8.20.23 Prayers of Church & Community, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Pasadena, CA

 Prayers of Church & Community, August 20, 2023

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Eternal God, forever and a day, your glory, your goodness, your grace, sustains the world, the universe, and our souls …  

your love for us is without question, 

and still and always a great and wonderful mystery - 

that you, O God, the God of heaven and earth, 

the God of all time and eternity, 

should be so committed to us, 

so involved with our affairs and our fancies, 

and so kindly disposed to our raging faults and dismal failures.

We pray this day for the efforts of politicians around the world to forge new alliances of peace, cooperation, and good will, for the sake of the earth, and all its creatures, great and small.

We pray for scientists engaged in the work of discovery … those who search the heavens, and those who probe the atom … to better understand what it means to be human, to be alive, to live in a vast and wondrous universe, and to find new ways of healing the body, feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and relieving the distress and anxieties that plague the soul and disrupt our lives. 

We pray for the writers and actors who give us a mirror wherein we can find ourselves: for Gerta Gerwig and “Barbie” … for Christopher Nolan and “Oppenheimer” … and for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; for Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses and David - and for Jesus and the Canaanite Woman.

We pray for our families and friends … we pray for our church … we pray for our nation … we pray that democracy will grow stronger, and the forces of fear will diminish …  

we give thanks for the wisdom of our Constitution, 

and we pray all the more for school boards, 

library associations, city councils,

those who teach, those who govern, 

those who point the way forward, 

who lift up the best of our ideals and the best of our dreams.

Deliver us, we pray, from the deep anxieties that take our hand, deny us rest, and foster the sins of the world. 

Help us, we pray, to find the inner peace of faith, the peace that comes when we trust your word, that you goodness is at work in all things … that in all things, in the worst of it, in the best of it, and in all the in-between times, we belong to you, a most faithful savior, a kindly LORD, a loving God … though our days are numbered, they are numbered by you, O God, and we need not fear evil, for thou art with us.

In the name of our LORD Jesus Christ who taught us to pray, saying:

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors; and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen.