2023 September 03

Prayers of the People #

Oh God, to You is not every grave but a bed?1 Do not the dead sleep, waiting for You to call them up? Give the child something to eat, You said, and will the sleepers on that day of raising up be fed as well? Oh death, where is thy sting?2 Your scythe the Lord has blunted and the walls of your keep He has crumbled. We are the people of resurrection! and it we profess and it we believe. But the span of our days is brief and the absence of our kin, of our friends, cuts deep, oh God, and we weep over them. And did You not also weep, You to whom dry bones, if You willed it, are but moments away from rising and making a joyful noise? Dry our tears3, oh God, for they have been our bread for too long and we cannot live on them alone4. Feed us new food at Your table, walk with us in the evening breeze, rustle the leaves in Your passing5, nourish us, oh God, nourish hope and friendship among us.

God in your mercy,
Receive our prayer.

Your saint Henry David Thoreau, blessed bean cultivating idler6 and abolitionist, taught that a government is but a wood gun to the will of the people7. And should we not, to Thoreau’s mind, be not no-government people but better-government people, to know and to state what fashion of wooden gun commands our respect? Would that not be one step toward obtaining it? Maybe, maybe, maybe. Have we not become a people like an unturned loaf in the oven8? Do we not make oracles of trees9? We herd the wind and with our wind we make oaths and those oaths seal pacts and what are they, this bundled wind, but poisoned blooms springing forth in the furrows of Your fields, oh God10? Conceal us from the council of the wicked for their tongues are whetted like a sword11. Stuff our ears with Your words, make our feet trod along Your straight and level path, make our mouths pour forth with Gospel. We remember this day A. J. Mustee, a man set against war and domination, a pacifist but not passive in his labors, a union organizer and sponge for the policeman’s baton, a man who, like an Old Testament prophet stood and cried out Madness! Madness! Madness! as the 20th century hatefully ground forward12. Teach us peace, oh God, when war offers succor. Teach us mercy, oh God, when our hands grasp at the levers of power. Teach us love, oh God, when the world is aflame with hate. If we take in equal measure to what is taken, how long until the stock of eyes grow thin, until the storehouses of teeth lay bare? Teach us, oh God, those things we must know. Work in us the desire for that which needs doing.

God in your mercy,
Receive our prayer.

Ahab, Ahab, vile captain, the whale seekest thee not, it is thou that madly seekest him! Where, oh man, is thy watery grave?13 Ahab, Ahab, wicked king, thief and murderer, what prophets did you heed in the end, what deceiving spirit wagged their tongues in the caverns of their mouths? Hungry from the day of its crafting was the arrow that bit into your flesh!14 Oh God, we pray “forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us and lead us not into temptation”15 as You have taught and though we pray earnestly who is it that cannot sin but You? Who can stand on the topmost of the Temple and put no kindling on the fire of ambition but You16? You who laid the plumb line of Creation17, are You not gentle and humble in heart18? And how can it be so? And it is so, for Your ways are not our ways19. Your yoke is easy on those that bear it. Lift it up for us, oh God, that we may shoulder it. Look on with tender mercy those saints that now work in the world with Your light burden, by whose labors the blooms of justice and peace spring forth in the furrows of Your fields. Friends, raise now either aloud or in your hearts those that work for the Lord.

God in your mercy,
Receive our prayer.

Oh God, in Hawaii they burn, our siblings. In Ukraine, they are shredded, our siblings. In Florida they drown, in the Mediterranean they fall in the heat that will not lift, in Nepal the glaciers run down the mountains which hold up the dome of the sky20 but no rain comes to replace them and they, our kin, die of thirst. Our siblings, Your children, one and all. What day has been, since the Angel was set with sword against the gate of the Garden21, that has not known sorrow? And, oh God, what day has been that has not known joy, since that very first when only You were and all that you beheld You declared good? What day has not seen a child loved by its parents? What day has not heard the songs of birds? When have trees not whispered to one another beneath the soil? What day has the sun not shone on an Earth bursting with life and the hope of life? Those who mourn will be comforted. Those who are starved for justice will have their fill. We ask now, oh God, for the healing and comfort of those sick among us, if You will it. Friends, whether aloud or in your heart, who do we pray for this day?

