On the Anniversary

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Prayer of the Week

Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Prayer for the Week

Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in my heart the love of your Name; increase in me true religion; nourish me with all goodness; and bring forth in me the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen

Prayer for Mission

For Mission

Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.

From the daily office of The Book of Common Prayer, 1979.
dailyoffice.org

Prayer for the Week

Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of this redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Prayer for the Church

Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

HT: Scot McKnight @ JesusCreed.org

Advent Prayer

Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

-from The Book of Common Prayer

A Prayer for Thanksgiving

Prayer of Thanksgiving

by Walter Rauschenbusch

O God, we thank you for this earth, our home;
For the wide sky and the blessed sun,
For the salt sea and the running water,
For the everlasting hills
And the never-resting winds,
For trees and the common grass underfoot.
We thank you for our senses
By which we hear the songs of birds,
And see the splendor of the summer fields,
And taste of the autumn fruits,
And rejoice in the feel of the snow,
And smell the breath of the spring.
Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty;
And save our souls from being so blind
That we pass unseeing
When even the common thornbush
Is aflame with your glory,
O God our creator,
Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

From Living God’s Justice: Reflections and Prayers, compiled by The Roundtable Association of Diocesan Social Action Directors

Confessions #8: the gift of worship

"Therefore he who made me is good, and he is my good, and I exult to him, for all the good things that I was even as a boy. My sin consisted in this, that I sought pleasure, sublimity, and truth not in God but in his creatures, in myself and other created beings. So it was that I plunged into miseries, confusions, and errors. My God, I give thanks to you, my source of sweet delight, and my glory and my confidence. I thank you for your gifts. Keep them for me, for in this way you will keep me. The talents you have given will increase and be perfected, and I will be with you since it was your gift to me that I exist."
- Augustine

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and he said, "It is good." He made the heavens above and the earth beneath and filled them with birds and fish and plants and other animals, and he made man and woman after himself to govern and cultivate the earth as his stewards. But man and woman chose to worship the things they were to rule over, even themselves, and we continue to plunge ourselves into "miseries, confusions, and errors."

It's like becoming spiritually inbred. We worship ourselves and so complicate, multiply, and propagate the corruptions in our own nature. So Jesus comes to fix our broken, crooked DNA with "the word of life, which is able to save our souls."

Maybe that's why he's the "seed of Abraham". Like a human genome project in the divine laboratory, and project to map our flaws and inject the healing strand, the seed of new life, from which sprouts true worship, in spirit and in truth, to the creator himself. This true worship, spreading like a virus of light throughout the darkest rooms of our heart to realign, renew, rebuild, refresh, restore.

It says of Jesus that when he ascended "gave gifts to men", gifts of worship I assume, so that in possession of them we are possessed by the one who gives them, in thankfulness, in worship.

Some say that this life is merely preparation for the next. If that is true, and gifts and talents are really gifts for worship, then I had better get busy worshiping. Or else, I might not have much to do in the next life but sit on the bench. Whatever the afterlife (or life after life after death, as some say) holds, it sure isn't a place you'd want to be "benched" at for lack of practice.

Time to start existing.

Confessions #7: In the image

"In you are the constant causes of inconstant things. All mutable things have in you their immutable origins. In you all irrational and temporal things have the everlasting causes of their life."
- Augustine

"God has instituted prayer so as to confer upon his creatures the dignity of being causes."
- Blaise Pascal

Who can tell?

Morning Prayer from
				The Book of Common Prayer
				Sunday, 2 September 2007 The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity

All
Almighty and most merciful Father,
we have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.
We have followed too much the devices and desires
of our own hearts.
We have offended against thy holy laws.
We have left undone those things
which we ought to have done;
and we have done those things
which we ought not to have done;
and there is no health in us.
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.
Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.
Restore thou them that are penitent;
according to thy promises declared unto mankind
in Christ Jesu our Lord.
And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake,
that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life,
to the glory of thy holy name.
Amen.

