Prayers: Season of Pentecost 2021

Saturday in Christ the King Week, November 27, 2021

O God of everlasting time, we seek to measure time and qualify it with dates and anniversaries, and on the eve of our arbitrary New Church Year, as we renew the cycle of how we parse Christian knowledge, let us have some new and fresh applicative insights that can achieve telling relevance for people who have become tired of old presentations.  Let us not fall into vain repetition in the New Year; let us see Your effects with the freshness of the very first time.  Amen.

Friday in Christ the King Week, November 26, 2021

God who is the owner of all because You contain all and was before what is now and will be after what is now, help us to live so as to offer what we create in words and deeds now will contribute to better tomorrows for those who will live after us, and let our legacy be love and justice.  Amen.

Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 2021

Gracious God, you have made us a world of infinite number of relationships, and we ask for grace in bringing justice to all relationships and that within the human community we might continuously complete the perfect contractual and reciprocal relationship with occasions for thanksgiving.  Give those with abundance, the will to distribute to those who do not have enough and so follow the sacrificial example of Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Wednesday, in Christ the King Week, November 24, 2021

God of Time, we face continuous endings and beginnings and some endings like death are impactful in our lives and the new beginnings after substantial endings are very hard to adjust to because in our inner sense, and maybe in our pride, we think that we and everyone whom we rely on should have everlasting continuing stable, even static, existence, until we stop and accept the probabilities of what may happen in time.  Give us grace to accept continuous endings and beginning, and let us have continuous "unveilings" of wisdom to take from the old experience which can helps us adjust to the new and find new grace for new situations.  Amen.

Tuesday in Christ the King Week, November 23, 2021

God, whose Son we call the Eternal Word; forgive for implying that we can know you or anything without having language.  Establish us as people who are in, by, for language today as what exemplifies our human distinction and accept that through language we personalize the entire universe and come to confess you as a God of Persons.  Amen.

 Monday in Christ the King Week, November 22, 2021

God, whom we confess to be changeless, even as our traditions of the you the divine are ever changing and as One who is pure freedom represents the seeming contradiction of changeless omni-Becoming; we are in the merry go round of time as the landscapes and inscapes of our live whirl to our vision even as we try to catch light in our hands of naming language to try to memorialize a stability and alas we cannot catch and retain the reflecting experiences of time.  Help us to live with perpetual loss of all in time and perpetual gain of what is and what will be and may we be good sailors of such restless seas and use the our sails of language to propel us to worthy places and states of behavior as we partially direct the mysterious Energies of Teeming Life.  Amen.

Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, November 21, 2021

Almighty God, it has been in our antiquity that the notion of king has been regarded to be the symbol of human power and authority, and in conceiving of the highest human authority from God, Christ the King has come to our language as what perfect divine power would be for us.  You Christ, as our King, are known more in mothering nurturing power for those who need it the most, and your warrior side is the manifestation of protection from all that is unworthy.  We ask for the manifestation of the perfect power of care in our world today, and give us the inclination and wisdom to join in the application of the power of care in our world today.  Amen.

Saturday in 25 Pentecost, November 20, 2021

Great God of freedom, you have the ability to contradict yourself in allowing such a wide range of permissive agency within the order of all beings.  You are confident enough in your sustaining greatness and do not allow the ugly expressions of freedom in time, diminish your greatness known in your continuing sacrificial weakness to manifest true moral integrity for us as human being to freely choose.  And we ask for strength to choose rightly today.  Amen.

Friday in 25 Pentecost, November 19, 2021

God, you have come to named in our human languages because we have a hope that supreme greatness rules the universe, not with coercive force, but with the creative lure of love for us to choose to do things which comport with love.  We confess you to be Love, because love is what we need to do today.  Amen.

Thursday in 25 Pentecost, November 18, 2021

O God with such power of restraint, how often we would wish you to do thunderbolt and lightning strike interventions within our situation of distress or the great situations of persecution and oppression; but since you leave it to us freely to choose to love and do justice, help us not to faint under such a great task as to persuade everyone in the world to always already be kind.  Amen.

Wednesday in 25 Pentecost, November 17, 2021

Almighty God, your power is seen in containing so many entities which share a portion of your freedom, and who in significant ways muck up the perfect manifestation of freedom we call harmony; in your power of restraint in not forcing us to be robotic good agents, you are betting on us as secondary agents to make the just and loving choices that promote harmony.  Give us wisdom to direct the limited power of our secondary agent status in our lives today.  Amen.

Tuesday in 25 Pentecost, November 16, 2021

God, whom we call All Mighty; we know that human power is easily corrupted because human power cannot accept the greatest counter-strength of power in having the ability to be weak.  God of power, we honor your weakness in not forcing robotic actions upon the world, but allowing the genuine play of freedom which allows for extreme cruelties and systemic competition, but also glorious love and justice.  God, your weakness in the face of your permissive freedom, has created moral integrity and we in awe and in our own weakness honor your great power in weakness.  Amen.

Monday in 25 Pentecost, November 15, 2021

Christ, whom we call King; no earthly king can fill out the full fit of the metaphor for how a perfectly powerful person is supposed to be.  We can only submit to an "unearthly kingship," since all earthly models fail, as does even the earthly notion of king.  We can believe that we live in a Realm of Plenitude, and as humans, we need to have a model of how a most plenitudinous person lives in a Realm of Plenitude to guide us as lesser beings to the fulfillment of our best behaviors.  And so we live off You, the One who is truly omni-competent.  Amen.

Sunday, 25 Pentecost, November 14, 2021

Everlasting God, who comes before and after and with all human experience; in freedom we can observe the past and gain insights about probability for the future.  We ask for enlighten apocalypses, unveiling, of what might come.  Let the probability for future evil outcomes frighten us in a preventative way now and let the visions of the probable success of love, justice, and mutual care be the motivation for us to seek the best good now.  Amen.

Saturday in 24 Pentecost, November 13, 2021

Eternal God, forgive us for thinking that we have power to bring things to an end and stop time from happening.  But help to to embrace our role in how things happen in time with the degree of freedom which we possess, and let us qualify sheer time with the the practice of love and justice in all that we do and say.  Amen.

Friday in 24 Pentecost, November 12, 2021

God of hope and rescue, you allow us to resort to visualizations of being saved by future intervention occasions when the pain ends or the effects of the devastating event have been survived and people have begun to rebuild and re-vision in hope.  Thank you for allowing apocalyptic visions to help during the painful times because we need to focus upon living and having being within a realm which is much greater than our own realms of limited perception.  We submit to the great lure of God's realm to love and to bring love into places where it is not yet the winsome reality.  Amen.

Thursday in 24 Pentecost, November 11, 2021

Gracious and Peace loving God, we bemoan the human conditions which has given rise to the need of people who are called to the vocation of protecting the populace.  We ask for forgiveness for the times that we have ask our soldiers to be aggressors on our behalf and not protectors.  We ask you to bless those who served for our protection even as we ask for universal peace and the conversion of our armies to help us deal with the disasters which Natures brings upon us requiring frequent rescue.  Amen.

Wednesday in 24 Pentecost, November 10, 2021

God of Omni-Becoming, we dwell with you in the threshold of what is before and after in the experience of what is perpetually ending and what is perpetually becoming.  And we thank you for retaining identity with what has gone before for familiar continuity, and we ask for faith to adjust to the new which does not have the same continuity, and we ask for grace to shape what will be new toward your excellent goals of love and justice for all and everything in life.  Amen.

