Category: Preaching Notes
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.
Lost Paragraph
Memorial Day and 4 July are always difficult days for me when it comes to worship and the community of faith. It is a balance act to worship on these national holidays that are meaningful without bringing civic religion into the sanctuary or wrapping God in the flag or a providential nationalism. I’ve only preached on Memorial Sunday (Trinity Sunday for some) twice. My words were borrowed, a major rewrite and organization, from a previous sermon that I gave on the Sunday following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Here is the last paragraphs of my sermon that I titled then as well as yesterday, “Universal Sounds.”
I believe those who claim faith in God, by whatever name, need to encourage the whole world to pause, unwrap the sound proofing flags from our hearts, remove the ear muffs of politics from our ears, and sit in silent, prayerful, memorial respect. Maybe if we can hear the universal sounds we can learn the melody of peace in our language and, in our ordinary time, they will know we are children of God by our justice, our mercy, our hospitality . . . our love.
Would that be an appropriate memorial for the men and women that have served or gave their last full measure of devotion so we might hear the universal sounds? Let it begin with us.