Sunday, December 29, 2002
Offered by John Buchanan, Pastor

O God, our help in ages past, you have been our companion along the way of our journey: you have been with us on each day of our pilgrimage. And as we mark the passing of time this week, we give you thanks for your presence, your steady, creative, energetic and merciful love in our lives.

O God, we thank you for all that has been: for the Christmas celebrations and reunions with loved ones and the opportunity to travel again to Bethlehem. We thank you for good days this year when we have known the glory of your creation, days when we saw warm sun sparkling on the lake and felt the gentle spring air and were startled by the color of new flowers. We thank you for nights when we saw a full moon rise over the lake and the bright brilliance of a starry sky. We thank you for days when we were given gifts of love in a child’s laughter, a beloved’s thoughtfulness, a friend’s generosity. And we thank you, O God, our help in ages past, for those days that challenged us and demanded that we think and reexamine our assumptions and work in new ways. We thank you for your presence—urging, pushing, prodding us to grow and become the women and men we can be and you want us to be.

O God, our hope in years to come, we thank you for all that will be: for the new year stretched out before us with its promise and potential, with new challenges and gifts to discover. We pray your blessing, merciful God, for our nation and our leaders in the difficult days ahead. As our president and those around him decide how to exercise the unprecedented power that is theirs—and ours—help them, stand beside and over them, that our nation will contribute to world peace and world order for ourselves and our children and all people. Give them a sense of the great burden of responsibility that accompanies great power. Give them humility and trust in the wisdom of the people who elected them. Stir up in them the best instincts of this precious nation, instincts of kindness and compassion and equality and a passion for justice.

O God, our shelter from the stormy blast, we commend our lives to your care: our fears, our anxieties, and our love for our dearest ones. We commend to your care those who are sick today: Mayor and Mrs. Daley. Be with them and be with those who are lonely and those who grieve.

And, O God, our eternal home, we face a new year with the confidence of your children: sure that in all the changes and challenges of the future we can rely on your love in Jesus Christ, from which nothing in this world, not even death, can separate us.

Hear our prayer, which we offer in the name of Jesus Christ, who taught his disciples to pray, saying . . .

Prayer © Fourth Presbyterian Church