It’s the third Sunday after Epiphany and the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We’re using material from the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Service to celebrate this together. Our hymns, 3 led by our virtual choir, and 1 led in-person on guitar, all have a strong unity theme. Our First Reading challenges the scope of our caring – how big our vision is of those our Lord loves and wants to love through us. Our Children’s Time focusses on the meaning of the First Reading through the song “Hey, Jonah!” which has the same tune as “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.” Our Gospel encourages us to experience the unity of working together with all our might to “fish for people,” casting the net of light and love that we ourselves have experienced scoop us up from the overwhelming waters and place us in the boat with our Lord and our fellow “fishers.” Norman is officiating and Fergus preaching. Dan is sharing our First Reading, and Dinah is leading us in the Prayers of the People. These Prayers begin with a Litany from the World Day of Prayer Ecumenical Service. They conclude with two Prayers in Response to COVID-19, one from India and the other from South Africa, that remind us both of the global nature of COVID-19, and of the global nature of our Faith, our unity with brothers and sisters throughout the world. The Archbishop of Cape Town will be offering the latter on video. We then move to sharing Spiritual Communion together. Our namesake wrote in 1 Corinthians 10:17, “we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” United with one another, and the rest of the Church throughout the world and throughout time, we feed on our Lord by faith with thanksgiving. Then, our Liturgy ends, and the service begins, as we go forth to united in our mission to share the Good News, spreading the light of love wherever there is darkness through what we say and do.
Today’s Service of Holy Eucharist will be livestreamed on our main Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/stpaulscalgary) at 9:30 am. Following the service, the video will be posted on our YouTube Channel, and a link to the service will be added here. Please download the Order of Service if you would like to follow along.
Permission to reprint, podcast, and/or stream the music in this service obtained from:
(a) ONE LICENSE with license # A-713985, and/or
(b) CCLI with Streaming License # 20351479.
All rights reserved.