Tuesday in 24 Pentecost, November 9, 2021

God, whose infinity expands and grows at the edge of the outer growing concentric ring of existence, within such expanding plenitude, we can but live on islands of language traditions which name who we are and where we live in relationship to the immediacy of what we can know; give us humility to know that our island of reality is but a partial perspective upon plenitude, but let us not make our smallness excuse for not attempting great things as they pertain to what justice and love mean within the immediate situation of our lives particularly as it calls us to care for one another.  Amen.

Monday in 24 Pentecost, November 8, 2021

O God, whose Son promised that we have dwelling places prepared for us, and who invited us to abide in him as he abides in us; grant us and our world the blessing of homing behaviors so that each can know the safety of belonging in a place, starting with all that is located within our epidermis boundary.  Amen.

Sunday, 24 Pentecost, November 7, 2021

Eternal Word of God, in you all of our words get dissolved within a grand "hum" of the universe, when all speaking and text create the interaction of all possible contexts and our individual egos melt to be connected with all, and from this all we must return to very specific contexts to make connecting love and justice particular with the imperfection of being but a moment in time.  Amen.

Saturday in 23 Pentecost, November 6, 2021

O God, in whom we live and move and have our being, deliver us from alienation of thinking that we can run from and escape the divine presence.  And help us to accept that nothing can separate us from love, not even our attempts to believe that we and others are unlovable.  Let us become tired of our false game of running away and denying the power of your love.  Amen.

Friday in 23 Pentecost, November 5, 2021

O God, your strength is also your weakness, strong in establishing freedom, and weak in suffering the consequences of sharing the freedom so widely with beings who do not know how to use freedom wisely.  Help us to use freedom today for justice and love and so honor the best use of freedom which redounds to the moral integrity of representing your will in the best way.  Amen.

Thursday in 23 Pentecost, November 4, 2021

Gracious God who inspires repentance, we as persons and as communities are in need of repentance; forgive us for accepting forgiveness, without taking any responsibility for repairing the effects of our misdeeds as persons and as communities.  Accepting forgiveness without repairing the effects of our harm is a half repentance which does not really complete the covenant that we have with you.  Give us grace to repair the harm that we and the communities of our past have done.  Amen.

Wednesday in 23 Pentecost, November 3, 2021

Almighty God, your Son Jesus said that with You, all things are possible; would it be possible to convert people of ruling class and privilege who claim identity with you to expedite the practice of universal care and just distributions of sustaining supplies for the well being of body, soul, and spirit for the general populace in our world?  Would you lure us to see the benefit of all having more than enough?  Amen.

Tuesday, All Souls, November 2, 2021

God of Completeness, on this day, we reduced personhood to one aspect of inner human essential geography, the soul, perhaps because we fear that death has permanently disembodied essential soul and spirit identity.  We honor the mystery of how our faithful departed will be reconstituted with extra-bodily regenerative powers to re-cement inner identity of soul and spirit with outer identity of our bodies.  We love our bodies, O God of complete personhood, even as we know that they will eventually decay but we trust that divine omnipresence is the perfect memory function to effectuate a complete and better personhood make over, for all in the future so that no unique identity will ever be lost.  Amen.

Monday, All Saints' Day, November 1, 2021

Most Saintly God and Jesus Christ, you can remain a theory to us unless we see the highest values of what we call divine instantiated in the lives of people like us; we thank you for the great cloud of witnesses, the saints who have revealed in their living the values of love and justice for all people.  Amen.

Sunday, 23 Pentecost, Eve of All Saints', October 31, 2021

Great God of the cloud of witnesses, we thank you for the linguistic environment left in the aftermath of Jesus and the great saints who have helped us to constitute our interior lives in such a way that we might know you more clearly, love you more dearly, and follow you more nearly, day by day.  Amen.

Saturday in 22 Pentecost, October 30, 2021

Preserving God, we try to preserve our lives as long as we can, and we try to preserve the community memories of great saints and great souls of our world, who have been significant mentors for our quality of life;  and as we know that all human preservation will eventually fail because of what can be lost in the passing of time, we seek the substantial power of you the for-all-times One, to preserve all that is lost and use what has been lost in time to make better futures which will include the fact that we have all been here.  Amen.

Friday in 22 Pentecost, October 29, 2021

O God, you are the ideal which we proclaim and cannot meet and live up to.  We confess that you care for the poor and lowly in a world which has too many poor and lowly and the lack of equitable distributions of the goods of the world for all.  If we can confess the ideal, then you have given to us the responsibility to be living always toward surpassing ourselves in the excellence of the ideals of love and justice which adorn you as chief godly values.  Amen.

Thursday in 22 Pentecost, October 28, 2021

God of sustenance, we live as "parasites" on your Plenitude; we take life from you and in living "off you" we want to add value to your world by letting the arterial food supply of the Holy Spirit make us food for others to know the benefit of your love.  Amen.

Wednesday in 22 Pentecost, October 27, 2021

O God of expansiveness, we have had to learn that you and your ways arise within the total environment created by all being contained by you; we have left regarding you as an outsider who intermittently intervenes, and come to see you as the Pure Ground of Freedom in which we live and which has been shared with all who live within You.  Help us to honor the very high stakes of having freedom within your Freedom by living lives of mutual care and appreciative stewardship for the great gift of living within You.  Amen.

Tuesday in 22 Pentecost, October 26, 2021

In you, O God, we live and move and have our being, and sadly so many people, and us, often, live as though we don't know our location in your realm.  Help us to remember always our location in your Realm, and to convince others of the same, and let us live in the best possible way the goodness of your Realm as it is known in love and justice.  Amen.

Monday in 22 Pentecost, October 25, 2021

God of total time and space environment and of all possible discourses about the same, we are contained in You, in small partial environments that may suggest the obviousness of the Greater Environment that You are; give us grace, to negotiate with the facilities of love and justice our lesser environments knowing that we only know and see in part and that we have to trust the greater part to you.  Amen.

Sunday, 22 Pentecost, October 24, 2021

God of our future, send out your profound lure to invite us to greater love and justice today in how we live the values of what is good news for people in the ways in which they need to experience it in their lives to the greatest benefit of their lives.  Amen.

Saturday in 21 Pentecost, October 23, 2021

God of sustenance, because we find ourselves here again today, we are given a "do-over" for our lives today.  Help us to ritualize the habits of love and justice so that they become our character, and help us to interdict the bad habits of hate and bias in our lives with the higher power of your Spirit of love.  Amen.

Friday in 21 Pentecost, October 22, 2022

Everlasting God, we know not whether you are subject to time; we only know that you have come to human naming behaviors within the becoming of the world.  Perhaps the best that we can do is to confess you as Omni-becoming, because we are limited to but being becomers in the world of process and time.  By confessing you to be extra-temporal, we do so by naming the dynamic Personal Mood of Spirit which we cite as the omnipresent conducting environment within which we live.  Amen.

Thursday in 21 Pentecost, October 21, 2021

God who resides within an infinite number of things in relationship to each other; we seek to reduce the mystery of causal connections so that we can control.  Forgive us for our use of human control to harm each other and our environments.  Forgive us for missing the message of sacrifice of self and fearfully thinking to protect ourselves means preemptively hurting others first.  Help us to reconcile personal sacrifice and survival and know the love which casts out fear of the other being at their threatening worst, even as our fear makes us our threatening worst.  Heal our collective paranoia and bring us to restorative peace.  Amen.

