A Prayer for a Day’s Labor

On Sunday morning I left the house without the pastoral prayer that I had created.  The pastoral prayer or community prayer time is an important part of worship so I spend time crafting words.  I pieced together some of the words from my short-term memory for Sunday morning, but print them here.

Adapted from Eleanor Roosevelt’s Evening Prayer and A Prayer for Labor Day from Prayer in America

Let us pray:

Creator, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Set our eyes on far off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from the fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness people hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of the world made new.

Blessed be the works of Your hands, O Holy One.

Blessed be these hands that have touched life, and have nurtured creativity.
Blessed be these hands that have held pain and that have embraced with passion.
Blessed be these hands that have planted new seeds. tended gardens, and harvested ripe fields.
Blessed be these hands that have cleaned, washed, mopped, and scrubbed after so many sometimes with no thanks.
Blessed be these hands that have taken blood pressure, dispensed meds, and healed.
Blessed be these hands that have closed in anger, become knotty with age, hands that are wrinkled and scarred from doing justice.
Blessed be these hands that have reached out and been received, hands that hold blankets, bottled water, and MRE’s; hands that dig wells and write checks, and open us to embrace the other: these hands hold promise of the future.

Blessed be the works of Your hands through our hands, O Lord . . . our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

, 09/07/2010. Category: Preaching Notes, Theological Rant, Youth Ministry.

Understanding the Present

I’ve been wondering how our nation has gotten to the place that we now call “the present.”  I don’t often read Frank Rich in The New York Times, but his article, “Freedom’s Just Another Word”, is a good explanation of the present.  The fear profiteers are doing their part to make sure that the top 1% stay comfortable by making sure that everyone else is fighting amongst ourselves; and they are doing a good job though given the amount of grief and anxiety the fear profiteers don’t have to be to creative.  Where are the voices of memory, shame, and leadership calling out those that would divide for the sake of power and wealth?  Doesn’t it bother anyone else that the news media outlets are using religious adjectives to describe the type of “American” people are or are not.  Does that sound like the nation you learned about in public school?  Where is our Atticus Finch?

Freedom’s Just Another Word
by Frank Rich | The New York Times | September 4, 2010

And yet here we are, slouching toward yet another 9/11 anniversary, still waiting for a correction, with even our president, an eloquent Iraq war opponent, slipping into denial. Of all the pro forma passages in Obama’s speech, perhaps the most jarring was his entreaty that Iraq’s leaders “move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative and accountable.” He might as well have been talking about the poisonous political deadlock in Washington. At that moment, there was no escaping the tragic fact that instead of bringing American-style democracy and freedom to Iraq, the costly war we fought there has, if anything, brought the bitter taste of Iraq’s dysfunction to America.

, 09/06/2010. Category: Culture.
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