born as a human being, who plunged down into the depths of our world, experienced every facet of human experience, and tied God to our fate forever. And it’s Christ’s hope for you, not your hope for yourself, that is healing and redeeming and saving you day by day.

May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in
believing through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Romans 15:13