Great Prayer of Thanksgiving

This is part of my liturgy for an Easter celebration of the Lord's Supper. The opening dialogue is from Psalm 118. The first half of the prayer (beginning We thank you, O God, Creator...) is adapted from the German Reformed liturgy, and the second half (beginning We thank you, eternal God, Three-in-One) is from the New Century Hymnal (UCC).

Open now the gates of righteousness,

That we may enter and give thanks to God.

O give thanks to God, for God is good.

God’s steadfast love endures forever.

This is the gate of God.

The righteous shall enter through it.

We thank you, O God, Creator of all that is—sun and moon, stars and galaxies, water and earth, plants and insects, humans and animals: You are both the Giver and Sustainer of life:

Your Word calls us from darkness into light.

The Gift of Easter

Listen to the MP3, or read below:

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

—Col. 3:3-4

A great deal is lost in time of war—lives, livelihoods, innocence, and beauty. Entire cities can be destroyed. One example is the city of Dresden, Germany, which was destroyed in February 1945. Its most beautiful church—the Frauenkirche—wasn’t completely rebuilt for 60 years. Its counterpart, the Coventry Cathedral in England which had been destroyed five years earlier, remains a bombed-out shell to this day.

Frauenkirche, shortly after the city of Dresden was
destroyed by a bombing raid 13-15 February 1945

Not all war stories are stories of the destruction of beauty, however. There are some amazing stories of its preservation. And one of my favorites is about the cathedral in the French city of Chartres. This cathedral’s windows are among the most famous in the world. One historian wrote about its beautiful rose window in this way:

One becomes, sometimes, a little incoherent in talking about it; one is ashamed to be as extravagant as one wants to be …the limpidity of the blues; the depth of the red; the in-tensity of the green; the complicated harmonies; the sparkle and splendor of the light…