After years of drought, this year’s winter and spring rains have brought almost unbearable beauty to Austin. I had gotten used to a minimal landscape, the trees calligraphic in their bare-branched simplicity – and then all of a sudden the world was shaggy and colorful and fragrant with blossoms on every branch. When I run in the neighborhood around the seminary, I find my head swiveling to take in a sweet smell or a brilliantly colored sidewalk garden.
In the midst of all this blooming, three of us realized that we had significant ordination anniversaries: Cynthia Kittredge 30 years, Kathleen Russell 25 years, and my 20, all adding up to a stunning 75 years of ordained life. We celebrated the occasion at noon Eucharist in Christ chapel on April 17, by remembering also the courageous women who went before us and made the path that we walk on. You can hear Kathleen’s beautiful sermon here. What follows is the Eucharistic prayer I wrote for the day, inspired both by the physical beauty that surrounds us here and by the beauty of the work that involves us day in and day out at Seminary of the Southwest: forming students to live and lead as Christ in all the contexts to which they are called.
The Lord is here.
God’s Spirit is with us.
Lift up your hearts.
We lift them to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to offer thanks and praise.
It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give you thanks most gracious God,
for in the very particular creation of this place you have surrounded us with signs of your generous love:
the motte, with its ancient oaks whose roots and stories go so much deeper than our own;
this hilltop, that challenges us to see the city of Austin with your eyes;
this chapel, always drawing us outward toward the cross.
We thank you for the people you have called to be here before us: for John Hines and all who were here in the beginning of this place, for students, staff, trustees, and faculty who have hallowed the seminary with their work. For Nelle Bellamy and the first women students. May we have the grace to fit our feet into the paths of forthrightness, courage, and service that they have left here for us to follow.
We thank you for bringing us together to share a common life, for habits of confession and forgiveness that bind us more surely to one another and to you.
And especially today, we give you thanks for the ministry of women in your church, for the women who called each of us into ministry, women who were models of faithfulness, strength, intelligence, humor, wisdom, and tenacity for us. Together we name our holy ones:
[Here the congregation adds the names of women who have been significant to them as models of discipleship and women who called them into ministry.]
And so we join our voices with those of the saints and angels, as we praise you:
Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.
We give thanks to you, O God, for your Word, calling women and men into holiness:
for the women who walked from Galilee to Jerusalem with their beloved teacher, who left families, husbands, and children to listen to Jesus’ teaching, to anoint him with fragrant oil, to stand stalwart at the cross, to witness the empty tomb, to proclaim their Savior’s resurrection.
Together with them,
We remember Christ’s death,
We proclaim his resurrection,
We await his coming in glory.
And we remember: at supper with his friends on the night when Jesus was betrayed, he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
Accept, O gracious God, our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.
✜ Send your Holy Spirit upon these gifts, that they may be for us the Body and Blood of your Son.
And grant that we who eat this bread and drink this cup may be filled with your life and goodness, ✜sanctified by your Holy Spirit to bear your life into the world.
All this we ask through your Son Jesus Christ. By him and with him and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory are yours, now and forever. Amen.
Let us pray as Jesus taught us:
Our Father in heaven…
Fraction
Invitation:
The gifts of God for the people of God.
May we who share these gifts be found in Christ and Christ in us.
Jane Patterson (@JaneLPatterson1) served on the Adjunct Faculty since 2010 and was appointed assistant professor of New Testament beginning June 1, 2013. In the Master of Divinity program, she teaches courses in Bible and Spiritual Formation; in the Center for Christian Ministry and Vocation, she teaches a course on the Bible as a resource for pastoral caregivers. Outside the seminary, she is co-director of a ministry called The WorkShop that guides laity in the use of the scriptures for discerning how to live faithfully in all aspects of daily life.
