Congregational prayer

A slight departure from my usual letters...

Here's a prayer I wrote for worship leading at church this past Sunday (Jan 25). The Scripture passage for the sermon was John 3:1-21, so I drew on some of the images from there.

The final paragraph is adapted from an assurance written by Rev. Dr. Ginny Brown Daniel, in So Loved: Service Prayers for the Fourth Sunday of Lent (posted on the Worship Ways page of the United Church of Christ website).

“Light has come into the world”

Light has made its home among us as self-giving love.

“But people loved darkness instead of light... for fear that their deeds will be exposed.”

There are so many places we long to see the light of truth expose evil deeds:

the genocide in Gaza;
the war in Ukraine;
the conflicts in Sudan, Yemen, DR Congo, Myanmar and the Tigray region of Ethiopia;
political and economic instability in many countries across Latin America;
the lawlessness of law enforcement in the USA and their threats to Venezuela, Greenland and even Canada;
Canadian-owned mining companies around the world;
fossil fuel extraction companies and other capitalist, exploitative, war-mongering executive decision-making tables;
polite government processes that disenfranchise, blame and oppress both newcomers and Indigenous people in Canada.

Lord, have mercy.

We perhaps less readily confess we need your light of truth to shine into our own thoughts, words and deeds,

to convict of the evil things we have done and the good we have left undone. For our failure of courage to love with our whole hearts.

Lord, have mercy.

Forgive us. Shine your light into the dark places.

The image of God resides deep within each of us – even the doers of evil. May the Spirit empower us to live by the truth, so the light within us would manifest as light without. May we recognize and draw out that light in others, returning God’s blessing by the way we love.

Amen.

Comments

My favourite nativity scene

“There’s no accounting for taste.” That’s my dad’s favourite way of explaining personal tastes that are incomprehensible to him, like living downtown, and riding bike in winter. The inexplicable factors which determine an individual’s likes or dislikes are probably the only way I can explain why my favourite nativity scene contains a horribly caricatured black magus, a random adoring child attired – to my fancy – like a Roma person, an old shepherd carrying some sort of blunderbuss. And a haloed holy family with an 18-month-old baby Jesus. This is the "Christmas Manger Set – the Christmas story in beautiful cut-out scenes and life-like figures." See how the 1940s-era family admires the realistic flourishes, like raw wood beams and straw protruding from the edge of the roofline; the rough, broken wood of the stalls; the tasselled camels; the richly dressed magi; the woolly sheep; the Bethlehemites on the path in the background, ostensibly out to get water, judging...

Upside down economics of Jesus: household action and global change

—Presented at a CAWG event in Altona— In Living More with Less , Doris Janzen Longacre shares a story about envelopes from Marie Moyer, a missionary in India, who was studying Hindi with Panditji. Marie writes: “From his philosophic mind, which probed the meaning of events and circumstances, I learned more than Hindi.” Just before her teacher’s arrival one day before Christmas, she’d received and opened a pile of Christmas cards and discarded the envelopes as he walked in the room. She writes: “He sat down soberly and studied the situation, then he solemnly scolded me: ‘the reverberation of this wasteful act will be felt around the world’.” Marie was stunned. “What do you mean?” she asked him. “Those envelopes,” he said, pointing to the wastebasket. “You could write on the inside of them.” “Chagrined”, Marie apologized and rescued the envelopes with the help of Panditji, who “caressed each one” as he pulled it out of the garbage. This forever changed Marie’s relationship to pape...

Broken people...

After reflecting with one coworker on how often churches in all their forms really mess up and hurt a whole bunch of people in the process -- and how "we gotta do better" -- I stumbled into another conversation with a coworker which highlighted our brokenness, and I suddenly realized what was wrong with my take in the first. I wanted the church to be better at fixing our mistakes, or better yet, at not making them in the first place. But maybe this "fix-it" attitude is partly the reason we keep blowing it again and again! My friend recollected an experience when a church community was in a terrible place: compounded mistakes, hurts, and frustrations had blown up, spewing pain all over all parties. (I'm sure anyone with a long history in the church can think of one, if not several, such occasions in their past.) A new Christian who observed all these goings on responded in an unexpected way. Instead of "you people are a bunch of screw-ups! How could this pos...

kar0ling

Search This Blog