Life is a gift from God, and without God we would have no life at all. Our lives are rich and colorfully textured, and filled with many kinds of people. How do we assess everyone around us? Jesus gave us instructions about that. His words are clear but complex, simple but complicated. Today we shall contemplate what it means to be useful members of the human community, and how we are to relate to one another. In anticipation, let us join with one another as we worship God.
Pastoral Prayer
We praise Thee, O God, for bringing us together once again to sing Thy glory, to hear Thy word, and to respond to Thy love. We thank Thee for the privilege of worship, and for the bonds we share as members of this worshiping community. Help us in this time together to drink deeply of the living water offered to us in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ, Thy unique Son. As we reflect on what he said so long ago, inspire us with what his words mean today. Keep us from turning Jesus into nothing more than an ancient historical figure. Enable us to see him as Thy word made flesh for all time and not just for a period of little more than three decades twenty centuries ago.
We ask Thee to be with us as individually and corporately we attempt to wrestle with issues and questions for which there are no easy answers. Thousands of people are left homeless from a huge hurricane, and while we can do something to assist them, we realize that their troubles are so great compared to our own relatively orderly lives. We read about terrorist incidents in places far away, and our hearts go out to those whose lives are torn apart by senseless, vicious violence. We think of people we know personally whose lives have become prisons of illness or helplessness or despair, and their situations cause us to try to put them out of our minds, wondering whether there is anything we can do to help them. Yet many of these brave souls continue to be beacons of faith in their own darkness, and we are the beneficiaries of that glowing trust. Deepen us, when our lives are too shallow. Strengthen us, when we are too weak. Lift our spirits, when our thoughts or fears threaten to hurl us into the depths.
Loving God, we realize how precarious life is without Thee, and how challenging it can be even with Thee. Help us to assist one another along the way, and thus to perceive Thy presence in the presence and concern of others around us. Turn all of us into instruments of divine grace, so that Thy name may become more widely known throughout the earth. We ask these things in Jesus’ name, who, more than any other, has drawn us into Thy presence. Now we join together in words Jesus taught his first disciples, saying, Our Father....