Wed. morning Jul. 1
Opening response
O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
Prayer of thanksgiving
Blessed are you, Sovereign God, creator of all, to you be glory and praise forever. You founded the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands. In the fullness of time, you made us in your image, and in these last days you have spoken to us in your Son Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. As we rejoice in the gift of your presence among us, let the light of your love always shine in our hearts, your Spirit ever renew our lives, and your praises ever be on our lips.
Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Blessed be God forever.
The night has passed, and the day lies open before us; let us pray with one heart and mind.
Silence is kept.
As we rejoice in the gift of this new day, so may the light of your presence, O God, set our hearts on fire with love for you; now and forever.
Amen.
Hymn
O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing
Confession of Sin
Let us admit to God the sin which always confronts us.
A time of silence and self-examination may be kept.
Almighty God, patient and of great goodness: I confess to you, I confess with my whole heart my neglect and forgetfulness of your commandments, my wrong doing, thinking, and speaking; the hurts I have done to others, and the good I have left undone. O God, forgive me, for I have sinned against you; and raise me to newness of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
May the God of love and power forgive us and free us from our sins, heal and strengthen us by his Spirit, and raise us to new life in Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Psalm 119:105-128
𝙍: Deal with Your servant according to Your mercy.
Your word is a lamp unto my feet
and a light unto my path.
I have sworn and I will confirm it,
that I will keep Your righteous judgments.
I am exceedingly afflicted;
revive me, O LORD, according to Your word.
Accept, I beseech You, the freewill offerings of my mouth, O LORD,
and teach me Your judgments.
𝙍: Deal with Your servant according to Your mercy.
My life is continually in my hand,
yet I do not forget Your law.
The wicked have laid a snare for me,
yet I have not strayed from Your precepts.
Your testimonies have I taken as my heritage forever,
for they are the rejoicing of my heart.
I have inclined my heart to perform Your statutes forever,
even to the end.
I hate the double-minded,
but Your law do I love.
You are my hiding place and my shield;
I hope in Your word.
Depart from me, you evildoers,
that I may keep the commandments of my God.
Uphold me according to Your word, that I may live,
and let me not be ashamed in my hope.
𝙍: Deal with Your servant according to Your mercy.
Hold me up, that I may be safe
and that I may observe Your statutes continually.
You reject all those who stray from Your statutes,
for their deceit is falsehood.
You destroy all the wicked of the earth like dross;
therefore I love Your testimonies.
My flesh trembles for fear of You,
and I am afraid of Your judgments.
𝙍: Deal with Your servant according to Your mercy.
I have done justice and righteousness;
let not the proud oppress me.
Guarantee the well-being of Your servant;
let not the proud oppress me.
My eyes fail from watching for Your salvation,
and for the fulfillment of Your righteous word.
Deal with Your servant according to Your mercy,
and teach me Your statutes.
𝙍: Deal with Your servant according to Your mercy.
I am Your servant; give me understanding,
so that I may know Your testimonies.
It is time for You, O LORD, to act,
for they have broken Your law.
Therefore I love Your commandments
more than gold, more than fine gold.
Therefore I esteem all Your precepts to be right;
I hate every false way.
Glory to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning, is now,
and will be forever. Amen.
𝙍: Deal with Your servant according to Your mercy.
Psalm prayer
O God, save us from ourselves, from double standards and divided hearts, and give us light and life in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Old Testament reading
Judges 15:1-16:3
After a while, during the wheat harvest, Samson went to visit his wife, taking a young goat. He said, “I’m going in to my wife in her bedroom,” but her father would not let him go in.
Her father said, “I thought that you thoroughly hated her, so I gave her to your best man. Is not her younger sister better than she? Please, let her be your wife instead.”
Samson said to them, “This time I cannot be blamed by the Philistines when I do them harm.” Samson went and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches and turned the foxes tail to tail and put a torch between each pair of tails. He set fire to the torches and sent the foxes into standing grain of the Philistines. He burned the harvested grain, standing grain, vineyards, and olive trees.
The Philistines asked, “Who did this?” They said, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because the Timnite took the bride of Samson and gave her to his best man.”
So the Philistines went up and burned her and her father with fire. Samson said to them, “Because you have done this, I will take revenge on you, and afterwards I will stop.” He struck them down with a mighty blow, then went to live in a cave in Etam Rock.