Wednesday in 21 Pentecost, October 20, 2021 

God, whom we call One and who is the basis of unity, we ask for grace in dealing with the manifold results of extreme diversities which have exploded from you as the generating One.  It is easy for us to create an island of separateness and arrogate our difference as the replacement unifying identity for the universe.  Forgive us the tendency of our isolating idolatries in making our very partial views, total views to force upon everyone else.  God, who is eternal Word, let your Omni-Wordiness, deconstruct any linguistic identity idol which we might foist upon those whom we might want to colonize in our small empires.  Let your greatness deconstruct us to know forever the true mood of humility.  Amen.

Tuesday in 21 Pentecost, October 19, 2021

God of Time and Language, you teach us to qualify time with the adverb, "again."  Again and again we do things and such repetitions build grooves of habit and character of our lives.  Let each word and deed of becoming in our lives today contribute to the character of what can be called love and justice, so that we can mystifyingly reduce the meaning of all of the occasions of our lives to what is love and justice.  Amen.

Monday in 21 Pentecost, October 18, 2021

O Eternal Word of God, only you are completely literate, for only in your plentitude can everything come into having being within the universe of language users.  Let our articulations of all language events of speech, writing, and body language deed, comport with a further nuance of languaged lives, the nuance of morality and spirituality which has come to the experience of language users as love and justice.  Amen.

Sunday, 21 Pentecost, October 17, 2021

Gracious Christ, you established service as the standard of what is great in the realm of God.  We ask that the value of the realm of God become more and more the value of the visible realm of human life so that more people can truly know the good tidings of God's love.  Amen.

Saturday in 20 Pentecost, October 16, 2021

O God, O Christ, give the church grace to be reconverted to the Christ-like values of the Gospel, which we have forgotten and do not know how to practice because we are compromised with the power-values of our societies and economies.  And when we are not oppressed and have the freedom to be openly Christ-like in our values and practice, let us be diligent to influence our societies to care for the least until they are no longer least but equal in dignity.  Amen.

Friday in 20 Pentecost, October 15, 2021

God almighty, who emptied yourself into the form of the one who went to the powerless state of death; can this emptying power come again to convert Empire Christianity to the beatitude values of Jesus Christ on behalf of the poor and marginalized.  Forgive the domination of Empire Christians who have compromised Christly values, and convert us all to the power of emptied selves into empathetic behaviors to rescue and raise the least who have been made to dwell on the margins of our Empire Christian societies.  Amen.

Thursday in 20 Pentecost, October 14, 2021

O God who became with us in Jesus as one who we confess to be bi-lingual in both divine and human communication, we ask for grace to follow in the steps of Jesus as a translator between the divine paradigm and the human paradigm and as we are faced with people who lives in warring and conflicting paradigms, we seek to be translators in the process of making peace, not to compromise with hatred and ignorance, but to set the conditions for people to be able to progress in enlightened love of one another.  Amen.

Wednesday in 20 Pentecost, October 13, 2021

O God, who upholds the multivalent conditions of people experiencing weal and woe and everything in between, keep us vigilant to use our blessing and strength to comfort the suffering and interdict the causes of suffering when we have the ability to do so; and let us not be the ones who consciously cause the suffering of others, and let us be the healers of our group sins which have resulted in the suffering and oppression of others, because of the good tidings of Jesus to minister to those who are held captivity by the worst in life.  Amen.

Tuesday in 20 Pentecost, October 12, 2021

O God, uniter of all that is seen and unseen, forgive us for neglecting the visible world of people in need, environment in destruction, by living a false spirituality of not caring for the world that you love.  By dividing spirit from matter, and mental creative genius from the physical, we have given ourselves permission to exploit our world without regard for its future.  Restores us O God, in our stewardship role of the world so that we might rightly love the world, all of the world, as you do.  Amen.

Monday in 20 Pentecost, October 11, 2021 (Indigenous Peoples Day)

All Loving God of all people, how is it that your name has been used to justify over and over again the subjugation of people when people have been enslaved in their own lands or removed from the homes?  The only might which makes right is the might of your great freedom which allows some people in the field of probability to claim victory in your name, but you great God of freedom cannot be over-identified with any one such victory in the field of freedom.  In the time which characterizes freedom, victory is only temporary.  Teach us O great creator, to celebrate freedom with learning how to live together through the impartation of dignity to all people.  Amen.

Sunday, 20 Pentecost, October 10, 2021

God the great Weaver of Life and one who sews the splendored garments of the diverse world; please thread us through the eye of your needle so that we can know that we are thread in your hand as you embroider the beautiful tapestry of the kingdom of God, which is also the kingdom of the world when we know that we are but thread in your hands.  Amen.

Saturday in 19 Pentecost, October 9, 2021

O God who is with us, forgive us from we use your being "with us" more for affirmation and justification of our petty perspectives rather than for your seething conviction of where we are drastically failing at care, compassion, and justice for the "least" in this world.  Forgive us for using, and name-dropping your name to rubber stamp selfish and ethno-centric causes.  Let us know that God with us, means all of us, and so the common good is more important than individual or tribal good.  Amen.

Friday in 19 Pentecost, October 8, 2021

God in refreshing rain, water from the clouds baptizes our earth with a blessing whose collateral effects sustains so many life forms, and we feel personally blessed and favored to be in the place where rain falls.  We ask for grace to be able to be in synchrony with the intermittent timings of your immanence in Nature, the most poignant womb of our existence until we are born into eternal life.  Amen.

Thursday in 19 Pentecost, October 7, 2021

God of unity in difference, we are tempted to believe that differences can challenge any cohesive sense of unity.  We can think that the quantity of differences as they grow can claim to be what is divinely great, until we are humbled by the awareness of mutual effect of all beings in the realm of quantity and by awareness of the other.  And the unity of awareness and mutual effect among different beings is proof of the connecting unity we profess you the Divine One to be.  And and in the realm of freedom, we profess the best way to be mutually aware is Love, and so we confess you as the unconditional glue to hold together infinite diversity.  In our small human realm, large in our eyes because of being the only realm we know, let us discover strategies of love to express in the best way the connection of mutual awareness in the realm of differences.  Amen.

Wednesday in 19 Pentecost, October 6, 2021

Awesome God, we stop to contemplate as we realize that a language product of thought, speech, written word, or body posture are limited occasions in time and our portals to our interior are taking in connections which cannot be consciously sorted by our language functions.  Too much is getting into me as a receiving junction of the universe and I cannot censor all that I receive even as I ignore or am not aware of all that I am receiving.  And in the intention to contemplate, I imagine going to the flood of all that I am receiving and let it overwhelm me beyond my control and in faith I believe that I am receiving emanations of You.  Amen.

Tuesday in 19 Pentecost, October 5, 2021

Great Giver of the Law, including practical human instructional manuals for how to best live before God and with each other, we thank you that the intent of the law is not to show us how good we are or how bad we are, but it is the teaching curriculum to assist us in becoming as good as we can be in our life as we try to surpass ourselves in excellence each day and rely on our perfection being the completeness through association with you who sustains us in perfectability.  Amen.

Monday in 19 Pentecost, October 4, 2021

Gracious God, you gave us your Unique Son Jesus, and we have been given the witness of a unique son, Francis of Assisi.  And as we doubt the quality of our faith lives because we are not enough like Christ or Francis, help us to find how each of us is uniquely a child of God with a mission of love and justice in the unique time and space locations that we find ourselves in today.  Amen.