God in your mercy,
Receive our prayer.

Oh friends, let us sing to God while we yet live, let us hymn to Him while we yet breath, let our speech be sweet unto Him. As for us, will we not rejoice in the Lord and His works? God willing, will we not be a blessing to our neighbors and, God willing, will we not be a bane to the wicked? In the holy name of Jesus, Child God, the blameless lamb, who lived and died and lives again for our sake, we pray,

Amen

  1. I’m thinking of two things here, one of which I reference shortly. The foremost is the raising of Jairus’ daughter – how sad that we do not know her name – in Mark 5. “The child hasn’t died–she’s just asleep.” I assume a bed for Jairus’ daughter because it’s common in my culture to lay the recently dead out in a comfortable repose, but the text doesn’t say that. I think also of 1 Thessalonians 4 wherein the dead are also described as merely sleeping. ↩︎

  2. 1 Corinthians 15:55 famously at funerals, quoting part of Hosea 13:14. The whole of that verse in Hosea is, in Alter’s translation, “From Sheol shall I ransom them, from death shall I redeem them? Where are your words, O Death, where your scourge, O Sheol? Regret is hidden from my eyes.” The statement in 1 Corinthians, pared with the quotation from Isaiah 25 suggests a positive reading but in the context of Hosea I find it challenging to read this as anything other than a rhetorical question with a negative answer. The first letter to the Corinthians is understood in our age to be truly Paul’s writing. I wonder, did Paul have the whole of Hosea memorized or was this one snippet common in song or other brief, absent its context? That is, did Paul recognize the rhetorical question and see the answer here as a plain ‘yes’? ↩︎

  3. Psalm 42:3 ↩︎

  4. Matthew 4:4, Luke 4:4. It is, of course, not tears nor bread that we can live on but the words that proceed from the mouth of God. ↩︎

  5. Starting in August of 2022 I co-lead a Genesis study, going chapter by chapter every two weeks. As of this writing we had reached Chapter 22, the Akedah. Yet, I remain stunned by Genesis 3, the notion that God would come into the garden to take strolls. ↩︎

  6. Do read Walden Pond; or, Life in the Woods. Or, if that’s not to your taste A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. ↩︎

  7. This is from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. This essay of Thoreau is hugely influential to my thinking, as is, frankly, quite a lot of what Thoreau wrote. It forms the core thrust in my Build Good Software: Of Politics and Methods. ↩︎

  8. Hosea 7:8 ↩︎

  9. Hosea 4:12 ↩︎

  10. Hosea 10:4 ↩︎

  11. Psalm 64:3-4 ↩︎

  12. Discussed in AJ Muste’s Christian nonviolence. ↩︎

  13. Moby Dick is my favorite book. I don’t know that I could tell you exactly why. Like Job, it tasks me and I think on it often. I think it’s general cultural knowledge in my time that Captain Ahab is, well, the captain of the whaling voyage that hunts Moby Dick. He is a man obsessed. Sayeth cheif mate Starbuck: “Oh! Ahab not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” Captain Ahab is explicitly named for King Ahab in the text of the book, a curse on the man’s life from the very start. ↩︎

  14. King Ahab, seventh king of Israel, lives his life out in 1 Kings 16 - 22. ↩︎

  15. A stanza from the Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4. ↩︎

  16. Matthew 4:5-7, Luke 4:9-12. ↩︎

  17. Job 38:4-7 but also I am reminded now of Amos 7:7-9. A plumb bob is a neat tool, ancient, using gravity to mark a vertical line. ↩︎

  18. Matthew 11:28-30 ↩︎

  19. Isiaah 55:8-9 ↩︎

  20. On the notion of the sky being a solid dome in ancient Mesopotamian thought, I warmly recommend the chapter “Cosmic Geography” in John H. Walton’s Ancient Near Easter Thought and the Old Testament. ↩︎

  21. Genesis 3:24 ↩︎

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