2022 September 04

Prayers of the People #

Oh Lord, who in ancient days before light was and when all was welter and waste1 knew us, we pray to You now as a community as You have taught, in the sure knowledge that where we gather so too do You gather2.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

We have learned of the Philistines, the Sea Peoples3, who in the time of Saul made war with Your people Israel, of Goliath4 and his challenge, of the quaking of the proud warriors of Israel before him. Goliath towered over all others, his scale armor was bronze, the weight of a full grown man. A helmet of bronze was on his head; his spear, iron tipped, was thick as a weaver’s beam. Who of the warriors of Israel could get inside his shield and reach at the quick of his heart? None, save a simple boy, the least son of a lesser family5, a shepherd, who felled Goliath as if he were a wolf hunting the sheep and goats at dusk, with a sling and a stone. Who is weak and who is mighty, Oh Lord, in this age of flood and fire and famine? Who or what, if we just sallied forth, Oh Lord, would we find to be no more than a tall man in a tinpot hat? Strengthen our hearts, unwind the fears that coil around our hearts and take our hands to Your doing.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

Those now who sit in power over the common sit seemingly immovable. The dictators, the autocrats, the billionaires, that great crowd of lessers of two evils there they sit each with their knuckles clenched to white on the arms of their precarious chair. In the time of Isaiah the rich populated their homes with the goods of the poor6 and satisfied themselves with a single bite from a loaf that might have fed a whole family, with a sip of wine from a skin that, had it been shared, might have cleaned the water of a household7. It was You who took them and laid them low. Have You not taught us that if we have two cloaks we have one for ourselves and one we hold in safekeeping for the needs of our neighbor8? We profess it! Save us from greed, deliver us from the fear that demands accumulation, keep us from storing up those things that rot and rust9. Kindle in us a fire for our neighbors’ prospering, draw us deeper into community with You and with each other. Move us ever and always, Oh Lord, from profession into action.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

David sang, while fleeing from his son Absalom, that You were a shield for him, Who lifted his head in a time of need. Rescue is the Lord’s, he sang, and on Your people sits a blessing for You are the one who strikes foes upon the cheek, smashing their teeth10. David, Your chosen warlord11 who took of the sons and the daughters and the harvests, David knew you best in this song as Lord of Hosts. Do we? For You teach us that blood spilled cries out to You from the ground12 and that we should not spill it13, but also You teach that anger for no cause against another is as like to murder as not14! Do we refuse to turn our cheek when we might have15, smug in the knowledge that You sit on our side of matters always16? Do we busy ourselves with the sty in another’s eye while we are blinded by the log in ours17? Who among us can take up and cast the first stone18? You say, Oh Lord, you say that our works are evil from youth19 and we repent that it is so. We see through a glass darkly20, and cast our thoughts and our deeds onto You. Set us right, bring down Your Spirit onto us and make Your doings leap from our glad hands.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

We mourn, Lord, for those that have gone on before us. We profess the Life Eternal and know that we will see all who lived again on some future day, resurrected, perhaps in a moment and perhaps when the stars themselves are cinders. Those that have died, we know, will not be as they were, as we will not be. But You understand our mourning, don’t You? You have lived as we live now: our lives are brief and our view is clouded and we see this span of years we travel as the totality of things. You have lived and You have raised the dead, healed with a mere word, with the smallest touch of your cloak. Dry bones could leap refleshed with song on their lips if You wished it21! Dry our tears, oh Lord, for they have been our bread for too long22. 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 if You will it or their comfort, naming the afflicted now aloud or in our hearts.

Spirit of Provocation,
Receive our prayer.

Living God, whose breath hovered over the waters and with words alone named light into existence, named night from day, named the land from water, named the sky from all that rests below it, we bless Your holy name23. When you breath into us we are, when Your breath leaves us we return to dust. You sat Adam in his place that he might name the animals and give them their ways24. Who are we to carry out the work of Creation with You? Your children, your siblings, your beloveds. We live in common in imitation of You and are drawn each 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, guide their work to Your worship 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 for You 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.

A day is coming when the first will be last25, when the tearstained will weary their cheeks with laughter26, when all weapons of war will be set aside and their ways forgotten27 and every laborer, no matter the hour they come to work will given to them what is right in Your eyes25. We yearn to name the things of this new day, to work these things into existence as You will it. You crafted the world and saw it and declared it good, may we view it with Your eyes and shape it with Your great care. Our God who was before and will be after, 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 You call us to shelter beneath the span of Your roof beams28, as you call us to be shelter to one another.

