Below is the Prayer of Intercession I composed and offered within the worship service at which I was also preaching yesterday. I don't often post prayers of my own. This one touches deep places in the way I look at the world, the church and the people who move in and out of our lives. If using some or all of it lifts your heart and hands to God so much better. It is written around the seldom noted superlative at the end of I Corinthians 13, "Faith, hope and love remain, but the greatest of these is love". For all our talk of mission and missional – there is a job description for the Church that isn't hard to understand – just hard to live in, live up to, live towards.
Eternal God and
Father,
Whose infinite yet
intimate love
shared from all
eternity between Father, Son and Spirit,
is the same love you
have poured into our hearts by that same Holy Spirit.
We pray for all those
people in our lives,
Who have been touched
and transformed by love,
faithful,
unselfish, generous, joyful, love.
Lifelong friends
and good neighbours
wives and husbands,
parents and children,
sisters and brothers,
best friends and new friends
overcoming
differences in language, race, gender, religion.
O God, in that rich
life of love as Father, Son and Spirit,
We see love’s
inexhaustible possibilities:
So we pray for
those whose lives are broken for lack of love:
Children whose
safety and health come second to adult demands;
Friendships ended
by exploitation and backstabbing;
Marriages shredded
by unfaithfulness and broken promises;
Families fractured
by social pressures, whether poverty or affluence;
Neighbourhoods
where love is weakness and compassion despised
Businesses whose
bottom line isn’t the welfare of the work-force;
We pray for
Churches, and for our church
which you have
called to be the Body of Christ,
to embody and to model
the love of God in Christ,
which is gift of
the Spirit and the sign of your Presence
May our love for
others, like your eternal love,
Be generously
given, lovingly available,
patiently faithful,
willingly sacrificial
persistently
hopeful, and self-evidently joyful.
We pray for those
we’ve only heard of on television,
Those whose lives
disintegrate under pressures of hate and violence,
Whose lives are in
different ways, damaged, diminished, defeated,
by the absence of love, a vacuum
filled by the power of hate.
Two boys whose home
was so toxic they tortured other children
The 19 year old
whose reckless driving killed his friend
The mother who made
her own son ill, to gain media attention
The teacher injured
trying to separate fighting pupils
The baby abducted
in
The Sikh neighbour
stabbed to death defending a young woman from a mugger
These and so many
more, human lives caught in the crossfire of love and hate,
we hold them before
your healing mercy:
God of love and
hope,
we pray for our
society, our city, our neighbourhoods,
and for ourselves
as your ambassadors of love
Make us ministers
of reconciliation with a passion for peacemaking
Fill us with
compassion for the poor, the hungry, the lonely
Like Jesus gives us
eyes to see Zacchaeus hiding in shame;
courage to ask the
name of violent terrified Legion;
to stand between
the vulnerable victim and those holding the stones;
to touch with tender
risk those who like the leper are feared and excluded;
to see the best in
the Samaritan and go do likewise –
to open our arms in
welcome like the prodigal father
to take our loaves
and fishes and bless them to the use of others,
and so to be
perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect;
whose sunlight love
gives life to all within its radiance,
whose rain of mercy
falls with life giving refreshment,
who reaches out
with a love that warms and waters,
embraces, holds
and heals a broken world,
and all this, in Jesus' name and
in the power of the Spirit,
Amen.
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