Holy Week Services
A Prayer for Holy Week
Prayer: Promissory Language that Breaks Despair
You are the God of all things new.
You lurk on Saturday night in silence
just as you lurked
at the edge of that old deportation.
And then you leapt up on Easter morning with new life,
just as you enunciated homecoming for our ancient people.
You refuse the power of death
and have broken open our displacement with new possibility.
We give thanks for your promises you have kept among us,
and for your promises still under way,
promises of a new heaven
a new earth,
a new Jerusalem,
and a new covenant.
We watch with eager longing
for your newness
that will outrun all our losses.
Emancipate us from our anxiety to watch for your gifts of newness
and to receive the strange forms
that your new beginnings may take among us.
At the far edge of our exile,
just as the new day breaks,
we will shout with glad elation,
“He is risen indeed.”
--Walter Brueggemann, Cincinnati 2011
Join St. Paul's Cathedral, Des Moines for Diocesan Holy Week Services
Maundy Thursday – April 1
7:00 pm Holy Eucharist and Stripping of Altar
Upcoming Ordinations
Agape Cafe at Old Brick: Celebrating 28 Years
Agape Cafe -- a diocesan ministry out of Old Brick in Iowa City for over 28 years, serving a hot, made-to-order breakfast weekly to their guests. The cafe is open to all; it has become a community of those in need of food, friendship, respect, and welcome. Agape Cafe is celebrating their anniversary by launching a fundraising campaign with up to a $10,000 diocesan match. To learn more about Agape Cafe, visit their website: https://www.agapecafe.org/
As a diocesan ministry, Agape Cafe appears on the Gifts List on the diocesan donations page -- along with the Bishop's Discretionary Fund, Companion Dioceses above-and-beyond gifts for greatest need, and others. To see a fuller Gifts List and support one of our many diocesan ministries by online donation, visit https://www.iowaepiscopal.org/donate