Sunday, 19 Pentecost, October 3, 2021

God, you are the name we use for the greatest reduction of All, being the collective All with a single name in many discourses of people who cannot avoid using tropes of totality because we know that we're not alone but only have being with all other beings whose corporate collection attains a personal name, your name, as an abstracted unity of all who is known through emanating connections in space and time.  We will continue to use your name, even name drop you as though we have a very local privilege because in your all our smallness is connected into the one great Unity in you.  Keep us humble Great God, and do not let our provincial identities in space and time presume too much.  Amen.

Saturday in 18 Pentecost, October 2, 2021

God of Love, what you share with us of your love, can never be finished in time; we look to the application of love as our caring engaging with all things, and we ask for new strategies to expedite what love can mean to the people in the situations of of our lives today.  Amen.

Friday in 18 Pentecost, October 1, 2021

Eternal Word of God, once the human community came into knowing that we had words, we came to name you since we could not avoid in our smallness the obviousness of participating in a Plenitude which attained your Name as the one than which none greater can be conceived.  The gift of language means that we are personal beings and so we cannot understand you as anyone other than best Personal Being who is Love.  Amen.

Thursday in 18 Pentecost, September 30, 2021

God as Vision of Perfection, we who are imperfect who dwell with those who are imperfect and who fail often in charity, are tempted to make failure in charity and adjustments to the same the new standard.  You are Love, and your Son promulgated the union of love as the standard for living together and he loved imperfect people who failed in charity even as he asserted Love as the continual normal goal of life.  Amen.

Wednesday in 18 Pentecost, September 29, 2021

Eternal Word Christ, you are the ladder between the unseen and the seen, on which all of the angels ascend and descend as messages and messengers.  In you Eternal Word, all messengers and messages have their being and we seek on Michael's day to appropriate the strong words which will overcome the work of evil and the evil ones.  Amen.

Tuesday in 18 Pentecost, September 28, 2021

O inspirer of wonder, let the gates of childlike wonderment be open to all so that awe and respect might guide everyday worship of the Plenitudinous One, but also the treatment of the particular neighbor who is before us and worthy of be held to be one who bears the divine image.  Amen.

Monday in 18 Pentecost, September 27, 2021

God of perfect harmony, in your forgiveness you allow for the human probability of failing, and when failure is such a human norm and probability, we often seek to enthrone failure as the norm.  We thank you for keeping the vision of what is best before us as the norm so that the direction of our lives has a lodestar to follow.  Amen.

Sunday, 18 Pentecost, September 26, 2021

Lord Jesus Christ, you have asked us to be salt in this world.  May our lives so accompany the events in our world that we would bring the zest of enjoyment, the preservation of stewardship, and the purity of being the salt in the wounds of evil in our world.  Amen.

Saturday in 17 Pentecost, September 25, 2021

O God of Creative Freedom who has called all things good; we must admit that we need the intervention of fasting in our lives and world today to correct many wrong directions in the stewardship of the goodness of our lives and creation.  Give us the strength to fast from things which harm us and our world, and give us strength to convert the energy once used for harm into energy to be used for care.  Amen.

Friday in 17 Pentecost, September 24, 2021

Eternal Word of God, you have become omnipresently reflexive within human experience since we only establish the pervasiveness of eternal always, already, Word by means of having words and language.  And accepting ourselves as caught within the reflexivity of the realm of Word, we seek the best human word products in speech, writing and body language to be worthy of the declaration after all creative events of Eternal Word declaring all events of word products as being Good.  Amen.

Thursday in 17 Pentecost, September 23, 2021

Eternal Word of God, we live and move and have our consciousness of ourselves as language users who live by means of a story because continuous perception of reality has to be defined with beginning and endings, stop and starts and because life is never freeze-framed or stopped.  Since we have to reduce the morass of possible incoming data to stories of identity about who an individual is within a community which provides all past traces to revoice from in the present, we want to know the best stories, the best scripts for the total arrangement of our worded existence and we ask that people would learn to follow scripts of love and care for each other and for the world.  And this is what we can present to you as being godly, worthy of You as Eternal Word who has stamped upon us Worded beings as your image.  Amen.

Wednesday in 17 Pentecost, September 22, 2021

O God, your Son Jesus said, whoever is not against us is for us; let us have wisdom, grace, and humility to affirm goodness and kindness as it arises in many different ways through the diverse experiences across the human communities.  Give us appreciative hearts for the great call of kindness that is needed to preserve our world and free us from ruining our kindness by thinking it better than the kindness of others.  Amen.

Tuesday in 17 Pentecost, September 21, 2021

God of Renewal and Renewer and Sustainer of Continuous life, let not the traces of what we have done be regarded to be waste for the dustbin of history but as the building blocks for better todays and tomorrows and let us avoid the hell of wasteful lives through learning how to creatively serve you and each other as we pay ahead for a better future.  Amen.

Monday in 17 Pentecost, September 20, 2021

God of the Obvious, the obvious togetherness of all beings; you sent Jesus who bore the name Emmanuel to indicate the divine presence as an intimate togetherness with human experience and so we confess that you God are with us.  And we accept today our role of being with you and with each other and may all of the beings of the world be able to confess about us today, "you have made us better."  Amen.

Sunday, 17 Pentecost, September 19, 2021

Holy Jesus, unique child of God, who was also a newborn baby and grew to be a adult man who still regarded the importance of children; let us recover the child aspect of our lives in our naive wonder at the world, but let us train the adult aspect of our personalities to be those who care for the young and those made vulnerable and dependent by the various conditions of life.  Amen.

Saturday in 16 Pentecost, September 18, 2021

Originating Parent of the human race, we long to be your good children and as adults we wish to recover the joy of our first birth in our continuous second births into each new moment of life with freshness of delight.  Amen.

Friday in 16 Pentecost, September 17, 2021

Gracious God, you inspired blessed Hildegard to write that there is the music of heaven in everything.  Help us to know ourselves as both tonal features and players of the Divine Score of God in the proclamation of creation as the truth of beauty today.  Amen.

Thursday in 16 Pentecost, September 16, 2021

O Jesus Christ, Unique Child of God, you presented babes and children as the innocent pre-adult states before becoming coded with adult power-hungry egos; give us the Holy Spirit as an interior rising of a new birth so that we can have our birth event innocence be the clean slate onto which we develop the beauty of holiness, the tough muscles of adult innocence.  Amen.

Wednesday in 16 Pentecost, September 15, 2021

O God, who is the connecting essence of all things in their separate identities; deliver us from the selfishness which comes from the fear of loss of identity in submitting to the connecting power of love which invites us to regard each other in compatible reciprocal ways to celebrate diversity.  Help us to keep the wall of difference between our identity and the identity of the other transparent so that the interacting mutual regard of love can always be dynamically active.  Amen.

Tuesday, Feast of the Holy Cross, September 14, 2021

O God almighty in sublime weakness, the cross of Jesus reveals your submission to the divine weakness seen in allowing the less powerful to actually use their power to hurt innocent people, and yet the overall Creative Freedom, generously shared with all is in fact proof of a greater power which becomes best known and godly when we as free people instantiate moral and spiritual excellence through the practice of love and justice in the lifting up of the lowly.  We are in awe of the vast probabilities which your freedom permits even as we accept the charge to use our freedom for care of others today.  Amen.

