“The Lord is risen!” we proclaimed last Sunday, as another Easter grasped us with its joyous message. But today is another Sunday, and other issues emerge. What are we to do we do when Easter seems a lifetime away, a world away? Today we enter the world of a fictional person who supposedly lived three and a half millennia ago, whose story is as current as the headlines or the lead stories which confront us every day. Looking through the telescope of time, let us, with sober confidence, worship God.
Pastoral Prayer
Our hearts are filled with gratitude to Thee, O Lord our God, for the goodness and the fullness and the richness of life. We admit a total inability to account for how we happened to born where we were born and to the parents to whom we were born and for being citizens of this particular nation at this particular time in human history. There is nothing any of us did to deserve such a blessing, but we have it nonetheless, and therefore, not knowing where else to turn, we give Thee thanks. Help us to utilize our blessings beyond our own benefit, and to enrich the lives of others by our lives.
We pray for parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters who are grieving and angry because tragic mistakes were made which resulted in the deaths of three hundred teenagers. We pray for the few individuals who are most responsible for those deaths, and whose turbulent spirits are assaulted by painful self-recriminations. We pray for parents whose worldview refuses to see the need for inoculations, some of whose children are paying the price of that worldview. We pray also for thousands of people in central Africa who endure death, pain, and warfare, but without headlines or lead stories because of the overlooked location of where their tragedies occur. We pray for people we know personally whose lives have been disrupted by death or illness or hardship. Thou alone knowest all of us in all our needs, O God, and Thou alone canst ultimately positively address all those needs. Teach us how to look for Thee more effectively when we may doubt Thy presence altogether.
We ask Thy forgiveness of our self-absorption, of the ways in which we focus too much on ourselves and too little on the needs and aspirations of others. Enlarge our vision, O God, so that we see beyond ourselves, our families, and our homes to the larger world around us, with all its pressing problems and unsolved dilemmas. Keep us from living insular lives on this island, and convince us that no man is an island, apart from the main. These things we ask in the name of him who placed us into the worldwide community of all Thy children, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Now we pray as he taught us, saying, Our Father….