We are blessed to live in a community which exhibits the beauties of nature so fully that hundreds of thousands of people each year come here to be re-created in the extraordinary scenes of the beach or the golf course or the morning light shining through the limbs of oaks or pines or palmettos. Today we gather in praise of the God who created the natural order and everything in it, and we express our profound gratitude for the beauty of the earth. Let us therefore, with confidence, worship the God of creation.
Pastoral Prayer
Loving and gracious God, we bow before Thee, conscious of the great gulf which exists between us and Thee. Thou art great and we are lowly; Thou dost love with a love which never fails, and our love for Thee and for one another is fitful and fleeting and faulty; Thou art completely trustworthy, and we scarcely trust ourselves, let alone one another. Despite our feelings of immense inadequacy before Thy great grace, lift us up out of ourselves, that we may more effectively reflect Thy spirit within us. Forgive us for all the ways we fail to do Thy will, and give us the tenacious determination to do Thy will more graciously and gratefully from now on.
We thank Thee for all the ways we perceive Thee in our lives: when someone who is not kindly does something kind to us, and we realize it was Thy transforming grace which made it happen; when personal or political disaster is averted, and upon reflection we trust it was because Thou didst intervene; when we calmly accept adversities it is not our nature to accept, and we trust it could only have been Thou who didst enable us to sit back in trustful resignation for events we know we cannot control. We pray for elderly people who are experiencing old age not as a blessing but as an immense burden, because disability or pain have enveloped them, and they worry that their ability to withstand the adversities that confront them is rapidly diminishing.
We pray for people for whom the current moment brings sorrow or sadness: those who are experiencing relentless physical or mental anguish, those for whom grief is the primary feeling of which they have awareness, those who feel engulfed by a gradual or swift diminution of awareness of the world around them, those who believe they are cut off from everyone dear to them, even from Thee. Lord God, grant cheer to the cheerless, hope to the hopeless, and love to the loveless. These things we ask in the name of Jesus, who constantly leads us into new understandings and appreciation of who and what Thou art. Now we pray as Jesus taught his followers, saying, Our Father….