In the holy name of Jesus the Christ, who lived and died and lived again for our sake, we pray,

Amen

  1. This is Robert Alter’s phrasing in his translation of Genesis 1:2. ↩︎

  2. Matthew 18:20 ↩︎

  3. We don’t actually know precisely who the Philistines were, although we do know that you could kill them with a donkey’s jawbone. I don’t imagine that’s a unique weakness. Anyhow, it’s possible that the Sea Peoples who invaded across the Aegean and Medierranean in the Late Bronze Age were of the same or similar culture to the Philistines, as suggested in the prayer, and it’s possible that they aren’t at all the same. It’s possible the Philistines aren’t even one people consistently throughout history but a vauge Other that is in opposition to Israel. Sorting this out is not aided by the fact that the Greeks lost their history and forgot how to write for a while there but made up some really fascinating stories to explain the past after they picked writing back up again. ↩︎

  4. 1 Samuel 17, generally. The boasting of Goliath should be familiar to readers of the Illiad. I tried to echo some of the pleasure in bronze and weapons of war in that epic here, undercutting it with “tall man in a tinpot hat” as David undercuts the notion of heroicism through his deed. David doesn’t even wear the armor loaned to him by Saul, sallying forth in a tunic alone. ↩︎

  5. 1 Samuel 17:12 notes that David is the last of eight sons of Jesse, where in 1 Chronicles 2:13 it’s the last of seven. Anyway, David’s a way down on the list (although last sons in the Hebrew Bible often find great favor with their parents if not their siblings, see Joseph). We understand Bethlehem to be a place of great importance now, but it’s worth noting that in the Hebrew Bible Bethelemites – as Jesse and his sons were – had fallen in importance, garnering few mentions after the ages of Genesis and outside of David’s early life. If it was not a backwater it was, at least, not an important place to be. ↩︎

  6. Isaiah 3:14 ↩︎

  7. We who live with, seemingly, effortless clean water find it hard to understand just how difficult getting clean water actually is, especially in places that lack organized sewage systems. Backpackers will know that to drink from clear streams is an invitation to parasitic and bacterial infection, how much worse in a world where human waste piles up and rots in the sun? Alcohol was drunk for pleasure, especially among the rich as the early chapters of Isaiah make abundantly clear, but it was also essential for sterilizing water. ↩︎

  8. The words most directly referenced here are John the Baptist’s in Luke 3:11 but consider also James 2, and Ezekiel 18. ↩︎

  9. Matthew 6:19-20 ↩︎

  10. Psalm 3, although also Psalm 58. There’s more petitions asking God to smash teeth in the Psalms than you might imagine. ↩︎

  11. David is annointed in 1 Samuel 16, and what is a king but a very accomplished warlord? Consider that it falls to Solomon to build the Temple because David’s hands are too bloodstained to do so (1 Chronicles 22), or, I suppose, David is too much of a ‘man of blood’ which is much more Metal. 1 Samuel 8 also warns against kings in just the way described here, and acted out by David and his descendents, some more than others, bar the one who was never a warlord. ↩︎

  12. Genesis 4 ↩︎

  13. Thou shalt not murder. Of note, the Anglo Saxons after converting to Christianity kept right on stabbing each other but got very, very punctual about weregild payments. Horrible people. Really good poetry though. ↩︎

  14. Matthew 5:21-23 ↩︎

  15. Matthew 5:39 ↩︎

  16. I would argue that a deviant reading of Romans 8:31 is that if I feel righteous in a thing then it must be righteous and therefore God will see to my desires. The opposite is true, but it is appealing to think we can coax God into obeying our whims and desires. ↩︎

  17. Matthew 7:3-5 ↩︎

  18. John 8:7 ↩︎

  19. Genesis 8:21 ↩︎

  20. I have always loved this translation of 1 Corinthians 13:12 from the King James Version, for all its faults. Through a Glass Darkly is also an exceptional Ingmar Bergman film, the first in his “Silence” trilogy. ↩︎

  21. Ezekiel 37:1-14 ↩︎

  22. Psalm 42:3 ↩︎

  23. Genesis 1 ↩︎

  24. Genesis 2 ↩︎

  25. Matthew 20 ↩︎ ↩︎

  26. Luke 6:21 ↩︎

  27. Isaiah 2:4 is used now in contexts where warlike societies convert some of their weapons into tools not meant for disassembling humans. Isaiah’s prophecy is stronger than that: in days to come we’ll look at a gun and have no understanding of what it might be for. The weak understanding of this would be that the gun is replaced by an even more effective human disassembler – much like how most folks today will not understand what relationship a halberd has with mounted, armored knights – but that’s not what is meant, surely. ↩︎

  28. Genesis 19:8. Lot offers up his two daughters in place of the Messangers to the men of Sodom. ↩︎

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