Sunday, May 25, 2025:
Join Us Today for our Emmaus Celebration at Christ Church United Methodist or on Zoom: All are Welcome!
In Person in Classroom 8 at Christ Church United Methodist
1717 Yulupa Ave, Santa Rosa,
Passcode: 1234
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Passcode: 1234
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Emmaus Liturgy for May 25, 2025:
Welcome:
With his self-giving love, Jesus showed us the face of the unseen, divine Mystery so that in his humanity we could sense, taste, enjoy and share in the eternity of God. We experience God in the living Christ as love because he is at the heart of our personal and cosmic life: where Christ is, there we are also.
Can we interpret this revelation of Christ as Love in a more expansive time frame, from a cosmic, evolutionary perspective? If we look at the immense journey of the Universe, we are overcome with astonishment by the innumerable ways the Cosmos invented to expand, connect, and shape life. How could it happen, this incessant and ongoing creative process from the initial formation of particles to the enormous spirals of galaxies, from the lowliest bacteria to the highest hominid, to the amazing overabundance of flying, swimming, smelling, singing, barking, mating, nursing, fighting, praying, and dying that surround us?
What we have discovered is that the Universe and Earth are alive, they bring to life, and they evolve. Earth organizes herself, spins, interweaves, acts, and generates all the lives and the rhythms of the living beings. Her wholeness and grandeur is present in each particular event, in each individual creature, in our personal and collective self. Just consider how the Earth built a way for sentient and sensuous life, creating an atmosphere with the right concentration of oxygen—neither more nor less—so as to provide the potential nest to host all the animal species.
Then the ebullient, restless Universe opened another, more complex way of life—through humans—to reflect on itself, to arise the quest for meaning, beauty, truth, purpose, and wonder. Think of the tremendous labor of all living forms that have adventurously traveled to arrive finally at us, opening the way of conscious evolution.
Opening Prayer:
O Magnificence around us, O Holiness everywhere, O radiance within us; now is the daylight upon us. Over the turning world your winds advance. The cities waken one by one, the villages arise, and your love talks in the squares. You are always the balance against our suffering. You are the trumpet of our peace. Blessed are you, our Lord, forever and ever. Amen
OPENING SONG: Somewhere to Begin - Sara Thompsen
People say to me, “Oh, you gotta be crazy!
How can you Sing (Dream) in times like these?
Don’t you read the news? Don’t you know the score?
How can you Sing (Dream) when so many others grieve?”
People say to me, “What kind of fool believes
That a Song (Dream) will make a difference in the end?”
By way of a reply, I say a fool such as I
Who sees a Song (Dream) as somewhere to begin
A Song (Dream) is somewhere to begin
The search for something worth believing in
If changes are to come there are things that must be done
And a Song (Dream) is somewhere to begin
People say to me, “Oh, you gotta be crazy!
How can you Love in times like these?
Don’t you read the news? Don’t you know the score?
How can you Love when so many others grieve?
People say to me, “What kind of fool believes
that Love will make a difference in the end?
By way of a reply, I say a fool such as I
Who sees Loves as somewhere to begin.
Love is somewhere to begin.
The search for something worth believing in
if changes are to come, there are things that must be done
And Love is somewhere , and a Dream is somewhere, and a Song is somewhere to begin.
FIRST READING: On the Necessity of Snow Angels for the Well-Being of the World
Wherever there is snow, I go,
making angels along the way.
Luckily angels have no gender
and are easier to make
than you might think.
All you have to do is let go,
fall on your back,
look up at the sky as if in prayer.
Move your arms like wings,
Move your legs to make a robe.
Rise carefully so as to do no harm,
and walk away.
All the angels along the path behind you
will sparkle in sunset, gleam under the stars.
In spring the angels will be invisible
but really they are still there,
their outlines remain on the earth
where you put them, waiting
for you and the snow to return.
Keep Walking
towards the next beautiful thing you will do – Grace Butcher
SECOND READING: Let this vertical Power
Let this vertical Power
This inter cosmic influx
This Divine intervention
Cut right through
Your horizontal cycle
Your life
Your endless incarnations
moving forwards….
Let it break the cycle
Of endless repetition
Sameness in a new coat
Lameness as to Higher Purpose
For struggling in the footsteps
Of those you were before this
Is what keeps the struggle going!
Allow the Supernatural
To break open
That which is natural
And lift up your Being
Into the vastness
Of Interconnectedness
Into the Field of Love. – Viveka Weddepohl
Third Reading: Earthworms
Imagine. The only thing that
God requires of them
is a persistent, wriggling, moving forward,
passing the earth through
the crinkled tube of their bodies
in a motion less like chewing
than like song.
Everything they encounter
goes through them,
as if sunsets, drug store clerks,
diesel fumes and sidewalks
were to move through our very centers
and emerge subtly different
for having fed us — looser somehow,
more open to the possibility of life.
They say the job of angels
is to sing to God in serried choirs.
Perhaps. But most jobs
aren’t so glamorous.
Mostly the world depends upon
the silent chanting underneath our feet.
To every grain that enters: “Welcome.”
To every parting mote: “Be blessed.” – Lynn Ungar
Gospel: John 13: 31-33a, 34-35
When Judas had left them, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.