First Reading: Jonah 3.5-9

So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.
For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water:
But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands.
Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?

Second Reading: Revelation 3.19-22

As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.
Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.

Today's Morning Reading

From today's morning reading of the Book of Common Prayer:

from the OT reading, Habakkuk 3:2
O Lord, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy.

from Te Deum Laudamus

				O Lord, save thy people and bless thine heritage.
				Govern them and lift them up for ever.
				Day by day we magnify thee;
				and we worship thy name, ever world without end.
				Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.
				O Lord, have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us.
				O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us, as our trust is in thee.
				O Lord, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded.

A Poem and Prayer

Jesus,
bread and light of life,

I am not
but you are
in me I am
in You alive.
















"But we, O Lord, behold we are Thy little flock; possess us as Thine, stretch Thy wings over us and let us fly under them. Be Thou our glory." - St. Augustine

A Poetic Prayer from Down Under

God of Eternity, Lord of the Ages,
Father and Spirit and Saviour of men!
Thine is the glory of time’s numbered pages;
Thine is the power to revive us again.
Pardon our sinfulness, God of all pity,
Call to remembrance Thy mercies of old;
Strengthen Thy Church to abide as a city
Set on a hill for a light to Thy fold.
Head of the Church on earth, risen, ascended!
Thine is the honour that dwells in this place:
As Thou hast blessed us through years that have ended,
Still lift upon us the light of Thy face. Amen.

-Australian Presbyterian, Ernest Northcroft Merrington

it came upon a midnight clear

Emperors and Angels

Isaiah 9.2–7; Luke 2.1–20

a sermon at the Midnight Eucharist, Christmas Eve 2006

by the Bishop of Durham, Dr N. T. Wright

The following is from the Christmas hymn, "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear", but with a few of the lines changed a bit in order to more accurately represent the heart of the prophets and the meaning of Christmas, which, as Bishop Tom Wright said this is Christmas eve, is a "summons to us, as it was to his first followers, to sign on under his authority, to celebrate the birth of the Wonderful Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, and to work under that authority for the growth of his promised kingdom of endless peace, of justice and righteousness."

For lo, the days are hastening on,
by prophets seen of old,
When, by the Spirit’s mighty power
Arrives the time foretold:
When Peace shall over all the earth
Its promised splendours fling,
And the whole world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.
-Edmund Sears and N.T. Wright

A song and a Prayer

You are so high among the highest, and I am low among the lowest, a mean thing. You never go away from us. Yet we have difficulty in returning to you. Come Lord, stir us up and call us back, kindle and seize us, be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love, let us run (to you).
-St. Augustine

Since from His bounty I receive
Such proofs of love divine
Had I a thousand hearts to give
Lord, they should all be Thine
A thousand men could not compose
A worthy song to bring
Yet Your love is a melody
Our hearts can’t help but sing!
-To Christ the Lord Let Every Tongue,
Samuel Stennet and Laura Taylor

a trinity prayer

The following prayer is from a book by Tom Wright entitled Bringing the Church to the World. Sometimes we neglect the simple, repeatable, foundational prayers because of a misunderstanding of the prohibition to not use "vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words." The issue was the vanity of their babbling, as some translations have it, not just the fact that they said the same thing twice, or three or four times, and the fact that they expected to be heard by their idol-gods because of the quantity of their repetitions or something like that. But for those who personally address the one and only Creator, there is no vanity in addressing him, one, two, five, or even one hundred times a day, regardless of the variety of the content of the addressing. Did not Jesus validate the persistent (or nagging?) widow who won over the unrighteous judge? Or maybe we just don't know the benefits of it... I for one sure don't, but I know there are many whom have gone before me that do. And, I think I'd like to learn. So, anyway, here it is. If you'd like to read the corresponding chapter out of Wright's book, you can find it here. It's a good one.

Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth:
Set up your kingdom in our midst.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God:
Have mercy on me, a sinner.

Holy Spirit, breath of the living God:
Renew me and all the world.

Kerby