These are resources for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity (the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost) on Sunday, August 16, 2020. The resources are gathered from a variety of sources and, while assembled mainly for The Anglican Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, on the island of Crete in Greece, others may find them useful.
The German edition of Thomas Mann’s four volume novel Joseph and His Brothers, written between 1926 and 1942 in Germany, Switzerland, and California. He had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 for such works as Tonio Krüger, The Magic Mountain, and Death in Venice, but Mann considered the tetralogy his greatest work. It is a retelling of the biblical story from Genesis, informed by facts and speculation derived from archaeology and non-biblical histories. It is not accidental that as Mann wrote the work he found himself in exile from Nazi Germany. It has been translated into English twice, in 1948 and 2005. Rumour has it he started it as a short story.
Read
The readings appointed for August 16, 2020, according to the Church of England Common Worship Lectionary, and the Revised Common Lectionary, are Genesis 45:1-15, Psalm 133, Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32, and Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28. At St Thomas’s we will use the reading from Genesis, the Psalm, and the short version of the gospel.
Share
You can join us via Zoom by clicking the link below, or enter the information at right into your Zoom app: Meeting ID: 850 4483 9927 Password: 010209:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85044839927?pwd=TkQ1cHEzNUNjSjVCNTNJVUJwSkZaQT09. Things went fairly well last Sunday with only some minor technical problems!
If you are unable to join us in person, or cannot join us via Zoom, then you can simply do it all yourself – read the lessons and pray the prayers below, as well as listen to the recorded sermon, and intersperse it all by clicking on the links to the hymns.
If you are in Crete you can join us in person. We meet this coming Sunday, August 16 2020 at 11:00 am EEST at the Tabernacle of the Church of St Thomas, Kefalas. We have revised our protocols around the pandemic:
Protocols for St Thomas’s in the Pandemic
- Anyone attending a service or activity at the Anglican Church of St Thomas must wear a mask.
- Before entering the church please was your hands or use hand sanitizer.
- Social distancing is practiced – so individuals or families must stay at least 1.5 metres from another individual or family. Seats are set out this way in the Tabernacle, so please do not move them.
- Visitors are welcome, but if you have been here less than two weeks we will ask that you sit outside the church, and maintain social distancing.
- If you are a regular, please take the books home with you and bring them back next time – the hymn book, the service booklet, and the psalter. If you are a visitor, please just leave them on the chair, and someone will collect them and wipe them down.
- A maximum of 18 persons may be in the Tabernacle. Any more than that will have to sit outside.
- We sing – but we request that you do so softly!
- Communion will continue to be offered to the people in one kind only, the consecrated bread. Communion will be brought to congregants.
- While we do provide coffee, and tea after the service, we ask that people keep their distance while getting their refreshments, and that they might take them outside immediately afterwards.
We recognise that these protocols are changing as we learn more about how to live with the Covid-19 pandemic; thank you for your patience!
Reflect
As usual I will post the sermon shortly after the service.
Fr Leonard Doolan’s of St Paul’s, Athens did not manage to record his sermon, but the printed text of what he will preach today is available here: Trinity 10 2020 Sermon
I posted about a sideways-way of listening to the parables of Jesus which may or may not work, here.
Pray
Collect
Let your merciful ears, O Lord,
be open to the prayers of your humble servants;
and that they may obtain their petitions
make them to ask such things as shall please you;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
(or)
Lord of heaven and earth,
as Jesus taught his disciples to be persistent in prayer,
give us patience and courage never to lose hope,
but always to bring our prayers before you;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Intercession (Litany 35 from Common Worship | Daily Prayer)
Send forth your strength, O God,
establish what you have wrought in us.
Uphold all those who fall
and raise up those who are bowed down.
Open the eyes of the blind
and set the prisoners free.
Sustain the orphan and widow
and give food to those who hunger.
Grant them the joy of your help again
and sustain them with your Spirit.
O Lord, judge the peoples
and take all nations for your own.
I bid your prayers for the Church.
- for Robert Innes & David Hamid, our bishops;
- for Justin Welby our archbishop, Stephen Cottrell the Archbishop of York, and the General Synod of the Church of England;
- for the churches and peoples of Liberia, Sierra Leone (World Council of Churches Ecumenical Prayer Cycle);
- for the Scottish Episcopal Church and The Most Revd Mark Strange – Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church & Bishop of Moray, Ross & Caithness (Anglican Cycle of Prayer); and
- (from the Prayer Diary of the Diocese in Europe) give thanks for:
- for Frances Hiller (Bp David’s Chaplain and Deacon),
- in the Ministry Team: for Bishop David (as Warden of Readers), and for Director of Reader Ministry, Paul Wignall;
- for all those training to be Readers in the diocese;
- for Clare Amos (Director of Lay Discipleship); and
- Pray and give thanks for the work of the Friends and its Secretary, Jeanne French.
I bid your prayers for those in leadership:
-
- For Katerini Sakellaropoulou, President of Greece, and
- Kyriakos Mitsotakis the Prime Minister of Greece;
- for Elizabeth, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and her other realms, and also Governor of the Church of England;
- and Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of her British government;
- for the leaders of all nations, and for all in authority.
- For Katerini Sakellaropoulou, President of Greece, and
- I bid your prayers for this village of Kefalas and all the villages and homes in the Demos of Apokoronas here on the island of Crete;
and for the cities, towns, and villages from which we come.
I bid your prayers for the safety, health and salvation of:
- those who travel by land, air, or water,
and for all medical staff testing and tracing tourists; - the sick and the suffering,
remembering the approximately six and a half million active cases of the novel coronavirus, and mourning with the families of the 750,000 who have died in the pandemic;
and also remembering those ill with other diseases, and those whose operations have been postponed; - prisoners and captives,
especially the over one million Uigers being held in detention in China; - for the people Lebanon, as they recover from the massive explosion in Beirut and the collapse of the government in that country; and
- refugees and migrants,
especially those on Lesvos and in other camps in Greece
The Island Parson 