Pentecost

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

The Lord be with you.
And also with you.

Christ is risen, alleluia.
He is risen indeed, alleluia.

Dear friends,
this water will be sprinkled on us
as a memorial of our Baptism.
May the Lord our God help us by his grace
to remain faithful to the Spirit we have received.

I saw water flowing from the Temple,
from its right-hand side, alleluia:
and all to whom this water came
were saved and shall say: alleluia, alleluia.

May almighty God cleanse us of our sins,
and through the celebration of this Eucharist
make us worthy to share at the table of his Kingdom.
Amen.

Let us pray.

O God,
whose Son, Jesus, prayed for his disciples,
and sent them into the world
to proclaim the coming of your kingdom:
by your Holy Spirit,
hold the Church in unity,
and keep it faithful to your word,
so that, breaking bread together,
we may be one with Christ in faith and love and service,
now and for ever. Amen.

℟.  Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the earth.

Praise the Lord, O my soul,
O Lord, God, your glory is great.
How manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all. ℟.

All creatures look to you
to give them their food to eat.
When you open your hand, they are filled with good,
when you hide your face they pine away. ℟.

When you take away their breath, they die,
and return to the earth, whence they came.
When you send forth your spirit, all things spring to life,
and the face of the earth is renewed. ℟.

The glory of the Lord shall never cease,
the Lord shall rejoice in all his works.
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live,
I will praise my God while my breath remains. ℟.

A reading from the letter of Paul to the Romans.

All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ – if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

For the word of the Lord,
thanks be to God.

Patrick White, the Nobel Prize winning Australian novelist, wrote of a defining moment in his life: “During what seemed like months of rain I was carrying a tray load of food to a wormy litter of pups down at the kennels when I slipped and fell on my back, dog dishes shooting in all directions. I lay where I had fallen, half-blinded by rain under a pale sky, cursing through watery lips a God in whom I did not believe. I began laughing finally at my own helplessness and hopelessness, in the mud and the stench from my filthy oilskin. It was a turning point. My disbelief appeared as farcical as my fall. At that moment I was truly humbled”.  He later wrote in a letter: “What I am increasingly intent on doing in my books is to give professed unbelievers glimpses of their own unprofessed faith”.

There is something primal about Holy Spirit: it belongs universally to the human condition. Spirit is fundamentally about an encounter or engagement with everyday reality.  It comes as gift: it is not a possession. It’s an attitude, not an opinion. It’s about making “harsh and saving sense out of what we experience here and now”.  We don’t make Spirit happen. We don’t tire the muscles of our mind in order to believe. “We find ourselves addressed, and in being addressed, we find ourselves”. Spirit is always relational: it is about Spirit coming into visibility: it is truly the Bread of Life.

Ruth Cracknell, the Australian actor, wrote of a defining moment in her life when her husband died. “It is the most precious moment I have known: it is the most surprising moment because entirely unexpected. And if this moment I can keep, then nothing more do I need, now or ever. We are not, and this you must believe, in an empty room, but in a space suffused. We are golden; we seem for a tiny fragment of time, holy; a medieval painting….”

Ruth Cracknell is less an observer of life than a participant.  And this is telling us something fundamental about the Spirit of God. She is not positing or placing God or the divine into her experience: she finds mystery, wakes up to a presence already there. It’s another dimension, a dimension of depth and richness. And she is sure: not in the sense of proving or mounting a case for anything, but bearing witness to her lived experience. Spirit comes always, is ever-present, often surprising, coming to us not so much as bringer of power as opener of eyes.  Waking us up to what is in front of our eyes! In this space called life, “suffused” with Spirit, the bread of our lives is broken and we find life.

Les Murray, the distinguished Australian poet, writes of a way of being in the world that strikes him as a palpable conviction that life has meaning and that it matters.  “From earliest childhood I was always conscious of a strong, sometimes frightening, sometimes deeply necessary current of sheer meaning in things and people, a pressure of significance that rarely carried over into what people consciously said. The world was resonant and radiant with meaning and, knowing this, how could I speak as if none of it mattered, or leave it out the way people seemed to do”.

