Sunday, March 8, 2009
Offered by Linda C. Loving, Minister for Evangelism

Holy God, you are with us in every season of our lives, but in this particular Lenten season we dare to draw closer to you, to truly contemplate the cost and the courage and the calamity of the cross, and to wonder how our striving and suffering will also know ultimate redemption.

Compared to Jesus, we lead such “little lives”: easily distracted, filled with worry rather than wonder, taking for granted your profound and endless love and underestimating our own potential to embody that love—to even change the world with that love—a love shown to us so clearly, so dearly in the life of Jesus.

And oh, we would change the world, O God, for your beautiful fabric of creation is torn by uncertainty and indifference and confusion, by starvation and unkindness and unthinkable violence. And on this morning, unthinkable violence is thought about, prayed about, as we journey with friends and neighbors at First Presbyterian Church in Wilmette in their staggering sorrow. We pray for our colleague, Sarah, who points them to your ultimate truth and light. We pray for those everywhere impacted daily by violent loss of loved ones. We wonder in our hearts if we are careening out of control—the toxic mix of high anxiety and low esteem, the barrage of bad news and availability of weapons, illnesses of spirit and mind.

Yet you have created us for hope and promised us strength and mercy in the presence of Jesus, who is here with us even now, calls to us even now, has holy work for us to do to help save your reeling creation. He is here with us even now, here for those who are suffocating in sadness; he is here for those fearful of failure and finances; he is here for those who carry illness and long for wholeness; he is here when life is turned inside out, so that we may lose ourselves in order to find ourselves.

He is here. He is here to pick up our burdens, so that we may take up our crosses and follow him and proclaim his love with our very lives, “in work that keeps faith sweet and strong, in trust that triumphs over wrong” (from the hymn “O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee”).

We hear his call. We respond with our lives and with the words he taught us, saying, Our Father . . .

Prayer © Fourth Presbyterian Church