Each of us is a child of God, and collectively all of us are communally children of God who live in communities and nations with many other people. Individually and corporately we are responsible for all our decisions and actions, and thus we do well or not so well or very poorly. But through it all God works with us, moving us to strive to do better and to live more fully within His commandments. Therefore let us turn again in confidence to worship the God who bids us always and in all things to be His own.
Pastoral Prayer
Loving God, Thy grace is sufficient for all things, and for that we give Thee thanks. There is nothing we can encounter, nothing we can do, which places any of us outside Thy loving grace. Yet we also acknowledge before Thee that as individuals and as members of our community and nation, we do things we know oppose Thy will and Thy commandments. Help us to acknowledge our shortcomings and to confess our sins, both those we personally and corporately commit. Prevent us from supposing that the only sins which offend Thee are those we commit as individual men and women, lest we ignorantly overlook those things which collectively offend Thee.
We pray for people who on this particular day are feeling great stress: those in positions of high responsibility who know they must take a course of action but do not know what action to take; for those who are in relationships that are badly eroded, but who do not know either how to go forward or to sever the relationship entirely; for those who are confronted by more decisions and choices than they can reasonably expect to manage; for those who are seriously ill and who doubt that good health may ever return to them. In all the uncertainties of life, O God, may we perceive Thee alone to be One Eternal Certainty, and may that conviction lead us through the darkness we imagine seeks entirely to envelop us.
We pray for all the religions of the world, that they may become beacons of light and life, rather than darkness and death. Inspire all religious leaders to seek the good of all humanity rather than merely the perceived good of their own kind of believers. Break into the hard hearts and hard heads of people who fancy themselves to be religious, and yet strike out in violence against people who have opposing views or no particular views at all and yet become victims in the crossfire. These and all our prayers we ask in the name of Jesus, now joining together as he taught his initial followers, saying, Our Father….