Christmastide 7

Father and Savior,

We bless your name, yours who with mighty hand redeemed for yourself a people from slavery, yours who made a perpetual feast of the salvation of the lamb’s blood, yours who revealed his most righteous law in the wilderness.

The feasts we have kept, but your law has fallen away with us. You ask us: has not Moses given us the law? Yet none of us keeps it. You ask us in effect: Do we seek our own glory or yours? We would trample down and kill the true Lamb and righteous one to justify ourselves.

But bless you, Father, for your mercy. For you yourself would suffer the plague that we could never withstand: your own firstborn, your only beloved Son, you have not withheld. Rivers of living water come to us in our wilderness of sin from this, the stricken rock, the cornerstone and rock of offense.

Let us make up our minds about you, Savior. You are not of the demons, we are. You are not a fraud, we are. You are not aggrandizing yourself, we are. You are he whom we know, even among our denials in thought and action: you are the Christ, the son of the living God, the Lamb who takes away our sins. Have mercy. And Hallelujah. You have come.