Monday in 16 Pentecost, September 13, 2021

O God who is eternal Word and yet beyond words; we aspire to contemplate you in a wordless state of silence even though we can never escape our precoded existence by the language which constitute us even as contemplators.  Help us to use our rest from words, not as a denial of our worded existence, but as temporary word fasts so that our word diet and nutrition might be more completely praiseworthy for the tasks of love, kindness, and justice in our world.  Amen.

Sunday, 16 Pentecost, September 12, 2021

God of the ages, you were before and you are in the aftermath.  Let our aftermaths today be filled with the wisdom of having learned how to live better by the examples of good and evil which we have observed.  Let us prove that you are the God of spiritual transformation today.  Amen.

Saturday in 15 Pentecost, September 11, 2021

God of Power, you permit human empires to usurp your designation of almighty, and they enslave and subjugate with presumptive arrogance; but you hide your power within the power of kindness which is the true force of sustaining and continuously recreating a vast world over which no empire can claim control.  We ask for the conversion of more people to the power of kindness as they experience the disillusionment with the abuse of power in this world.  Amen.

Friday in 15 Pentecost, September 10, 2021

O eternal Word of God, who glues the meaning of words to what we experience in our five senses in the flux of time when everything thing seems to be changing including the meanings of everything?  Who glues and fixes final meanings to what is inside us as inner geography of spirit, soul, heart, chokra or chi?  O Word beyond particular culture or language, you encompass us in an endless reflexive Thesaurus and make truth and meaning relative to everything else in a synchronicity which only you are able to comprehend.  And we are small and caught in you and in flux and we ask to reside on linguistic islands of love and justice today.  Amen.

Thursday in 15 Pentecost, September 9, 2021

O God, we are ever looking for a hero, a supreme exemplar who would show us how to integrate all that happens in our human experience in the actual conditions of the probabilities of freedom, and you have given us Jesus, not as half a Messiah for only good and pleasant times, but Jesus as the the Suffering Servant who suffers for and with us in the suffering and death which is part of our life experience.  Help us to accept he full Messiah today, the God of both the cocoon and the butterfly.  Amen.

Wednesday in 15 Pentecost, September 8, 2021

O God, the Christ event arose within the divine milieu to help us cope with the actual conditions of freedom and a dying Jesus on the cross is a witness to divine surrender to the conditions of freedom in our world which can generate positive and negative outcomes.  Thank you for being one with us in the free conditions of the world where health often loses to illness and goodness to evil in our temporal existence.  We ask that we might be made better according to what standard of betterment means as love and justice whose manifestations are never finished in time.  Amen.

Tuesday in 15 Pentecost, September 7, 2021

Eternal Word of God, let us not make the tongue the only body language instrument of our lives today; let our entire body speak the words of justice, kindness, care and love so that we can say both do as I say and do as I do.  Amen.

Monday in 15 Pentecost, Labor Day, September 6, 2021

Eternal Word of God, you have let us know that we are worded beings, who are organized by having language mediate all known experiences of human existence; we accept today foremostly that our human labor has to do with words and how words organize our existence to perform all of the various human vocations which are needed for the common good.  We ask for the true freedom to come to our economic markets in making gainful sustaining employment the true motive of a market inspired by God who is perfect freedom of love and care.  Amen.

Sunday, 15 Pentecost, September 5, 2021

O God, we cannot limit your omnipresence by implying that your covenant with us defines every covenant with the Divine.  If you are limited to those who have had the accident of accessibility to sacred texts, then you would not be omnipresent and we dare not contradict your greatness.  Let us be sensitive to the many ways in which people have come to be persuaded by surpassing greatness in the various experiences of the Sublime and Holy, and let love and justice be the criteria of validity what is truly holy.  Amen.

Saturday in 14 Pentecost, September 4, 2021

Almighty God, your persuasiveness is general and not particular because it would seem that all should be impressed and convinced by the continuous sustaining of Plenitude.  You call us to be the persuaders for love in the details of our lives and we feel overwhelmed in the task of persuading of people in their particular situations that love is what should define their lives.  O God of love, you don't force love except that love is the divine motive which upholds the entire field of freedom.  Help us to be persuaders regarding love in the particular human interactions of our lives today.  Amen.

Friday in 14 Pentecost, September 3, 2021

O God, with humans the greater the power, the greater the corruption and oppression of the poor.  With you great power means a permissive freedom in the world which testifies to the emptying weakness of Jesus on the cross.  Your absolute power expressed in such permissive freedom seems to be a contradiction until we learn to use our power to lift up the lowly.  Teach us the right use of power today.  Amen.

Thursday in 14 Pentecost, September 2, 2021

O God, we like to win, be prosperous and have our influence and affinities control our social situations, and yet your Son Jesus was found with the lowly and outcast.  When we try to make Jesus the king of a theocratic system, we find that methods have been used which are not worthy of the humility of Christ.  We pray that power will be used today for lifting up the needy and the poor.  Amen.

Wednesday in 14 Pentecost, September 1, 2021

God, who establishes the past as absolute in that whatever happened, will always be what happened even as those who interpret what has happened do so from such widely different perspectives based upon our own contexts that we dare not assume to claim your objectivity.  You know all things together; we know only a limited number of things in part, and so when the hum of all things together proves inaccessible to us, we choose to call the mystery of synchronic togetherness, love, presided over by you whose name we call Love.  Amen.

Tuesday in 14 Pentecost, August 31, 2021

O Omnipresent One, because you are everywhere, you are responsible for everywhere, and it is obvious that you respect freedom as being omnipresent too. We question why you place such faith in humans to have freedom to care for each other when we fail so often to do it well.  But we also know that freedom plus care is the highest form of morals and ethics and because you value the highest expressions of freedom, we seek to honor creative freedom today by living lives of justice and love.  Amen.

 Monday in 14 Pentecost, August 30, 2021

O God, whom we call One, even the One who presides over a creation of seeming infinite diversity; let not the diversity among people keep us from acknowledging the unity we share as people in our common needs of health, food, and water and in the esteem which we need because we are more than our bodies.  Grant to us the appreciation of the greater esteem of spiritual health of salvation and let this need unify us in our differences.  Amen.

Sunday, 14 Pentecost, August 29, 2021

O God, send us your charity to be delivered from our temporal provincialism, our prison of our own time's importance.  Deliver from geographical and cultural provincialism of reifying our own ways of seeing and understanding as final judging criteria, but when we are just and loving let us transcend time and place and not back down to witness to the God of love in time.  Amen.

Saturday in 13 Pentecost, August 28, 2021

O God who is omni-relatable to every age, we seek to be motivated by the desire to expound you in our time as the one who loves all, and in the ways which are winsome to the ways in which people need to be love.  God, your omnipresence is like water which surrounds us and composes our very inner natures and your omnipresence is pliant and flexible and yet strongly surrounds infinite differences.  Your synchronic response to infinite difference bespeaks of such strong pliant majesty, and we are inspired to propound the excellence of your love in new ways and new words appropriate to the new differences which have arisen in new situations of Time.  Give us the wisdom to apply your love to difference, not with old cultural answers, but with new voices to win others to your love.  Amen.

Friday in 13 Pentecost, August 27, 2021

O Great Presider over the field of freedom, show us in our portion of that field how to use our freedom and target the appropriate concerns that lie nearest so that that we can exercise best stewardship within our patch of the field of freedom today.  Amen.