“My children, I am with you only a little longer. I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. As I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Homily:
Now enter Jesus, a Jew who not only understood human nature but even told the Samaritan woman at the well, who was smarting from the Jewish dislike for Samaritans, that he was aware of her five husbands and of her live-in companion who was not her husband. Thanks to the love of Jesus, cultural, religious, and moral containers are all transcended in favor of a deeper, wider, and richer access to life, and life in abundance.
Extraordinarily enough, even Jesus’ suffering and death are not interpreted as an end but rather believed as a new beginning, a new consciousness of the living God that is no more an external presence but is discovered as a raising force at the heart of the human and of creation.
The life-enhancing power of love that the disciples met in Jesus is now acting, breathing in our lives, in our pulsing truth, and has become the ever-expanding, creative, healing power of our lives. We are the living stones in the sight of God so that, as Richard Rohr says, “The soul is God’s “I AM” continued in [you],” the part of you that “already knows, desires, and truly seeks God.”
Teilhard de Chardin says, “We live in an entangled universe of inseparability where everything is connected to everything else, including God….I see in the world a mysterious product of completion and fulfillment for the Absolute Being himself.”
Can we interpret this commandment to “Love one another as I have loved you” in a more expansive time frame, from a cosmic, evolutionary perspective?
Imagine your best friend from your early 20’s has come to visit, and you’ve just shared a wonderful meal, drank some wine, and your explaining Emmaus. How do you answer when they ask you how you understand God, the Cosmos and yourself in a relational creation?
What do we bring to the table this evening?
Offertory Song: All I ask of you
The Meal Prayer:
East Side: May we love ever more, be amazed evermore, be confounded evermore.
West side: May we commit ourselves to love, amazement and action.
East side: May we set our hearts ablaze, enough to make us whole again.
West side: May we be the loving fire we wish to see in the world.
All: We are Spirit and Life and the searing world of liberation. From the inside out...from the roots branching upwards…from the heart, to thought, to word, to action. Through life’s trials and hardships, we can arise beautiful and free. – Julia Butterfly-Hill
Preface Dialogue:
Ed: God is within us and God is among us.
All: Amen, indeed it is so.
Ed: Let us lift up our hearts.
All: We lift them into the Mystery
Ed: Let us be thankful for all the ways in which we feel God’s love.
All: It is good to be grateful.
Dan: We give thanks for Jesus of Nazareth, who loved so greatly and taught so clearly and courageously that he was able to set people free from images and ideas and religious practices that bound them into fear and a false sense of separation from the Spirit of all life. Through him we have learned how our loving is a sharing in the life of this Spirit. In him we see the Spirit of Life challenging all of us to make its presence in earth more viable.
Blessing of the Bread and Wine:
Ed: On the night before He died, Jesus was at table with His friends. He took bread, He gave thanks to God, He blessed it, He broke it, and shared it with His friends and said:
All: This is my body, shared with you.
Dan: As supper was ending, Jesus took the cup of wine, He gave thanks, He gave it to His friends and said, “This is the cup of My love for you and for all creation.”
All: Go forth and be my hands and be my feet; carry my love into the world.
Ed: Let us proclaim the Mystery of Our Faith.
All: For it is Through Christ. With Christ, and in Christ, in unity with the Holy Spirit that all honor and glory are yours, now and forever. Amen.
Dan: Now together, as one community, let us pray in the Spirit of our brother Jesus.
All: O God, Mother and Father of Us All,
Like your son, Jesus of Nazareth, who blessed a variety of human relationships rooted in love, may we have the wisdom and grace to foster, strengthen, and support all loving relationships and all families.
May your command to love one another as you have loved us, O God, cause us to pay heed to the movement of your Holy Spirit, who calls us in the here and now to embrace the rainbow of loving human relationships that reflect your love for all of humanity in its wonderful diversity
May we speak out courageously when others try to pass laws that exclude, diminish, or demonize other persons and their families because of who they are and whom they love.
May we take to heart what we know to be true: that where love and charity prevail, you are to be found. We ask this, as always, through your Many Holy Names. Amen – Bernard Schlager
Invitation to Eucharist:
Ed: Everyone is welcome to this table. The Spirit, whom the Universe cannot contain is present to us in this bread. She, who redeems us and calls us by name, now meets us in this cup. So come, take this bread, drink this wine. In them the Spirit comes to us so that we can become one in the Spirit.
COMMUNION SONG: Let My Love Be Heard - VOCES8
Angels where you soar
Up to God’s own light
Take my own lost bird on your hearts tonight;
And as grief once more Mounts to heaven and sings
Let my love be heard.
Angels where you soar
Up to God’s own light
Take my own lost bird
On your hearts tonight;
And as grief once more
Mounts to heaven and sings
Let my love
be heard,
Let my love be heard,
Whispering in your wings…Ahhh
Let my love be heard…Ahh
Angels where you soar… Ahhh…ahhhh
Let my love be heard.
CLOSING PRAYER: All
May we be always hungry and thirsty for Love.
May our hearts and minds be soft and receptive
To God’s abundant life.
May our bodies have open doors and windows
To welcome the approaching, unknown future.
May we welcome, bless, and share this Universe,
This Earth, this time,
As a lavish banquet of Love God is setting.
Dan: And the people of this beloved Emmaus community say,
All: Amen.
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