Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed!  Alleluia!
 
What a beautiful day!  Easter celebrates new life and even here in St. Augustine seeing flowers and trees and plants come alive again after winter is one symbol of that new life.  But today we celebrate more than flowers and budding trees.  Today we celebrate the power of God to bring new life out of death, to give us joy instead of weeping, to empower our lives into wholeness after being broken.  It is a joyous Easter Day!

 … I guess you are wondering.  Why, if the Passion Gospel is over two pages long did I choose to only read two verses?  The answer is simple … today is Palm Sunday.  It is the day we remember Jesus entering Jerusalem at the beginning of Holy Week.  Jesus rode in on a donkey with people waving palms along the way.  Later he overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple.  He had a last meal with his disciples.  He was arrested, tried, mocked, scourged, whipped, and hung on a cross to die.  And then … three days later … he overcame death and rose from the dead.  It all started because he chose to go to Jerusalem during the Passover festival.  It all started when Jesus … while in Caesarea Philippi … the headwaters of the Jordan River in which Jesus had been baptized … it all started when Jesus turned his sight to Jerusalem.  Today, he arrived and rode a donkey into the city.

On August 28, 1565, Pedro Menedez first spotted the land that was to become the City of St. Augustine.  This City was named because that sighting … August 28 … was the Feast of Saint Augustine of Hippo, the Fifth Century theologian that formed many of the ideas behind Western Christianity.  One of those ideas is the Doctrine of Original Sin … that all humans are born in a state of sin, and that all humanity lives in a state of sinfulness … a state of perpetual separation from God.

LITURGY
Part TWO
St. Cyprian’s 3/6/16
The Rev. Deena Galantowicz
 
Worship is THE most important thing we do as a church.  Our Liturgy, our worship structure, dates to pre-Christian practices in the synagogues. Last week and this week we are following along in The Book of Common Prayer, which we are using all through this church season of Lent, but there are other forms of worship that have also been authorized for use by the Episcopal Church, including some familiar to you if you have been worshipping here at St. Cyprian’s for a while.  For example, in some other seasons of the Church Year we use some wonderfully inspirational Prayers from the Moravian Book of Worship and from the New Zealand Prayer Book.

The gospel reading from Luke begins this way:
Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.  And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them."  So Jesus told them this parable: "There was a man who had two sons.”