Covenant God,

we bless and thank you for the gift of the meal

that Jesus commanded us to share.

We thank you for this sign of your presence with us

and your love for the world that Jesus came to redeem.

We long to feast with Jesus in the fullness of the coming kingdom.

May our worship today deepen our anticipation of that glory. Amen.

What shall we return to the Lord

for all his bounty to us?

—from Psalm 116:12-14, NRSV

Christ shows his self-giving love by washing his disciples’ feet.

Surely we do not live up to Christ’s example.

We confess now our sin and our need of a Savior.

O Jesus, our ever-living Teacher, Friend, and Master:

we have heard your new command to love one another;

we have seen your example of how to serve humbly—you, their leader and Lord,

bent down to wash your disciples’ feet;

we have received bread and wine, signs of your presence and power within us.

By your Spirit, prompt us now, we pray,

to do as you command, to imitate your willingness to serve,

and to live as your children, fed and nourished for the journey by Jesus, our Lord.

Educated at Pembroke College and Ridley Hall, Cambridge, Timothy Dudley-Smith (b. 1926) has served the Church of England since his ordination in 1950. He has occupied a number of church posi­tions, including parish priest in the diocese of Southwark (1953-1962), archdeacon of Norwich (1973-1981), and bishop of Thetford, Norfolk, from 1981 until his retirement in 1992. He also edited a Christian magazine, Crusade, which was founded after Billy Graham's 1955 London crusade. Dudley-Smith began writing comic verse while a student at Cambridge; he did not begin to write hymns until the 1960s. Many of his several hundred hymn texts have been collected in Lift Every Heart: Collected Hymns 1961-1983 (1984), Songs of Deliverance: Thirty-six New Hymns (1988), and A Voice of Singing (1993). The writer of Christian Literature and the Church (1963), Someone Who Beckons (1978), and Praying with the English Hymn Writers (1989), Dudley-Smith has also served on various editorial committees, including the committee that published Psalm Praise (1973).

 

Richard Van Oss (b. 1953) was educated at Grand Rapids Junior College and Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He served as music director from 1973 to 1985 at Maple Avenue Christian Reformed Church and started work in 1985 at the First Reformed Church, Holland, Michigan. Since 1975 he has been a music and classroom teacher at the Ravenna (Michigan) Elementary School. Van Oss also served on the committee that compiled the children's hymnal Songs for LIFE (1994).