Then the Philistines went up and set up camp in Judah. They deployed against Lehi. The men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?”
They said, “It is to take Samson prisoner that we have come up, to do to him what he did to us.”
So three thousand men from Judah went to the cave in Etam Rock and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines are ruling us? Why have you done this to us?”
He said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.”
They said to him, “We have come to take you prisoner, to give you into the hands of the Philistines.”
Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you will not attack me.”
They said to him, “No, we will bind you securely and give you into their hands, but we will not kill you.” They bound him with two new ropes and took him away from the rock. He came to Lehi, and the Philistines shouted as they approached him. Then the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him. The ropes on his arms became like burned flax and the ties on his hands dissolved. Then he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out his hand and took it, and with it struck down a thousand men.
Samson said,
“With a jawbone of a donkey,
heaps upon heaps.
With a jawbone of a donkey
I have slain a thousand men.”
When he finished speaking, he threw the jawbone away and called that place Ramath Lehi.
He was very thirsty, and he called out to the LORD, “You gave this great deliverance through Your servant, but now may I die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” So God split open the basin at Lehi, and water flowed out of it. He drank, was refreshed, and revived. Because of this he called the place En-hakkore, which is in Lehi to this day.
Samson judged Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines.
Samson went to Gaza. There he saw a prostitute and spent the night with her. The people of Gaza were told, “Samson has come here!” So they surrounded him and laid in wait for him all night at the city gate. They kept quiet all night, thinking, “In the morning light we will kill him.”
Samson lay until midnight, then at midnight he got up. He grabbed the doors of the city gate and the two gateposts and pulled them out along with the bar. He put them on his shoulder and brought them to the top of the mountain near Hebron.
Silence may be kept.
New Testament reading
Luke 18:15-30
They also brought infants to Him that He might bless them. When the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to Him and said, “Permit the little children to come to Me, and do not hinder them. For to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”
A certain ruler asked Him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good, except God alone. You know the commandments: Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and your mother. ”
He said, “All these I have kept since my youth.”
When Jesus heard this, He said to him, “Yet you lack one thing. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. And come, follow Me.”
When he heard this, he became very sorrowful; for he was very rich. When Jesus saw that he became very sorrowful, He said, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Those who heard this said, “Who then can be saved?”
He said, “What is impossible with men is possible with God.”
Peter said, “Look, we have left everything and followed You.”
He said to them, “Truly, I tell you, there is no man who has left his home or parents or brothers or wife or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who shall not receive many times more in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life.”
Silence may be kept.
The Benedictus (The Song of Zechariah)
Luke 1:68-79
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
for He has visited and redeemed His people,
and has raised up a horn of salvation for us
in the house of His servant David,
as He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets of long ago,
that we should be saved from our enemies
and from the hand of all who hate us,
to perform the mercy promised to our fathers
and to remember His holy covenant,
the oath which He swore to our father Abraham,
to grant us that we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies,
might serve Him without fear,
in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our lives.
And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Highest;
for you will go before the presence of the Lord to prepare His ways,
to give knowledge of salvation to His people
by the remission of their sins,
through the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise from on high has visited us;
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Glory to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning, is now,
and will be forever. Amen.
Brief silence.
The Apostle’s Creed
Let us unite in this historic confession of the Christian faith:
I believe in God,
the Father Almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ,
his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the
right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge
the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
Amen.
Intercession and thanksgiving
Prayers may be offered for:
the day and its tasks
the world and its needs
the church and her life
Prayers may include the following concerns:
The social services
All who work in the criminal justice system
Victims and perpetrators of crime
The work of aid agencies throughout the world
Those living in poverty or under oppression
Other intercessions and supplications may be offered as the Holy Spirit leads.
Response
Father, hear our prayer,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Silence may be kept.
Collect of the day
O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that with you as our ruler and guide we may so pass through things temporal that we lose not our hold on things eternal; grant this, heavenly Father, for our Lord Jesus Christ's sake, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen.
The Lord’s Prayer
As our Savior taught us, so we pray
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
forever. Amen.
Conclusion
The Lord bless us, and preserve us from all evil, and keep us in eternal life.
Amen.