Prelude — A Flower Is Not a Flower
Ryuichi Sakamoto · piano
Sakamoto took his title from an eighth-century poem by Bai Juyi: “A flower, and yet not a flower; a mist, and yet not a mist. It comes at midnight and leaves at dawn.” A melody so spare it seems barely there, yet hard to forget once heard. Is anything only what it appears to be? What might it become?
Introit — One is the Body / Sing a New Song
organ
We begin the morning as scattered seeds on the earth, and something happens… water arrives, nutrients are absorbed, and a new body forms. And once we have grown large enough, others seek us out for shelter.
Hymn of Praise — For the Fruit of All Creation
EAST ACKLAM · HPP #287, vv. 1 & 3
The hymn text keeps circling back to a single refrain — “Thanks be to God” — as if gratitude was a habit of attention. This is a hymn for people willing to find and hold that gratitude.
Anthem — The Lord’s Prayer
Jojo Mead, solo
“Thy kingdom come.” It is easy to hear that as a request for something distant, but the prayer’s power is in its scale: daily bread, small debts, the ordinary temptations of a single day. If this morning has a thesis, it is here — that the enormous arrives dressed as the ordinary.
Hymn of Reflection — Hymn of Promise
Natalie Sleeth · HPP #474, all
Sleeth wrote this in early 1985, pondering a line from T. S. Eliot: “In our end is our beginning.” Every image in this hymn is a promise hidden inside a plain container — “unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.”
Offertory — The Gift of Love
O WALY WALY
The mustard seed gives everything it has to become a tree. This is the sound of that becoming — what you offer today, growing into something larger than the gesture.
Closing Hymn — May the Lord Bless You
TUNE: EDELWEISS
A blessing, like a flower, may not look like much, but it’s designed for travel: you receive it here so you can set it down somewhere else, for someone who wasn’t in this room.
May the Lord, mighty God,
bless and keep you forever.
Grant you peace, perfect peace,
strength for every endeavor.
Lift up your eyes and seek God’s face,
seek God’s grace forever.
May the Lord, mighty God,
bless and keep you forever.
Postlude — Shower the People
James Taylor · Jojo Mead, solo
“Shower the people you love with love / show them the way that you feel.” No heroics, just the daily, vulnerable act of letting what is inside you become visible. Which is, come to think of it, what everything this morning has been about: the hidden made manifest, the small made generous, the inward turned outward. Sing along with us!