Thursday in 13 Pentecost, August 26, 2021

O God of Wisdom, we seek manifestations of wisdom in traversing a very messy life in the field of freedom where it seems as though what may happen seems to happen without intervening higher censorship.  We know that anything that may happen within our purview has relative impact to us in our known environments but in the greatness of the divine milieu such events get saturated and diluted in being related synchronically with everything else which is happening.  God, in the greatness of divine saturation of everything, let us not think that our current pain or aspirations are without value or without divine vicarious identity and give us faith when in the now it seems as though providence arrives too late and has to rest upon our faith that the future hindsight will bless the former event as your will, having been qualified with many mysterious connections.  With faith in divine wisdom we enter this new day.  Amen.

Wednesday in 13 Pentecost, August 25, 2021

O invisible God, do an inside work on all that is invisible within us, a network of tangled traces of all what we have been with all of the personal inclinations which still exert the inertia tendency of habits which can unify the entire person to act out wrongly.  Give our external authorities courage to interdict and recommend best behaviors for the safety of the greatest number of people, let those who expound poor health practice in the guise of the freedom of religion be exposed for their betrayal of salvation.  Amen.

Tuesday in 13 Pentecost, August 24, 2021

O God who presides over an infinite number of entities, we encounter the morass of things which can come to language in our lives today and we are in need of regulation and filters to process what what is appropriate to the promotion of kindness, love, and justice today.  We beseech your help in the regulation of our lives today and let not self control be obsessive compulsive behaviors for fear of being out of control, but let regulation be guided toward achieving the desired will of heaven in the details of our lives today.  Amen.

Monday in 13 Pentecost, August 23, 2021

O God, who has come to English language as God, perhaps meaning at least the one about whom none greater can be conceived, the quantity of your occasions of experience is also your quality of excellence in comprehending all with such a great memory of all that has become, that in the current synthesis of all of the traces of everything that has been, we are renewed and let our renewal select the best traces of our past to bring forward to build the moments now with creative love to be justice for all.  Amen.

Sunday 13 Pentecost, August 22, 2021

O Christ of the Holy Eucharist, do we approach the altar again today to amass the number of times that we have received your presence?  Or do we receive you again today in dynamic remembrance with a requisite community to be delivered from our private experience that can be unchecked ego claims of false specialness?  Gracious host of the Eucharist, we come to you and to community because we are not individual islands of people separated by waters of impenetrable differences but united in having language to use to connect us and so we gather together to celebrate the best way to connect, in the feast of love, which impels us to feed the world with food and kindness. Amen.

Saturday in 12, Pentecost, August 21, 2021

O God of Persuasion, send out your cosmic lures in telling ways to coax people to peace, and to the good reason of healthy vaccines, and the science of epidemiology as a gift to help the most people live the longest lives possible.  Let your cosmic lures win us to love one another for our qualitative survival of the great number of people.  Amen.

Friday in 12 Pentecost, August 20, 2021

O God beyond appearances, it appears that justice, love, and general health is losing today as we survey racial injustice, and countries in the throes of war, the pandemic, the pandemic ignorant, fires and earthquakes.  And being beyond all appearance, we know that you are omnipresent and within all appearances, including the hurt and the pain and all loving and kind responses to those who know hurt and pain.  Because you are omnipresence, you are more exposed to hurt and pain than we are within our limited environments.  We ask for the divine pain tolerance as the mere survival mechanism as we wait in time for the normalcy of health and freedom from pain to return situationally to the lives of people.  The utopia which is the best of all possible worlds escapes us even as we seek to be guided by the vision of what is best rather than what is worst.  Beyond and within all apparent good and evil today, we surrender to your "With-ness" for our peace and solace.  Amen.

Thursday in 12 Pentecost, August 19, 2021

O God of Wisdom, who can respect our doubts because of our incomplete knowledge and our unfinished lives because we are contained in great Plenitude and only have limited knowledge of what lies closest to our available perceptions, we respect the greatness of the vast past from which we have but traces and we respect the hope of an endless future of which we have not actual knowledge yet; grant us grace not to overvalue or undervalue our smallness as we accept the justice of our specific calling to be who and where we are today.  Amen.

Wednesday in 12 Pentecost, August 18, 2021

O Creator God, share with humanity the inventive creativity to make the significant care of all and of our environment the criteria of human success.  Let power, wealth and knowledge come to serve the common good so that love and justice can be our chief values.  Amen.

Tuesday in 12 Pentecost, August 17, 2021

O God, our trope of Totality and Plenitude ; sustain me in my doubt as love, kindness, justice do not always seem to be the apparent winning values of the universe.  Perpetual competition where the lowly lose to the strong seems to be most apparent.  Would that the freedom to be knowledgeable, wealthy, and strong be converted to care for the ignorant, poor, and the weak so that greater harmonies of compatibility might reign.  I fear you because you have left us to our freedom without the capacity to exercise it adequately to the common good of all.  And so in my doubt, let me believe in an ever imperfect but good world, yet unfinished and yet blessed because the sublime moments of those who have moral and spiritual breakthroughs justifies the travail of being imperfect and unfinished.  Amen.

 Monday in 12 Pentecost,  August 16, 2021

God of Truth as Meaningful Significance, we seek the significant today which might promote our journey toward excellence as individuals and as people who can do more things for more people when we can unite in intentional justice as people.  We face so much meaningful pain in that pain has meaning in the hurt that it causes in people.  We wish to counter the pain of the world with strategies to interdict the pain and bring comfort to those whose memories are permanently scarred by the experience of pain.  Grant us to be able to provide meaningful comfort and peace today.  Amen.

Sunday 12 Pentecost and the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, August 15, 2021

O Blessed Mary, Mediatrix, you represent access to your Son Jesus, now the Risen Christ, not as his competitor but as his promoter.  We relate to blessed care of a loving Mother, and we know that you care for the human family as one who finds perfection in the collective care of everyone, with no one being left out, especially the hungry and the poor.  Teach us the care of even justice being applied to all members of God's family.  Amen.

Saturday, Eve of the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, August 14, 2021

Blessed Mary, the wine of joy for many in our world has run out and how can the feast of life go on properly without the elixir of joy?  We beseech you to beseech your Son Jesus, to save the feast of life with the sublime alchemy which enables the joy of God to rise in the hearts of everyone who has been invited to the party of life to be wedded with the divine.  Amen.

Friday in 11 Pentecost, August 13, 2021

O God of Eternal Word and words, the prayer words I try to offer are very limited as I use words to designate inner feelings which in turn I designate as desire to pray and offer the only thing which we as people have to offer, words.  As a word maker, I churn out words in speech and deeds in body language and I presume to perform them all before a parent, like one at a child's dance recital.  I hope you smile at the effort of my not yet being perfect in prayer dancing.  Amen.

Thursday in 11 Pentecost, August 12, 2021

O God of Perfect Freedom, the probabilities of today and tomorrow are set before us, and with our limited experience of what has happened to us in the past, we endeavor to be wise planners in our responses today.  Give us wisdom in pondering probabilities, so that we may respond with strategies of love and justice to each new situation, because we believe that love and justice express the salvation of God.  Amen.

Wednesday in 11 Pentecost, August 11, 2021

Because of you God, we look to memories and confess that there has always been a "Before."  And because of you God, we confess that there will always be an "After."  From the great Before and to the perpetual After stretches a continuum into which we as language users have arisen and been given consciousness that we are language users who confess that having language locates us at a valued sentient life whose analogical superlative equivalence expresses you God as the most sentient Being of all sentient beings and establishes the hierarchy of excellence which we seek to climb in the degree of freedom which befits our sentient level.  Give us grace to climb the moral and spiritual hierarchy toward you, O God.  Amen.

