Prayers of the People #

Friends, let us gather together in prayer.

Oh Lord, who laid the foundation of the Earth, marked a straight line across it, set the footings in their place and the cornerstone too we here gathered bless Your name, sure in the knowledge that where we are gathered so too are You.

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer.

You, oh Lord, have numbered the stars in the sky where you set them, given them names even. When we lift our eyes to them we are stunned by the glory of your handiwork, even in our cities where we set the sky alight. Have you numbered the stars that are not yet? Do your eyes see both forward and back at the same instant? Not a single star is missing, said Isaiah, because of Your might but how can we grasp it? Abraham’s descendants are greater than the stars in the sky but do we not now know how many trillions and trillions of stars there are, how in the great superstructure of the Universe our galaxy is like a speck of dust on a great bubble? How can we understand it? It is good, this Creation You have made, and we profess it yet are we not small, are we not creatures of a single Now that slides gradually forward, making a dimly remembered past and a vaguely predicted future? Bless our weak eyes, lift our heads and our hearts from the firmament at the great gift you’ve set above our heads.

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer.

Here in California with us lives Methuselah, high in the White Mountains. It’s harsh there, where Methuselah lives, hot and dry in the summers, bitterly cold in the winters; sheep, deer and marmots are Methuselah’s neighbors. Next year Methuselah will be 4,855 years old, oh Lord, a rough contemporary of your servant Abraham! Where Abraham died and lived through his descendants Methuselah has spent the millennia growing itself in a grove of self, shedding cones in due season, deepening its roots further and further into and across the stone that is its home. It is we who are made in Your image but how pleased must you be with the slow, steady life of trees, of their quiet feasting from the air and the sheltering of the birds of the field and of wayward prophets? How brief a span of days our lives must seem to Methuselah, how urgent our zigging and zagging across the face of the Earth. Are we good neighbors with our petroleum coated roads and engines that spoil Methuselah’s meal or does Methuselah, oh Lord, prefer the company of those that were here before the coming of horses? Whisper the answer in our ears in the dark of the night, teach us true neighborliness.

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer.

You shut Noah up in the Ark, Your prophets proclaimed the coming of captivity in a foreign land, You walked enfleshed on the Earth and healed and declared a new kingdom was bursting in at the seems of the world. A powerful change is coming over the world now and we creatures who see but dimly into the future see grim tidings. Much that is now will be undone, much that seems permanent will prove to have had its season. Your Will be done, Oh Lord. Dry our tears, set our hearts aflame and bring forth justice from the jaundice, goodness from the grotesque. We profess with Adam’s mouth that the world is fair and verdant but act with Cain’s hands and harvest thorns up from the soil. Break our feigned dominion, Lord; guide our hands to make peace with the lands in which we dwell.

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer.

We mourn, Lord, for those that have gone on before us. Today we think especially of Your child Eli Mata’afa who was killed Saturday last and is with You now. 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 it! Dry our tears, oh Lord, for they have been our bread for too long. Dry thr tears that stain the faces of Eli’s loved ones especially, we pray. Lord, too, 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.

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer. God in Your mercy, 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 name. 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 ways. 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.

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer.

God Who is and Who does and Who will be, a day is coming when the walls of our prisons will crumble and the prisoners will be free and welcomed back among their kin, when the lion and sheep will lay down and rest together, when the last weapon of war will fall into fragments in a museum collection, barely understood and of no especial interest. Trees will stretch into the sky, grasses will wave in the field, rivers will flow pure down into the ocean filled with whale song, no child will go hungry and no parent will live unable to quench thirst, no person will set aside more than they need at the expense of another and the clouds you’ve clothed the world in will roll peacefully overhead. In that time to come the Bay will shimmer with the sun’s light, fog will roll in over the peninsula from the West, the sun will slip beyond the horizon and all Your people will sleep undisturbed in their beds, one star twinkling for each.

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

Amen