Prayers for our Country

 

Please pray with me:  God the beautiful spiritual says it best, “Precious Lord, take my/our hand to lead us on and help us stand.  We are tried, weak, and worn.” As Isaiah sought to comfort to people who were in exile, we long for your comfort and compassion.  We are bruise and broken, hurting and aching, we long for Your healing.  Gracious God, it can often feel like we are watching the same screen, but seeing a different movie.  How is that we all live agreeing it is November 6, but not much beyond that?  Our phones all sync with the same time in our time zone, and yet we are as distant and disconnected as if some people were on Pluto.  God, as humans, we have always struggled with loving those who are different.  We have justified judgement based on gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, identity, geographic location, and countless other ways we sort each other into boxes meant to confine and define each other.  This muscle of judging is so strong that the gospeling muscle of Jesus’ truth has atrophied over the years.  God, we need Your wisdom, strength, peace, love, and presence today and this week.  God help us be the people and church You are calling us to be in such a time as this.  Go continue to guide us and ground us and govern us with a gospeling love of Your presence now and always.  Amen.

Prayers for our Country

 

Prayer for our country:

O God, You are our help in ages past and You are the hope in us and through us for the days to come.  We pray today for our fellow citizens, some of whom we struggle to love.  We get caught in cycles of dismissing each other.  We are quick to point out the splinter in another’s eye, while ignoring the log in our own.  Help us, O God.  We remember how Isaiah was told to preach to people who would not listen, change, or return to You.  Is that still the sermon You sing to us today?  We know we cannot change another person or convince them of our own correctness, yet we still spend our effort and energy trying. Open our hearts in this time of uncertainty.  Meet us in our fears and frustration, meet us in our division and derision, meet us on this election day.  God, we pray for the future of our country.  We pray for a new spirit to stir in our lives, our neighbor’s lives, our community, and from sea to shining sea.  We pray for those who will be elected to serve, not that we would follow blindly, but that we, as people of faith, would be infused and inspired with Your call to do justice, to show loving kindness, and to remember our humanity, that we are made of the earth.  God ground us and guide and let Your governing presence be what is at the center of our lives every day to come.  Amen.

Prayers for our Country

 

Tomorrow is election day in the United States.  There is so much sitting, stirring, and swirling in the air around us.  There is fear and frustration we feel we are inhaling with every breath.  There is uncertainty and confusion.  There is angst, anxiety, anger, and almost every emotion available exhaled with each breath, felt in each keystroke posted onto social media.  The truth is, we may not know the results of the election for several days as election workers count ballots and verify results.  It is hard, holy work.  Today and tomorrow, I want to invite us into a time of prayer for our country.  I invite you to be open to God’s presence.  We have been listening to the prophet Isaiah for the last several weeks.  This was intentional and prayerful ~ he was brash and bold in the face of chaos and challenge.  Isaiah lived during Exile, when the people of God could smell the Cheetos on the breath of the Babylonian army surrounding them.  The people of God would be defeated.  The temple would be ransacked, left in rumble and ruin.  Life would be turned upside down.  Faith seemed foolish or shattered or at least dented, as leaders were carted off to live in Babylon where they sat and wept.  How can you sing to God in a foreign land?  How can you sing to God when everything has gone to you know where in a handbasket?  How can you sing to God when all the exterior evidence of goodness and grace have been shattered like glass that has fallen on the tile floor?  Those ancient questions are still our questions.  How do we sing to God when the debris on our curbs and scars on the landscape from trees uprooted from hurricanes are a daily reminder of what we have gone through?  How do we sing to God when we are exhausted mentally, physically, and emotionally?  When wars still rage on ~ with violence begetting violence?  When we struggle to love our enemies as Jesus calls us not just as a good consideration but a commandment?  Please pray with me:

 

God, we pray for our country tomorrow.  We pray for people as they vote that election spaces will be safe, and people can exercise this right.  We pray for election workers who may face difficult and demanding situations, because of the anger and angst.  We pray for the leaders of our country; those who are running and those who will continue to serve.  O God, we lament that perhaps what unites us the most right now is our dissatisfaction and dismay and distrust of each other.  What unites us now is fear of the other.  What seems to be acceptable is our cynicism and criticism and calling out everything that is wrong.  We lament that we lack courage to weep.  We confess that we prefer a confident lie to a messy truth.  We confess that we judge and throw stones on social media and treat each other as less than created in Your image.  Have mercy on us, O Christ.  You call us, Jesus, not just to believe in you, like it some kind of test, but to let You, O Christ, abide in us.  Let Your gospeling wisdom interrupt, intercede, and inform our hearts, words and very lives every moment this week.  In the strong name of the One who was with the people of God in good times and bad, through Exodus and Exile, and everything in-between.  Amen.