Tuesday in 11 Pentecost, August 10, 2021

O Word of God who was made flesh, give us grace to see the value of science which is a discourse of word in the flesh coming to laws of statistical probability to provide us practical wisdom for living.  O Word, known in such amazing arrays of discourses, give us wisdom to use each discourse in the appropriate ways which pertain to the nature of the discourse, whether faith and spiritual discourse, or scientific discourse or artistic aesthetic discourse.  The fullness of Word is a symphony of discourses which is a sound of exaltation to the glory of you, O eternal Word.  Amen.

Monday in 11 Pentecost, August 9, 2021

Great Overseeing God, you preside over the landscape of what we see outside our inward perceptual of being perceiving egos in this world; you oversee the Inscape of everyone because Word has created the inward geography of each of us as we have interacted with what is outside of us.  Let the traffic between the inner world and outer world be peaceful today for as many people possible especially the poor, the sick, the suffering and the dying and let abundant life be the reward of all even while we are dominated by the conditions of less than abundant life in our worlds which are passing away.  Amen.

Sunday, 11 Pentecost, August 8, 2021

Eternal Christ, you were the infant Jesus in a phase of your existence.  And you grew to adulthood while honoring the child and child like and affirming the wisdom of God in the infant.  Resurrect within us that native joy of having been born that has been crowded out by the oft harsh events of adulthood.  Let the original joy of everyone's birth have a return to the collective memory of all people so that all of the peoples of the earth can rejoice together.  Amen.

Saturday in 10 Pentecost, August 7, 2021

O Christ, the Word made the Fleshly Jesus, how will our words and the words of our world be made flesh today?  In the total arena of all of the words being made flesh and instantiated in word products of body language, speech, and writing, please let the predominance of word products be the love, kindness, comfort, and justice which is always desperately needed to overcome the freedom which evil word products scream so loudly in our lives today.  Let us know that the somewhat humble and hidden good is triumphing in hidden ways so that people do not take credit for the goodness of God which we have the privilege to channel through our lives.  Amen.

Friday, The Feast of the Transfiguration,  August 6, 2021

O Shiny Christ hidden in the clouds of mystery; you were transfigured and revealed transfiguring as the metamorphosis cycle of our spiritual life.  We come to the elevated Mount today to be renewed in the process of transformation which we have embraced in following you.  Let our transformation not be only private journeys of piety but social waves of helping love and justice win a hearing and expression in our world.  Amen.

Thursday in 10 Pentecost, August 5, 2021

Eternal Creating Word of God, the configurations of the words inside of us guide what we do in our words and deed.  We ask that our inner word life in Time, this time will be like the turn of a kaleidoscope so that your light might shine through new combinations of the shard-like words of our lives and provide us a vision of the beauty of holiness resulting in words and deeds of love and justice.  Amen.

 Wednesday in 10 Pentecost, August 4, 2021

O Becoming and Creative God, who presides over a work in process.  Even as we grieve personal and communal disastrous events in being unfinished, we look in hope to continual new creation when we can take on occasions of being finished in better ways which bespeak mercy, justice and compassion which are the dynamic of harmonic Oneness.  O, how we are terribly unfinished today, but O how we are gloriously perfectible in the hope of possible betterment.  Amen.

Tuesday in 10 Pentecost, August 3, 2021

O God of Omni-Becoming, we ask for grace to revise today, because we cannot do other than to remember the traces of what has been and selectively re-apply them in the completely new contexts of our lives today.  And even while we confess stability of meaning and continuity of same being, we know that the passing of time alters us and the transmission of what we once were into the current time of our lives.  We ask for graceful transmission of the past to the present even as we ask that the character of our past experience will allow new insights for today to bring us to new excellence.  Amen.

Monday in 10 Pentecost, August 2, 2021

O God, who has given us the new daily bread of sustaining existence, we know that we consume Omnipresence by eating and having eaten all of the words of our lives which has formed our identity as continual word processors.  Again today we process the words of our lives and we ask for new words which will be a script rewrite on the plays of our lives that have had unsatisfactory plot outcomes of human sin and failure.  We ask for new words today to reshuffle the interior word reservoirs of our lives and let new fresh words lap like waves on the shore of the conscious production of words in speech and body language.  And where we repeat what has been good and useful, let it not be vain but only a retracing of something worthy to retain into the future.  Amen.

Sunday, 10 Pentecost, August 1, 2021

Almighty God, who deigns to be almighty in weakness in being immanent with all of the suffering in the world because the moral significance created by genuine freedom is permissive of all.  We thank you for being Creative Freedom and sharing proportionate freedom with all orders of creation and in your Divine Lure, and as you ask us to love even as you give us freedom not to, we would respond to you and  each other with the energy results of the Divine Lure of Love.  Amen.

Saturday in 9 Pentecost, July 31, 2021

O God who dwells at the top of the hierarchy of values, we cannot help but live lives of differentiated values because we live in language which classifies everything along the waves of desire which cannot hide affinity of one thing over the other.  We seek your help in choosing to be informed by the highest values which help us to be energized in our lives to know mercy, justice, and humility because of the overwhelming lovingkindness of your presence.  Amen.

Friday in 9 Pentecost, July 30, 2021

O God, we want you to shout out to us and be known even as the Psalmist told us that you say, "be still and know that I am God."  As music has rests to make its sound known in contrast, as speech has silence between voicing, as letters on the pages have spaces to let words stand out, so too you are the great Sabbath and Rest of the universe, not a passive rest but the active rest of containing all and whose fullness sometimes seems to be the silence of the hum of everything singing  their existences at once leaving the silent drone of the presence of all things summed up in You.  Amen.

Thursday in 9 Pentecost, July 29, 2021

O God of Compassion, let your love persuade us toward our best behaviors today since there are so many other objects to tempt our desire to focus and linger on to idolatry with its addictive outcomes.  Let us love with your love and so enjoy the good gifts given around us and in this enjoyment let us be thankful to know you the Great Giver of All.  Amen.

Wednesday in 9 Pentecost, July 28, 2021

O God of infinite contexts, any thing we say or do within possible contexts can become diluted like a sugar cube in the ocean; but let us not forget the particular truth contexts of issues of love and justice, which pertain to the harm or well-being of people.  Let not love and justice in particular cases die the death of a thousand qualifications, and because you became particular in the flesh of Jesus Christ, become particular in manifestations of justice and love in human community today.  Amen.

Tuesday in 9 Pentecost, July 27, 2021

O Timeless God, who comprehends time because of your maximal endurance, you will endure this day with all of its weal and woe, because in creative freedom, all things in Time must pass, leaving the Timeless one of substantial memory and continuity.  Give us grace to navigate meaningfully the mixture of weal and woe that comes to us.  Make us humble when we experience a disproportionate amount of the world's goodness, humble enough to share that goodness with those who experience a disproportionate amount of the world's harshness.  And make us fearfully respectful of our freedom to be equalizers in the meting out of a balance of the manifestations of fortunes which arise to our world today.  Amen.

  Monday in 9 Pentecost, July 26, 2021

Holy Jesus who is one of us, the human vocation and work is belief and faith in that we always show in our words and deeds what we are most persuaded about.  We seek to be motivated most by the example of your love today, not for religious performance of the appearance of piety, but for a deep desire to be better through your forgiveness which results in a good shame regarding what we might be without you.  Amen.

