Allie Scott is the pastor of the Shared Covenant Ministries, a United Methodist regional ministry in East-Central Wisconsin. She recently shared on Facebook a communion liturgy she shared at SCM. It is reposted with permission below. Thanks Allie, very creative!
Seussical Communion Liturgy
Allie Scott
May the Lord be with you.
And also with you.
May your hearts be lightened and filled with God’s love!
We lift up our hearts and praise God above.
Let us give thanks to the Lord, God our Father.
We thank God and praise Him – it isn’t a bother!
It is right and good-ful; holy and wonderful; blessed and joyful;
To give thanks to you God, Almighty and faithful.
For it’s you that has given us this worship time,
Filled with laughter, some holy humor and rhyme.
It’s you that has shown us your holy love,
That you have sent from heaven high up above.
And so, with your angels who first sang your song,
We proclaim your goodness by singing along:
Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
Heaven is filled with your marvelous glory;
Earth is filled with your light.
Blessed is he who comes in your name –
“Hosanna on high!” we loudly proclaim.
Holy God, it’s your Son we remember today,
Jesus Christ, the anointed, whom we try to obey.
He encouraged the poor and freed the oppressed,
And taught us that you care about the distressed.
Through his suffering, death, and resurrection,
He taught that Your grace beats out our imperfection.
He ascended to Heaven and sits there beside you,
But still remains with us in all that we do.
On the night he was taken, he lifted some bread,
He blessed it, and broke it, and here’s what he said:
“Dear friends, this is my body to you that I give.
Take it; share it: in you I will live.
From now on, whenever, wherever you meet
Remember our time when this bread here you eat.”
When supper was over, he then took the cup,
With praise and thanksgiving he lifted it up:
“For the New Covenant, this is my blood;
A sign of the Lord’s continuing love.
For God has forgiven your every mistake,
So trust in God’s love when this drink you partake.”
May we offer ourselves for God’s greater glory,
And proclaim what we know of this fabulous story:
Christ Jesus: he died, but then rose again!
He’ll return here on earth: Hallelujah! Amen.
Holy Spirit, come down on us gathered here,
With this bread and this fruit of the vine please appear.
Make holy this food, fill us with your grace,
So we proclaim gospel to the whole human race.
We love you, Lord Jesus, we’ll shout out again
Your glory and honor:
Amen and Amen!
That…. is…. awesome 🙂
FYI: The link to Shared Covenant Ministries is broken: http://www.scmofwi.org/
Thanks Chris! Fixed.
I am not a fan of this at all; it is evocative of the dreadful Seusscharist that was visited on an Episcopal parish in Michigan a few years back. John Wesley compiled a wonderful recession of the Book of Common Prayer; why can’t we use that? The liturgy should be a solemn, dignified encounter with God, who created us, and should be approached with fear and trembling. We must not forget that Christ will sit in judgement over us, and we will have to account for our actions; God is love, but also a consuming fire, and the liturgy should reflect this. I think John Wesley understood this, which is why he imposed strict moral standards on the membership of the Methodist societies; his goal was to prepare people to meet their maker, by means of entire sanctification, which if pursued aggressively could lead to the kind of ecstatic realization of divine love that John Wesley had in a small Moravian chapel in Aldersgate. The reason why the UMC is dying is because it has lost that real edge; instead of circuit preachers calling Christians to repentance, preaching in cemeteries with tombstones as pulpits, in the manner of Wesley, we’ve become a complacent mainline denomination that enjoys cute and contrived variations on the liturgy (the substitution of St. Thomas Sunday with Holy Humor Sunday is another example of UMC fail).
I almost wish the UMC would so solace itself and reform as a para church organization in the manner of the original Methodists, working to revive the faith in the other dying mainline denominations. In a certain sense, the early Methodists were like Anglican Dominican friars, freely crossing diocesan boundaries and compensating for the laxity of latitudinarian bishops and indifferent rectors who owed their benefices to simony.
I believe the UMC is “dying” because of thinking like this. John Wesley was, if nothing else, contextual in his ministry. To be anything else is to be non-Wesleyan.
Don’t listen to this sourpuss. God has an amazing sense of humor and delights in us as we enjoy worship and play together. I am leading a Holy Humor Sunday (in the united Methodist Church) with communion and God willing we will leave feeling closer to God and closer to each other!
People: “Lord, grant me a joyful heart and a holy sense of humor. Please give me the gift of faith, to be renewed and shared with others each day. Teach me to live this moment only, looking neither to the past with regret, nor to the future with apprehension. Let love be my guide, and my life a prayer.”
Leader: “Go in laughter; go in grace. Keep the Lord in your heart and a smile on your face.”
I will be 70 on June 5th, and I love this! Awesome!
God help us – many of God’s children have lost their sense of joy! Save us from the error of forgetting that our shared history was created in ‘revolutionary’ thinking – such earth shaking memories are easily placed into a museum to preserve rather that in continuing new contexts to continue.
I would love to see this illustrated to a book for children- all of us- to feast on these joyful words.