Prayer Eden Mennonite Church October 25, 2009

O God of goodness and God of change, you call us again  and again out of darkness into your marvelous light.  You call us to bear your radiance to the world as surely as you set the stars above it.

O God, move us beyond ourselves …
Grant us liberation from our whining, our negative self-talk, our recycled resentments, our laziness, our endless excuses, our hypocrisy in polishing up our words and behavior for Sunday but living double lives on Monday. 
Grant us a seamless life in you.
Grant us an exodus out of our short-sightedness and into your possibilities.

O God, betroth us to your Spirit and move us beyond ourselves … to integrity and wholeness and focus which in you are 100% possible.

Move us to separate the chaff from the bedrock, the nonsense from the truth, the distractions from the important.

Crucify us to the world and the world to us so that we may love the world the way you so love it.

O God, move us to imagine and to place a welcome mat for the new creation you are bringing.

We pray for the ignorant, the denying, the insulated.

We pray for the chronically anxious people all around us, desperately spending their lives for security in everything but you.

We pray for those addicted to creating drama in their relationships in order to dull the pain of hopelessness.

We pray for those who confuse being wired and distracted by technology with being alive; we pray for those who confuse busyness with meaning.   

We pray for so many for whom the economy is creating unexpected challenges —challenges at the beginning of working years, in the middle of working years, near the end of working years, and in retirement years.  Give them your guidance and wisdom and partnership on new paths. 

We pray for leaders of nations and corporations and towns and churches who lack imagination and nerve and can only think of doing more of the same.

We pray for those who lack so many material resources yet who creatively survive.

We pray for those who have tried so hard to fit into church but can’t.

We pray for those who have received so much from your church but have never thought of being the church.

We pray for those who are simply brutalized and dehumanized by violent crime, disease, exploitation, hunger, war, and displacement.

O God, strengthen us to be negotiators of common ground in the midst of killing fields; to join your mission of disarmament on Durst Street and in Darfur; to recycle swords of metal and swords of destructive words into plowshares; to deactivate warheads of prejudice, to decommission detonators of disrespect.

O God strengthen us to be progressive and proactive disciples, like the ancestors of this congregation, who embraced your future in advance and acted on it. 

And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.  Amen.