A Sung Communion Liturgy for the Season after Pentecost: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

A Sung Communion Liturgy for the Season after Pentecost:

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

(Tune: NETTLETON)

Come, dear friends, now to the table

Lift your hearts up to the Lord.

Let us gather, kneel together

Raise our voices! Praise God!

Now we gather at the table

Now we come to sing our praise

At the table of forgiveness

Oh, God’s goodness: see and taste.

Come, thou Fount of every blessing,

Tune our hearts to sing thy grace;

streams of mercy, never ceasing,

call for songs of loudest praise.

Teach us some melodious sonnet,

sung by flaming tongues above.

Praise the mount! We’re fixed upon it,

mount of thy redeeming love.

Out of love we were created,

From God’s breath we drew our life.

But God’s goodness we rejected,

Bound for pain and grief and strife

So God sought us through the ages,

Called to us to turn from sin.

Yet we would not heed God’s pleading,

Lost and suff’’ring, broken

So God sent to us Christ Jesus,

God-made-flesh to walk with us.

By his wounds: we found redemption.

In his life: abiding love.

 Jesus sought us when still strangers,

wandering from the fold of God;

he, to rescue us from danger,

interposed his precious blood.

On the night of that last supper

Jesus broke and shared the bread.

“This my body, take and eat it;

Broken so the world might mend.”

Jesus took the wine and poured it,

Offering with it his own life.

Telling us: “You are forgiven,”

 Telling us we’d gained new life.

O to grace how great a debtor

daily we’re constrained to be!

Let thy goodness, like a fetter,

bind our wandering hearts to thee.

Prone to wander, Lord, we feel it,

prone to leave the God we love;

take our hearts, O take and seal them,

seal them for thy courts above.

Holy, Holy, God Almighty,

Holy Spirit, fall on us.

Make these gifts of bread and cup now

Jesus’ body, Jesus’ blood

Though this gift we are Christ’s body

In this meal, we are made one

Here we raise our Ebenezer

At this table, we are home.

Prayer after Communion:

We give thanks for holy mystery

As you give yourself to us.

Send us forth now, by your spirit

As we journey out in love

Blessed be the tie that binds us

Blessed be the kindred love!

Lead us God, by your good pleasure

On the paths where we now go.

Text: Beth Quick, 2014, with adapted text from Robert Robinson, 1758, "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing." 

Permission is given for free use of this hymn text with author attribution.

 

A Sung Communion Liturgy for the Season after Pentecost:

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing by Rev. Beth Quick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.