Eucharistic prayer - July 2020

Thank you for your incredible life.

You announced a new kingdom at the margins of the world,
an offensive against the strongholds of oppression,
and the dawn of liberation.

You made a way in the wilderness.

You proclaimed good news of the kingdom,
brought healing and deliverance,
lived a life of nonviolent confrontation with the powers.

You restored social wholeness to the sick and 'impure'.
You tore down the boundaries of tribe, gender, skin tone, religion, disability and ill health.
You overturned the dynamics of status and honour
to make way for the outcast Jew and alien gentile.

With you there is no longer male or female, slave or free, Jew or gentile.
Racism, patriarchy and slavery have no place in your kingdom.
All are made in God’s image,
all are welcome,
all are included in your 'last as first' revolution.

Almost every ruling faction in society opposed you.
Your resistance was through loving enemies,
non violence,
story telling,
truth telling,
meals with the wrong people,
refusing to live under the domination of the powers and their way of ordering life.

You chose love and not fear
pursuing kingdom practice even at the cost of death.
Ultimately they did put you to death.
You were lynched and hung on a tree.

In a great mystery and a great reversal
you overcame the powers on the cross.
Three days later you were raised from death,
a sign that the powers have been defeated,
a sign of hope,
a sign of a future kingdom when all will be well.
You shattered the powers’ reign of death in history.

When we forget, help us to remember.
When we are blind help us to see.
When we are deaf help us to hear.
When we despair and are overwhelmed send your Spirit to comfort us.

You call us to a conversion of heart,
to turn away from empire, its seductions and iniquity.
This is not a call out of the world, but into an alternative social practice,
a community of resistance and healing,
gathering in homes and around the table with you.

You have given us a meal to remember you by
a meal to remember the ending of slavery 
and deliverance from the power of Pharaoh’s dream;
a meal in which you broke bread and drank wine -
your body broken for us,
your blood of a new relationship with God.

May our homes and our tables be open,
May they not have rigid boundaries.
May this table and this home today be such a place.
May we live from love and not fear.

We break bread and drink wine now to celebrate your life, death and resurrection.
And we look for the day when all slavery, all oppression and all domination is ended.
When we will be free at last
Your kingdom come
Amen