Prayers of the People #

Friends, let us gather together in prayer.

God in Heaven, blessed is Your name. We pray to You now as a community in the sure knowledge that Your ears hear and your heart turns to us as ours do to You. We thank You for this time together as a community, in this Chapel where I stand and all across the face of the earth through the Internet.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

God our Neighbor¹, our blood cries out to You from the ground², spilled in war, in the hopeless violence of a decaying empire, in the steady march of hunger and exposure in those cast aside. All these things our souls cry out against and, yet, not a thing happens that escapes Your notice³. How can this be, how can it go on? These days are hard, Lord, they are hard. We who live on fire with the promise of a new life cry out for wisdom, for strength and hope to use our lives to set that new thing closer for our neighbors, to be a vision of the new in a time of trial.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

God who Cried Out⁴, who lived in flesh as we do, died and on the third day set aside the separation of the Quick and the Dead, let Your will be done, there can be no other and there is no better way. In the midst of what weighs us down teach our hearts new songs and our eyes give new sight so that we will truly see and love the beauty of Your Creation, the things that grow at our fingertips and the vastness of space beyond this thin atmosphere You breathed with us. Teach us, Lord, to be kind and gentle shepherds of Creation.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

God who Broke Bread⁵, we eat in common, Lord, in memory of You in the knowledge that You are among us as we do. Your Saint Dora⁶ was known to say to to kith and kin if the Lord came eating and drinking⁷ then that is example enough to live by and there is profound, simple wisdom in these words. We are not alone and are meant to find good company with one another, as many here do. Bless our meals, Lord, strengthen the bonds the tie us together. Help us feed each other according to our needs, guide us in our efforts to feed to our neighbors and bring this communion we share out into Your blessed world, as You have done, by your example.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

God who Turns the Cheek⁸, forgive us our sins whether intentional or accidental, against one another or against ourselves. We struggle to do what is right in Your eyes⁹. But through Your grace, through Your spilt blood, through Your screaming and dying on the cross, through that miracle foretold by Your prophets¹⁰ we are forgiven what we have done and will do¹¹. Teach us this grace that we may carry it ourselves to those that wrong us, that we might see them as You see them: precious, beloved. What divides us seems at times eternal but only You, oh Lord, are eternal. Bless those among us who work for peace, who speak and do so at personal cost to themselves, who risk much in Your Works. We profess that if You are for us what can truly be done against us¹²? We bless now the works of the people either aloud or in our hearts.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

God of Healing¹³, we remember now all of us who have gone on before and passed into Your care. We who here now pray, Lord, have lived through a time of global pandemic, some have sickened, some have not, some have been stricken with a close grief and some not. And then there are those among us sick now, or beset by accidents, or with pains that will not heal. Comfort us Lord, heal us, and heal those whose names we speak now aloud or in our hearts.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

God of the Mountain¹⁴, God of the Valley, Lord of Hosts¹⁵, I Am that I Am¹⁶, Prince of Peace¹⁷, Father, Mother¹⁸, Son, Brother, A Still, Quiet Voice in the Wind¹⁹ by all these names and more we know You and do Bless. Our lives are brief, we who are dust and to dust will return²⁰. Our breath is Your breath²¹ and rushes in and flees in Your time²². You laid the foundation of the mountains²³, loosed the waters upon the face of the earth²⁴, and for all this it is as the merest footstool to You²⁵. What are we upon it, so vast a thing, and to You? Precious. Beloved, formed in Your image to walk upon it with You in the good of this world. Your ears hear what we say and what we cannot say²⁶ and you are here among us now²⁷.

Amen

Concluding Introduction #

This is the first intercession prayer I wrote for the Chapel, indeed the first ever. I was raised as a literalist. Although I do not hew to that hermeneutic any longer I still believe that the Bible is the word of God, an invitation to argument – in the sense of seeking knowledge through talking over an idea from every vantage point you can think of until it’s smoothed over in the mind – and it is a profound repository of wisdom, guidance and dogged mysteries. Which all is to say, when Jesus teaches in Matthew 6:5-7:

And when you pray do not be like those who are playacting; for they love to pray while standing in the synagogues and on the corners of streets, so that they may be visible to men; I tell you truly, they have their recompense in full. But when you pray, enter into your private room and, having closed your door, pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father, who watches what is secret, will reward you. And when praying do not babble repetitious phrases as the gentiles do; for they imagine that they will be listened to by virtue of their polixity.²⁸

I have took it very serious over the years. I was also raised to pray in a way that carefully circumscribed the words that we could say to God, not quite a fixed ritual but not far off, something separate from the beating heart I carry around in my chest. The words of Job to God – of anger, betrayal, of declaring that God has not treated Job with justice – were a flash in my mind when I first read them with adult eyes, especially when, in Job 42:7 the Lord scolds Job’s companions for speaking poorly of His purposes, and praises Job for speaking rightly. We were taught – and this is most certainly true – that God should always, always be addressed with humble deference. Imagine my surprise! I wanted very much to avoid in this prayer the circumscription of the heart to which I was raised. If God is real, as I profess, then we should really talk to Him.

When I accepted the invitation to act as intercessor for the Chapel it was my prayer – said privately, in my room with the door closed, in secret – that the Spirt’d settle on me in such a way that I would speak rightly of the Lord and from the banquet of song, story and teaching sat before us already. I was not quite sure how to go about finding the peace to be available for the Spirit. Inspiration came from Martin Luther’s “A Simple Way to Pray: How One Should Pray, For Peter, the Master Barber.” Luther suggests that if one has become “cold and listless in prayer” then one should consider structuring your prayer after the Ten Commandments or the Lord’s Prayer or a Psalm. That is, in fact, what happened here; the Lord’s Prayer, I hope, will now shine out to you as you read what follows.

I would also like to note, briefly, some matter of potential controvery here. The Chapel has started to shy away from the use of the word Lord for connotations of hierarchy and dominion. My own personal politics are very much opposed to hierarchical structure – ‘one God, no masters’ is a fine start on a summary – but I like very much the word ‘Lord’, which comes from the Old English hlāfweard meaning “loaf-ward” or “keeper-of-the-bread”, implying that one who leads is only suitable to lead if they provide bread to their followers, or that the providers of bread are the leaders. Hwæt! Do we not pray daily for our bread?