All Saints Day

 

This Sunday we will celebrate All Saints Day.  Today, I invite you to light a candle and name your saints.  For me, that includes my grandma, my mom, people whose love I felt at the church, and those whose fingerprints are on my life.  Recently, my Uncle Keith passed away.  I got to see him a few years ago when I was visiting Iowa.  I admired my Uncle Keith.  He was optimistic, caring, smart, energetic, and loving.  Uncle Keith sent handwritten letters, until arthritis caused him to turn to a typewriter.  Uncle Keith left fingerprints upon my heart.  I think about my grandma who lived with us growing up.  She was stern and serious, classic German personality.  But, as the baby of the family, I think she let me get away with things.  I remember watching soap operas with her during the summer and how her hugs let me know I was fully loved.  I remember my mom who sought to share love in the best ways she could.  My mom loved Christmas so much that the day after Thanksgiving, the Christmas boxes came out of hibernation in the basement.  How mom and dad baked cookies and candy for everyone.  How mom was the one who went to church with me.  I remember former pastors who shared God’s love with me, and I have lost touch with over the years.  One of the myths of life in America is rugged individualism, that we get to decide who we want to be.  We are shaped by those around us (see Monday’s meditation).  I pray today, you will light a candle to symbolize those whose love made you who you are.  Name your saints.  May this spiritual practice open you to Sunday when we honor the saints of our church.  With God’s love which comes to us disguised in the lives of those who love us. Amen.  

Prayer for this All Hallow's Eve

 

Prayer for Halloween ~ God, You hold us and know us better than we know ourselves, be with us this day.  We know that too often we get caught in ways of being that feel like shoes too tight on our feet.  We long to be grounded and guided by You in how we show up, but at the same time we need approval and acceptance from our tribes.  Help us, O God, for we don’t always know what the next right step is.  The thick fog that clouds our thinking can make it hard to be certain which way we are going.  Our ears thick with the noise of the world can make it difficult to hear Your still singing voice.  Our souls are confounded by all the “advice” can make it nearly impossible to know whether what we are sensing is a nudge from You or slight indigestion.  Help us.  Hold us, and all the costumes we wear.  Guild us as we turn toward the last two months of the year.  In the name of the One who promises to abide with us, Jesus the Christ.  Amen.

October Days

 

As October days dwindle, I invite you today to look back at the last year.  I know, we usually do this on December 31 or January 1.  But honestly, why conform to the cultural expectations?  Today, I will write down the highlights of the last year.

Write down the lowlights.

Where did Your soul feel like a fountain?

Where did Your soul feel drained?

Whose love in your life makes a difference?

And whose love makes demands and decrees you don’t want to obey?

Where was an ordinary moment a holy moment?

 

Hold your life for the mystery it is as the season of autumn is ensconced around us.  Amen.

Reflections on All Hallows Eve part 2

 

I remember one year I what as a ghost for Halloween.  I did this because we had just purchased new sheets, and my grandma (a child of the Depression) would not allow anything to be thrown away.  She recycled or repurposed before it was trending.  It was also the easiest costume to make.  A few holes for my eyes (I don’t think my grandma cut one for my mouth to breathe ~ but breathing is overrated).  She used some markers to make the eyes stand out.  And voila, instant Halloween costume. 

 

The truth is we are all haunted by unholy ghosts in our lives.  We may no longer be afraid of monsters under our bed, but we are afraid of the images we see on the news and the voices that tell us the world is dangerous. 

 

What ghosts and ghouls do you deal with? 

Tie this to what we talked about yesterday with systems.  How do you show up when the gathering sends a chill down your spine?  You know that meeting you dread each month.  Or that broken person who keeps calling?  Do you keep putting on the same costume to show up?  This is not meant to blame or shame, but to notice.  In fact, I would contend that noticing, rather than moving ahead on autopilot is a brave practice we need now more than ever.  This starts with noticing the places where your stomach does summersaults, your mind races like a hamster on a wheel, and your heart sounds like a bass drum of a marching band.  Hold those moments and think about what you said or didn’t say ~ the truth is that in anxious situations we can get bigger (raise our voice, pound the table, demand our way or the highway) or we can get smaller (sink to the sidelines and stay silent).  How you stay human-size, as your authentic self, is hard holy work ~ as hard as trying to maintain the status quo that goes against your values.  

 

I pray for all the ghosts and ghouls that show up in daylight in your life ~ for all the aches and heartbreaks and overwhelming sense we are all lugging around in the luggage of life.  May God who also hold you right now, be felt as we reflect on this one holy, beautiful, broken, precious life.  Amen.