Prayers of the People #

Friends, let us gather in prayer.

Lord God Almighty, we are like dreamers, our mouths are filled with laughter and our tongues with glad song. We rejoice! Rains invigorate dry rivers. We sowed in tears and reap in gladness; we bore our seed bag in sorrow and bear the sheaves with glad song to you, oh Lord¹. We make a joyful clamor to You, of You in the sure knowledge that where we gather You come among us.

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer.

In the beginning You spoke the world into existence, separating sea from land, sky from earth, springing forth the plants and animals the barest moment after the words passed Your lips. You fashioned Adam from the dust, Eve from Adam and walked with them in a world You declared good. In time You regretted this making, being grieved in Your heart by the wickedness of humankind. Did You not declare an end to flesh then? Yet, in the rot there was righteousness, among the bellicose one blameless. Did you not change your mind for this one man, Noah? You, Keeper of Promises, swept the world in water and scoured what was necrotic from its face but in that Ark thrived the seed of the new world on which your covenant rests. Was it by Faith Alone² that Noah found Your favor or did he tend to his community and welcome in the stranger, or did he do so from transformation, born of faith, being no less able to cease breathing? Oh Lord, bless us for our perpetual question: Are works the fruit, or the tree?³

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer.

Your scripture is a Wunderkammer that unfolds in new delights the deeper we experience it. What of Your Will? Teach us, oh Lord; we pray now for wisdom. We look out into the world and we see much that is wrong. We look into ourselves and see that what we wish we do not do and what we hate, we do⁴. Our hearts are wells overflowing with indignation and we need only dip in our cups to drink. “This board in my eye, how much less of a concern than the sty in yours,” we say after we have supped. Your justice finds no source in our indignation. Your Will is not inscrutable, oh Lord, but Your view is alien to us and we are slow to learn. In the most wicked man does not Your breath flow in and out? Do you not delight in the small spark of light there? When we step on the ground do You not see in that moment the footfalls of all feet that have ever shared that same place? We see in ourselves the signs of our ancestors — a smile passed through the generations, a curious inability to smell, a way of standing, a passion for tinned sardines shared between grandfather and grandson that never met — but do You experience at one moment all the people linked thus? Have You memory, or continual experience?

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer.

We profess the Resurrection and the Life Eternal. You have come and lived as we live. You lived as a poor man, in a land occupied by a great empire and suffered Yourself to be hung on a tree and shamefully murdered by that empire which now lies rotting in the ground these many centuries. Those who stood there at the root of that cross and wept, they will come again. The Rev. Dr. Walter Stuhr, who worked Your work for the ordination of women and LGBTQ candidates, he will come again. Those whose photographs we have brought today and those we remember in our hearts, they will come again. The veil that stood between God and humankind, was it not torn asunder by You? All your saints, they will come again and they will live. All who are parted will be reunited, all who weep now will be made glad, as you have promised. Dry now our tears, oh Lord, gladden our hearts and set our feet on the path to Your holy mountain.

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer.

Living God, for whom the earth is a mere footstool and whose stride spans the Heavens, whose hand covered Moses sat in his crack and yet who gently rustled the leaves when walking of an evening with Adam and Eve, have you not also walked upon the earth as we walk, enfleshed and in tender body? We who are among the quick suffer illness and injury, both knowable at a glance and invisible to our eyes. Lord there are those among us who are ill unto death, who suffer for want of medical care or live in a time before care can come, who are afflicted with pains that will not be healed in life, are set in trials that will not be lifted. We ask for Your intercession where it is Your Will, for the healing and for the comfort of those we name now aloud or in our hearts.

God in Your Mercy,
Receive our Prayer.

Oh Tender of Daily Bread, 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? You name us 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, guide their work to Your worship as our hands are able. Remind us of the works Your Saints have done in Your name, 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. 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 beams, as you call us to shelter one another.

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

Amen