Prayers of the People #

Friends, let us gather together in prayer.

Oh Lord, our abode¹, who spake the mountains from nothing and sees their unwinding as we see butter melt in pan², we pray to You now as a community as You have taught, in the sure knowledge that Your ears hear and Your heart turns to us as ours do to You.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

Your prophet Isaiah spoke of a vineyard on a hillside, carefully tended, hoed and clear of stones and planted with choice vines. In this vineyard You raised a tower, to survey and guard the vines from predators and built a winepress in the hopes of good fruit to make good wine when the time came to gather. But at harvest the fruit of Your vines, of Your People, was rotten, the justice that was meant to come forth was jaundice, the righteousness instead wretchedness. The rich had gobbled up the land from the poor, rose drunk on liquor and set at night on wine, unable to see the glory of Your work. The people celebrated this, loving to see even a glimpse of the fine things of the rich and, so too, lost their sight. The tower You cast down and the winepress You tore up and the field descended into wilderness.³

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

The Psalmist sings that the years to you are like a grass that sprouts in the morning but by evening withers and dies and, for our transgressions, we too deserve to whither⁴. But in our wilderness You sprang up among us, clothed in flesh, the Son of Man. Hope sprang up with You, a vision of a world that is just and verdant where we, Your people, work to Your purposes. You taught us to yearn for this new way and welcomed all in common, as siblings to You. You are the Alpha and the Omega⁵ and have raised up Your tower and reset the winepress on its foundation as Isaiah foretold, crying out that the ways would become straight⁶ to Your holy mountain⁷ where all are now welcome. We live in the hope that Your Will is being done here, that justice and righteousness are springing out from among us, not for our glory but for the well-being of all of Your children. It is You who set the pattern, the lowly Son of Man, the elevated Son of God, who lived and died as we live and die that all might be saved from Sheol’s hungry gullet⁸.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

We thank You, Lord, that we live in a time when we can see deeper into the unknown of space than ever before, for the heavens tell of Your glory and the sky Your handiworks declare⁹. The galaxy HD1 we see a mere 330 million years after the Big Bang, an age before metal was formed. The mind reals, we can barely comprehend it. What is humanity to You, that You set us up as stewards over creation and lived as we live? You invite us to conversation and we lack knowledge, encourage us who stride across the dirt to walk with You whose stride cannot be measured. We live in a Universe of profound mystery, we see it as a finely made cloth that stretches on and on out of sight. Guide us from arrogance, Lord, as we grasp at the threads of the merest edge of this cloth, teach us humility and wisdom and keep stoked the fire of exploration in our hearts.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

We we thank You, Lord, for those of us who have gone on before us, whether their lives were long or short. We profess the resurrection, of the life that will come where all who have gone and will go are gathered up together. We profess and we believe, but Your ways are not our ways and we struggle, Lord, to understand¹⁰. We weep for grief but, then, so have You wept for grief¹¹. You have raised the dead, have healed with a touch, with a word¹². It is You who could make a new people from dry bones¹³. Lord, there are those among us who are ill now even unto death, those among us who are afflicted with pain that will not pass in this life. We now ask for your intercession, for their healing or their comfort, naming the afflicted now aloud or in our hearts.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

You invite us, Lord, to Your table, to break bread with one another and with You. With Jacob You wrestled and You blessed him, renewing your covenant¹⁴. With Job you debated and it was he in his torment and anger that spoke well of You, earning Your praise¹⁵. You, Lord, are the great demolisher of walls, the great usurper of what is for what will be. What is it that we are called to, Lord? We know You by many names and by many works. We live in common in imitation of You and we each are drawn to one kind of work or another, some safe in our current age and some not. We confess that the Church is Your body upon the Earth and that only You and Your Church will endure. Take our hands Lord and guide their work to Your glory as our hands are able. Bless us in our work as we bless those among us that work for You now, especially those that work at risk to themselves. Please, friends, raise up aloud or in your hearts the names of those that work for the Lord.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

Like a mother hen You sweep us up under Your wing, shielding us. We yearn to be shelter for others, to live together in harmony, to not simply set aside the things of war but to forget what they are, to be ignorant of violence entirely¹⁶. If it is Your will, may we forget greed, Lord, that all who need might have, for this world is bountiful and all who live upon it are beloved to You, one no more or less than the next. Living God, Your ears hear what we say and what we cannot say, You hear our prayers before we can speak them. We live in the sure knowledge that You are here among us now and that we walk with you always in the good of this world You have crafted with Your hands.

We bless You, oh Lord and in Jesus the Christ’s holy name we pray,

Amen

Concluding Introduction #

This prayer was the third written, the previous two being delivered 2022 July 03 and 2022 June 05. The Chapel community response was incredibly heartening. The prayers offered previously are much different in tone and style – at least to my ear – than the prayers I found on the ELCA synod website as something that might be worked from. I had read a synod prayer in service before, perhaps in 2019, slightly doctoring up the language from the form of “a thing that has been done” to “a thing that we have done”. I dislike indirectness of this sort, thinking that if we are going to imply a sin we might as well come out and say it. There’s a fine line to be tread between thundering that we’re all hellfire bound and acknowledging that we, to a person, are inclined to evil from our youths, of course. This distaste for indirectness has something to do with my being Midwestern on my Dad’s side of the family and “Scotch-Irish” Southern as my elders had it on my Mom’s side: I believe in plain speaking and the power of a well-crafted phrase to cut the hands and feet off Dagon.

Different as these two prayers are in tone and style, they are, however, what the Spirit drew through. By the time of this third prayer I felt sure in the understanding that the Chapel would not be made to humor my eccentricity but would enjoy the fruit of it instead. I believe, in fact, that by this prayer I had been invited to be in the regular rotation of intercessors, which I remain humbled by.

The first prayer on June 05 was templated, per Martin Luther’s excellent advice, on the Lord’s Prayer and the second was as well, to a lesser extent. I hoped, sitting down to write, to use the frame of a celebration Psalm – 116, as I recall – but what I found in the writing was a celebration for the natural world instead, that which God made for us and called good. Certain themes have also begun to develop. I want in each prayer to ask for the healing of the sick among us, as is the norm in Chapel prayers, but also for the blessing of work for the Lord, inspired by the prayer for those that work for peace of Jack Elliot, he of blessed memory. In re-reading this prayer I am struck by the vivid physicality of description in the Bible, of “Sheol’s hungry gullet”, of deafness and blindness that come and go, of God creating and destroying a vineyard with towers and winepresses and fruits that grow heavy on the vine but harvest rotten, of each of us being souls enfleshed and the flesh itself. I am struck by how invested God and the Bible, by extension, are in the minute details and construction of the world, how evidently delighted in the thingness of all things.

My professional life is done in a secular context, a worldview of the free-market and a kind of vague secular humanism. (I say vague because there are hints that were it less gauche to say that some human lives simply don’t matter then the mask of humanism would fall away.) There is in this worldview a pervasive sense that Science is the only real way to see the world, that it stands in opposition to Religon (coded as Evangelical Fundamentalism in the United States) and to a lesser extent Art, unless the artist is able to make a lot of money from their art, in which case maybe that art is good. In reaction expressions of religious feeling tend to shy away from statements about the glory of the natural world, at least in our current era. I think this is a shame. Psalm 19 tells us that the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky his handiwork, observations made necessarily with the naked eye at the time of the Psalmist. How much more great is the declaration when we bring a space telescope into the mix?