Here you'll find the Easter morning liturgy, along with links to the scripture readings and sermon in audio and text versions.
Call to Worship Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24 Adapted
One: O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever!
All: Let Israel say, “His steadfast love endures forever.”
One: The Lord is our strength and our might; he has become our salvation.
All: There are glad songs of victory in the tents of the righteous:
One: for we shall not die, but we shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.
All: The Lord has treated his servant severely, but he did not give him over to death.
One: So we thank him that he has become our salvation.
All: The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
One: This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.
All: This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
One: Let us greet one another in this joy: “The peace of Christ be with you.”
All: And also with you.
One: Let us pray.
Prayer of Invocation (in unison; muted)
Risen Lord, on this strange Easter morning, we pray from a place that is yet waiting for release. Practicing physical distancing, we confess we sometimes feel entombed, often feel profoundly cut off from so much that is dear in our lives. For this, our hope in Resurrection is all the greater, and our need for your resurgent presence is all the deeper.
Persist among us, we pray. Insist upon us—that we might not fall for the deceptions of the world, its shallow hopes and palliative solutions; that we might instead persevere in your commissioning us to be an Easter people. Present yourself as ever one of the choices we might decide upon while we begin imagining what of our lives, having come apart, we might put back together, we might build anew.
Forgive us our lack of imagination. Forgive us our small-minded insistence that the best we can hope for is what is as it is. Forgive us our blithe acceptance of sin, of domination structures that grant social order but do so at high cost. Forgive us our acceptance, which surely is a sign that someone else pays that cost. Forgive us all the ways in which we violate
and defy your good will, in thought, word, and deed; in what we have done and what we have left undone. We recount these things, personal and systemic, now.
Silence.
Having walked with you know through this Holy Week, having arrived at this, its end. which is a new beginning, we pray that we might ever walk in your Way, that we might live out the “Yes” that is the Resurrection, which is “No” to the powers and principalities that calculate, exploit, deceive, and lull. Shake us from this lulling. Awaken us to your press for justice. Help us to rise and to live the life that truly is life, now and forever. In Christ, who awaits us at the end, amidst your eternal glory and at rest at your right hand, and who also meets us on the way, that we might walk true to his form, we pray. Amen.
