Find the Alleluias

 

The whole service was about finding alleluias all around, 'Praise the Lord' in everything we do. So we had eight items of food, each item beginning with a letter of the word Alleluia

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Apple

Loaf

Lemon

Eggs

Leek

Unsalted peanuts

Iced gems

Angel cake

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Then Hymns:  (these are from CH4):

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Abide with me 580
Lord of all being 125
Love divine 519
Eternal Father strong to save 260
Let us with a gladsome voice 93
Unto us a child is born 331
Immortal invisible 132
All creatures of our God and King 147

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And finally famous folk:

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Abba
Lady Gaga

Leonardo DiCaprio

Emma Watson

Louis Tomlinson

Usain Bolt

Idris Elba

Adele

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Then we told the story of creation finding all the alleluias holding up posters with the words that are underlined here, then rearranged to make an 'alleluia' across the whole of creation. The point being Thanksgiving is all around us, in the food we share, the people we share the world with, the worship we offer and the whole of creation.

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In the Beginning...

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...there was a huge empty space, so big no one can imagine just how big. It seemed to go on and on and on. God, who was the only thing there at the beginning, had an idea and did you know… something strange happens when God has ideas: the ideas become real. God’s idea was to create a universe, and pop, the universe was created.

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But it didn’t stop there, the ideas kept flowing, planets and stars and colour and sound and light and atmosphere and hydrogen and oxygen and gold and iron and sulphur and so it went on until God had the idea of trees and fruit and especially apples and there is a whole story attached to apples.

And God said to everything God had made: care for all of this. Look after the land. Share it with everything. Be fair. Be fruitful. Be good. Be marvellous.

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Of course it wasn’t easy. Trying to live together has never been easy, making space for everything that has been created. Added to that humans, one of God’s creations found it hard to till the earth. You had to work hard to grow what needed to be grown. And sometimes it was hard to share it. Some wanted more, some wanted to own it for themselves. People fell out over whose land it was.

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But so amazing was the earth, that it has always been able to produce enough for all. When we learn to share, all of us gets enough and there is even some left over. It doesn’t always work like that but it is what the whole story of creation is about.

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This is what love looks like because that is how it all started. God the Lord, used love to create the universe, God the Lord, loved it into being, then loved us into being, and then loved the land and the earth and the apples and the fruit into being. Then God the Lord said, use love to share it all, to look after it and forget no one. This is what love looks like: you can see it all across creation and at harvest. All of this is what love looks like: alleluia

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