“A pressure of significance” suggests moments and experiences that carry with them a “surplus of meaning”, that bring us messages from Beyond, and speak into our lived experience that the life we are living needs no “Why?”: that it simply needs to be lived, with wonder and gratitude. Such moments are “moments of grace, “events of Spirit”, where “our minds are nourished and invisibly repaired”. Covid-19 does in fact offer us, in all its terror and deadliness, opportunity. Perhaps instead of keeping on saying we miss the opportunity to be at Church and the Eucharist, we can rejoice: relationships are suddenly immeasurably precious: time and space that we might not otherwise have had bring us untold gifts: and far from arguing about how a piece of bread becomes Jesus (which the Church has argued about for centuries), the Spirit of the Risen Christ, the Spirit of Pentecost offers us the true miracle, of how Jesus actually becomes a piece of bread, meeting us in our everyday. “Come Holy Spirit, and overshadow us, enliven us with grace, and enfold us in love”.

Giver of life,
receive all we offer you this day.
Let the Spirit you bestow on your Church
continue to work in the world
through the hearts of all who believe.
We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ the Lord. Amen.

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 him thanks and praise.

It is right to give you thanks and praise,
O Lord, our God, sustainer of the universe,
you are worthy of glory and praise.

At your command all things came to be:
the vast expanse of interstellar space,
galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses,
and this fragile earth, our island home;
by your will they were created and have their being.

From the primal elements
you brought forth the human race,
and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill;
you entrusted us with the care of your creation.

But we turn against you, and betray your trust;
and we turn against one another.
Again and again you call us to return.
Through the prophets and sages
you reveal your righteous law.
In the fullness of time you sent your Son,
born of a woman,
to be our Saviour.
He was wounded for our transgressions,
and bruised for our iniquities.
By his death he opened to us the way of freedom and peace.

Therefore we praise you,
joining with the heavenly chorus,
with prophets, apostles, and martyrs,
and with those in every generation
who have looked to you in hope,
to proclaim with them your glory,
in their unending hymn:

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might
heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed are you, Lord our God,
for sending us Jesus, the Christ,
who on the night he was handed over
to suffering and death,
took bread, said the blessing,
broke the bread, gave it to his friends, and said,
“Take this, and eat it:
this is my body which is given for you.
Do this for the remembrance of me.”

In the same way, after supper, he took the cup of wine;
he gave you thanks, and said,
“Drink this, all of you:
this is my blood of the new covenant,
which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.
Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me.

Gracious God,
we recall the death of your Son Jesus Christ,
we proclaim his resurrection and exaltation,
and we look with expectation
for his coming as Lord of all the nations.
We who have been redeemed by him,
and made a new people by water and the Spirit,
now bring you these gifts.

Send your Holy Spirit upon us
and upon this offering of your Church,
that we who eat and drink at this holy table
may share the divine life of Christ our Lord.

Pour out your Spirit upon the whole earth
and make it your new creation.
Gather your Church together
from the ends of the earth into your kingdom,
where peace and justice are revealed,
that we, with all your people,
of every language, race, and nation,
may share the banquet you have promised;
through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ,
all honour and glory are yours,
creator of all,
now and for ever. Amen.

We break this bread to share in the body of Christ.
We who are many are one body,

for we all share in the one bread.

While the bread is broken Agnus Dei is sung –

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.

My Jesus, I believe that you are present in the most Blessed Sacrament. I love You above all things and I desire to receive You into my soul. Since I cannot now receive You sacramentally, come spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You were already there, and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You. Amen.

Father, may we who have received this eucharist
live in the unity of your Holy Spirit,
that we may show forth his gifts to all the world.

We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Forth in thy Name, O Lord, I go,
my daily labour to pursue;
thee, only thee, resolved to know
in all I think or speak or do.

The task thy wisdom hath assigned,
O let me cheerfully fulfil;
in all my works thy presence find,
and prove thy good and perfect will.

Thee may I set at my right hand,
whose eyes mine inmost substance see,
and labour on at thy command,
and offer all my works to thee.

Give me to bear thy easy yoke,
and every moment watch and pray,
and still to things eternal look,
and hasten to thy glorious day.

For thee delightfully employ
whate’er thy bounteous grace hath given;
and run my course with even joy,
and closely walk with thee to heav’n.