Our Lord and our Good God
This morning we come before you together seeking your light and your presence among the darkness and chaos that surrounds us. We are strangers in a land full of consumption and greed and inequality.
We listen together this morning to hear your good word that calls light from the darkness and order from the chaos. We listen together this morning as you call us to be agents, representatives of your light and those who bring order to a world lost in disorder.
And together we acknowledge that while we try to follow you, the powers and the principalities at work have placed us in a seemingly impossible position where we have no choice but to participate in the corporate sins that continue the active destruction of the world around us. And we ask together, how can we follow you? How are we supposed to follow you while there are so many good shows on Netflix or we need to check the latest tweet? How are we supposed to follow you while also making sure that we build a bigger barn? While our consumption comes at the cost of peoples lives in places we’ll never know?
Who will rescue us from us from this body of death? Praise be to you, oh Lord, who is the hope and mercy and salvation of this world. Who has seen this darkness and chosen to intervene.
And for the clear and present evils of the world, let us continuously come to you in prayer and persistently speak out.
The heaviness of this darkness weighs us down, but you are the light. And we ask that that light would be seen as we watch from afar the atrocity of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s genocide of the Uyghur population, the forced starvation and bombing of Yemen, and the countless other acts of slaughter in the world. And we are helpless to know what to do, so we bring these to you to ask for intervention, for an active response for peace and restoration and justice. Protect the vulnerable and give wisdom to the leaders involved.
The heaviness of this darkness weighs us down, but you are the light. Help us not to turn a blind eye to the active oppression of our black and brown and indigenous sisters and brothers. Show us our complicity. Show us our the opportunities for restoration. And when your Spirit stirs us to action, don’t let us ignore what you are calling us to do. Prepare our minds, that we would see the injustice in our neighborhoods and not stand idly by, but that we would be a stumbling block for the systems in place that keep the marginalized in their places of hopelessness.
The heaviness of this darkness weighs us down, but you are the light. Set our hopes on you and the grace and mercy and peace that has been given to us by the Good News of Jesus Christ, who is our Lord and Savior and King. Prepare us for the work of your holiness, keep us sober in spirit as we work to be lights that point to you. Rid us of any deceit and slander, so that we, being nourished by your grace like a nursing infant, would be built into a home where the people in our lives who do not know you would be able to come and sit and eat and know your peace and love and hope.
Help us to actively build up the communities where we find ourselves. Help us to serve as your priests in the world, confessing and offering sacrifices of the gifts that we have been given, so that the world might be restored, so that people would know you, and so that the real actual life that you intended for all people might be seen.
Thank you Lord that you have not left this world in darkness to find our own way in our blindness. We thank you for this community and for the work that you have called us to do.
Be with Michael now as he brings us a good word. Let his words be yours and let them open us in a new way to your truth and to see more who we are called to be in this world where we are.
And lastly, we thank you for your great, great unimaginable love for us. We thank you for the light that overcomes, the gift of your mercy and grace, and the good news of your son, Jesus Christ.
In whose name we pray
Amen