Prayers of the People #
Blessed God, who made the new day and placed us in it, who drowns our sin beneath the water, who took the stone cast aside and made it the chief cornerstone, we gather here in prayer in the sure knowledge that by Your promise You are here among us. We bless You from Your house, and bless all those who come in Your name, You whose right hand does valiantly and who opens the gates of justice and delivers us to its threshold. This is the day that God has wrought, let us rejoice and be glad on it.
God in Your mercy,
Receive our prayer.
Very God of very God, begotten but not made, You who, born of the Virgin Mary, lived as we live and died as we will die and lived again, what is death to you? It is sleep. You say, arise, take and eat, be well and be glad and Your breath rushes in again, lips redden, the soul rejoins its flesh. Oh Jesus, balm of sorrow, overflowing cup of blessings, whose blood is the wine of our salvation, oh Jesus, how grief sits on us, oh Jesus, how the memory of those that yet sleep pains us. Wipe our tears with the hem of your mantle. Bless us, Mary’s and Joseph’s boy, for the love in us that bends to the pain of want, remember with us the joy of those that were and yet still are. We remember especially this day Astronaut Colonel Rich Husband, Astronaut Commander William McCool, Astronaut Captain David Brown, Astronaut Kalpana Chawla, Astronaut Lieutenant Colonel Michael Anderson, Astronaut Captain Dr. Laurel Clark and Astronaut Colonel Ilan Ramon who died February 1, 2003 as the Space Shuttle Columbia, fatally injured on launch, failed in its struggle to bring home its crew. They left for their mission under Your words to Joshua, “Have I not charged you, ‘Be strong and stalwart?’ Do not be terror stricken and do not cower for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” This crew, they rode Columbia on a mission of peace and of science, revealing new knowledge about our atmosphere, laying bare one of the small mysteries of Xenon You sewed into Creation, carried a drawing of the gentle earth as seen from the moon, drawn in Thereseinstadt concentration camp, drawn there by a child, a vision of unity wrenched from out of the welter and waste of industrialized hatred. Columbia took to space in peace and those aboard it, that last day, they will come again, one fine day, in peace. As will all the sleepers come again. Oh God, we remember now to you those that have gone on to rest before us, either aloud or in our hearts.
God in Your mercy,
Receive our prayer.
In our prosperity say we not, “I will not be shaken, I am like a mighty mountain” but how delicate we are. Did not Your brother James say that we “are a vapor, appearing for a short while and then vanishing”? One day we are well and the next we are not. It is You who have brought us together as a community, invited us to Your table as one, that we might be a comfort to each other, friends in our gladness and friends in our need. Bless the bonds that bind us, flowing from the spearhead’s wound in Your side. Where it is Your will, You for whom David danced in joy, stay the flute players, stay the professional wailers, bring our bodies and our minds wholeness. Turn your face to us, oh God, shelter like a mother hen those who the doctors’ art cannot reach, whose names we say now aloud or in our hearts.
God in Your mercy,
Receive our prayer.
Enfleshed God who walked in Egypt, who walked in Lebanon, in Israel, who took water from a Samaritan woman in Palestine and claimed kinship with her, where did You lay Your head? Foxes have dens and birds their nests but You, holy holy holy, lived by the mercy of those that beheld You. Forgive us our laws that make crime of Your virtue, forgive us our left hand conspiring with our right, in league with our wagging tongues, professing we have nothing to spare. Does Your justice rest in the words ‘Go in peace, be warm and sated.’ or does Your Spirit find purchase in tending to the bodily needs of our siblings? Bless among us the works that bring comfort and joy to the widow, to the orphan, to those are set aside and said to be less, to those who are slandered, beaten, killed. Some of Your works, oh Jesus, endanger the worker in this age and some do not but if You are for a thing then who can be against it, truly? Feathered stones will not fly and the Accuser will find a bad onion in a good field but You, oh God, even we who are dust praise and declare Your faithfulness. We raise now aloud or in our hearts those that work Your works, especially those at risk to themselves.
God in Your mercy,
Receive our prayer.
Oh you blameless, oh you righteous. The wretched understand not, you say, the wicked work with cursed hands. Your heart, yours alone, it is not evil from birth. May we ask, have you tamed it? You, oh blameless, oh righteous, say ‘Yes, I have tamed it, unlike the wicked, the adulterer, the addict, the coveter of men’s things.’ You whose skin is unblemished, no scratching with potsherds on the ash-heap for you. Prosperity rests like a dove on your house, do you not also see plainly the folly of the poor? Woe, woe, oh you blameless, oh you righteous. God comes with the evening wind to walk and rustles the leaves in His passing. On your grounds, behind your walls, in your garden: stillness. You hear it there beyond your walls, do you not? There, out there: the rustling of God among the wheat.
Whisper, oh God, into our ears, we sinners, the mystery of Your worship. Root the pondering of Your words and deeds and hopes and dreams into our hearts. Blaze them like a furnace, burn out from them all the general rage and hate piled up there from Adam down, make not a mortar ready to burst our heart’s hot shell over the back of some great white whale in impotent fury, no, but make there a light that cannot be covered, a light reflecting Your glory and goodness, a light of peace and friendship for all peoples. There are none whose hearts beat yet that do not also draw Your breath, none on whom You do not look with love. Teach us, Spirit of God. Reshape our ways. Alight on us that we who are begotten and made might live in splendid imitation of You.
God in Your mercy,
Receive our prayer.
Oh God, You who are singular, You who exist without peer, we call attention especially to the marriage that will take place here among us today. Oh sweet Jesus, did You not first reveal Your glory upon the Earth at that wedding in Cana, Your mother confident in Your simple goodness? The tables of celebration are set. Smile, oh God, we pray, on the joyful din that will rise soon from them. Bless, we ask, the love to be celebrated here, oh God, and the loves that have flourished among us for many long years. It is a new day that you have wrought. We rejoice and are glad on it.
In the holy name of Jesus the Christ, who lived and died and lived again for our sake, we pray,
Amen