Category: benedictions and prayers

Your words bring us comfort, but they also bring us concern, because we know we stand before you guilty, in dirty rags, trying to hide our shame. We thank you that you don’t judge us based on what we do or what we know, but that you treat us with grace, inviting us to your holy feast, blind, crippled, and por alike.

Forgive us when we are consumed with our own image instead of embracing yours.
Forgive us when we treat other people as being somehow less than we are,
even though they too are created in your image.
Forgive us for thinking we have all the answers,
instead of trusting your limitless justice.

We ask for more faith – faith to believe your promises, though sometimes they seem far away.
We ask for more grace, that grace might flow from us
We ask for more love, that we could understand you more.

We ask, as you did, Jesus,
that this new day and new way of life would come,
and come soon –
that your will be done here,
just as it is in Heaven.

And it is in your name,
the name above all names,
that we offer this prayer.

Amen.

Father above,
you offer us so much, and yet we take from you so little. You promise abundant life and yet we are content with the scraps we can scavenge instead of feasting at your banquet table.

We confess to you that your promise to make all things new frightens us, because we do fairly well the way things are, and we are afraid of what we might lose. We worry sometimes about what it might mean to “become like Jesus”, and frankly there are times when we wish you hadn’t told us to follow in his footsteps. We reluctantly admit that we don’t always like where he leads us.

Even though we tend to like the world as it is, we ask for faith to believe the Good News of your Kingdom. We ask for eyes to see what we must change, and for strength to carry it out. We know that without you we have no hope, either in this life or the life to come.

And so we place our lives in your hands, honestly afraid of where you may take us, but hopeful and expectant to see your hand move.

In the holy name of Jesus we pray.
Amen.

Holy God,
we come before you grateful that you are a God of new beginnings, a God who promises to make all things new. We confess that too often we have become comfortable with the way things are, and not interested in the new heaven and new earth you promise. We admit that even more often we resist your coming Kingdom because we know it means we will have to give up idols in which we place far too much trust, and we are afraid of what that might mean.

We ask that you transform our hearts to see the world around us through your eyes. There are times when we’re not really sure we want that, but we believe in order to know you and participate in your promises we must also become new. Make us people who see wrong and try to right it; who see suffering and try to heal it; who see conflict and try to end it. We confess that this prayer and this way of life frightens us, and that without your grace we will surely fail.

So we ask for your grace –
grace given generously, that we might know you and do your will;
grace that we might abide in your present and eternal Kingdom,
where there is no death,
neither sorrow nor pride,
but the fullness of joy with all your saints.

Through Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord.

Amen.