Sunday 9 Pentecost, July 25, 2021

Gracious God of Signs, you have left us signs of divine presence and the greatest Sign of all is being sign making people because having language and words is having Christ, the eternal Word within us.  And because we have language in time, we will continue to make signs to point to endless future signs because underneath is the unreachable Signified endlessly delayed as future surpassability.  And to you, the Great Elusive Signified, we offer all the feelings, the pain, the hope and joy that is embedded within our worded lives.  Amen.

Saturday in 8 Pentecost, July 24, 2021

O God, who we have only come to know in Time, a continuous location in a before and after.  How are you a God before and a God after in time unless we know you today as surpassing how we knew you before in the total occasions of becoming?  We thank you for being vulnerable to being known in Time, as the perfect freedom which allows all who dwell in time to surpass themselves in a future in creative excellence, which will never be perfect except as associated with the ever becoming perfection of your creative freedom.  Amen.

Friday in 8 Pentecost, July 23, 2021

O God of Mystery, we believe in you because we know we have a need for an ironic position on all we know ourselves to be so that we can become what we are not yet.  We feel so far from the edge of the Great Pond which is the rim of our Origin, even as we feel that there is a creative Spring at the center of the Great Pond which renews and creates in freedom continuously.  What is between us and the farthest boundary on the Horizon is unknown and changed like the dead stars whose light is still reaching us in our time.  We turn to the Spring source to continue to effectively ripple the concentric circles of existence within which we live and in humility, we confess that we belong to Mystery.  Amen.

 Thursday in 8 Pentecost, Feast of Mary Magdalene, July 22, 2021

Blessed Mary Magdalene, we appeal to your special friendship with Jesus to intercede for all who have been diminished by powerful people who have tried to erase good witnesses to truth from the human record.  As the truth of your life has become more manifest in your risen state, let the truth of the lives of faithful women become manifest in this life and so help men to be faithful to the wholeness needed to be honest to the human population.  We ask for your intercession for women in leadership today as those who have discovered the secret of collaborating toward the goals of love and justice.  Amen.

Wednesday in 8 Pentecost, July 21, 2021

Eternal Word who is God, and thus the supreme value of human existence, we thank you for creating us in the image of the Word as we discover ourselves through language to be thoroughly worded beings.  And we thank you for giving us manifold linguistic modes to live and have our being in our experience which is always, already coming to language, in passive and active ways.  We thank you for the mode of spiritual linguistics which provides us with a discourse to register the experience of the Sublime, as what we name God-experience, in our highly worded existence.  We thank you for the gift of poetry to name the Sublime because we know that the experiences of the Sublime orders the value hierarchies of our lives toward what is lovely, kind, beautiful and just.  Amen.

Tuesday in 8 Pentecost, July 20, 2021

God who is creative freedom and ever becoming self surpassing with no significant rival; we bless you for moral significance which you have created in sharing freedom among all entities of the created order.  You have made yourself and the world vulnerable to outcomes of genuine freedom, as in the death of Jesus on the Cross.  You have given us visions of what the right use of freedom means in the realization of justice and love.  In your freedom you choose justice and love and we want to ride the strength of your freedom to make those same choices today.  Amen.

Monday in 8 Pentecost, July 19, 2021

Holy Spirit of God, in and through you we have a divine milieu to conduct mutual experience of each other so that we know that we are not alone.  Through you we know that we have no choice but to be together as people, as creatures and as good entities of creation.  We ask for your wisdom in knowing how to be together in the very best harmonic way so that every being gets the justice due according to purpose of individual existence.  Teach us the higher harmonies which integrate the many seemingly brash solo events which seem harsh to the ears of existence.  Amen.

Sunday, 8 Pentecost, July 18, 2021

Great Physician of the World,  deliver us from regarding health to be only an individual getting better temporarily before death; teach us by your Spirit to promote an entire social atmosphere of health within which each person can have the esteem of God's salvation concern and the concern of the entire community for the manifold well-being of each person.  Let no sick person or healthy person be an island but let them always be connected to the salvation of God and the delivery of healthful care in their time of need.  Amen.

Saturday, 7 Pentecost, July 17, 2021

O Christ, Great Physician, you taught us that health, healing, and wellness was communal.  You taught us that people get better quicker within the love and care and the prayers of people who care.  Inspire us to be communities of health that do not make people suffer physical, mental, social, educational, dietary, and financial illness alone.  Let us celebrate the healing power of doing good together in the collective effervescence of community.  Amen.

 Friday in 7 Pentecost, July 16, 2021

Gracious Orchestrator of the occasions in time: you are permissive of so many synchronous events which are often perceived by us to be a painful cacophony of clashes of egos and human systems and nature's systems.  In your creative freedom, you let so much be and as unknowing persons within this Maze of this Plenitude, we seek the wisdom of knowing specific paths in the times and places of our life for today which will promote occasions for better future becomings for the people in our lives.  Amen.

Thursday in 7 Pentecost, July 15, 2021

Risen Christ, you are a healer in forgiving us by repairing our state of alienation from God.  You are a healer in renewing our interior lives so that our spirits can no longer be called uncleaned.  You are a healer because you comprised a community which did not shunned people for reason of their social and health status.  Risen Christ let us follow in your healing ways by proclaiming the forgiveness of God, by offering the transformation of renew spirits and clean hearts and by being a community of welcome and care.  Amen.

Wednesday in 7 Pentecost, July 14, 2021

Risen Christ and Savior of the world, we cannot trade the hope of life after death for inaction in making the will of heaven be done on earth while we live; and so we cannot let the after life hope of perfect justice delay the incremental steps which which need to  be taken toward the justice in the world today, especially the practical justice of making sure that everyone has adequate food, clothing, shelter, health care, and the dignity of esteem and honor of each person among people.  Do not let us delay the implementation of justice for some future heaven.  Amen.

Tuesday in 7 Pentecost, July 13, 2021

Gracious God, who through creation conferred upon us citizenship in the realm of the parallel spiritual realm of heaven; help us to bring the fellowship of the spiritual realm into the visible order so that persons will not regard anyone to be aliens to the human citizenship privilege of love, dignity, justice and the adequate supply for happy and hopeful living.  Amen.

Monday in 7 Pentecost, July 12, 2021

O bountiful God, when we have attained self-reliance and self-maintenance to the point of amassing excess of what we need, inspire us to work for the right for everyone in our world to have enough of the manifold benefits of life on every level of their existence.  Help us to love our neighbor as ourselves, especially if we have attain the status of accruing excess.  Amen.

Sunday, 7 Pentecost, July 11, 2021

O God of love, we often do not want to be prophets, even though it just means calling our world to love our neighbors as ourselves; we wonder why such a call for the common good of humanity is often so controversial.  Deliver us from the self interest which will not make adequate and sustaining room for others to enjoy the bounty of the gifts of creation.  Amen.

Saturday in 6 Pentecost, July 10, 2021

O God, who is Love, give us grace to correct the record of all the wrong things that have been done in your name to justify human prejudice and ethnocentric pride.  We suffer because of the lingering effects of the abuse of power in oppressing people because so many have thought that it was God's will to do so.  Give us grace to be reparative people so that the good of today can make us hopeful that the new creation of God's Spirit has a future chance in the eventual persuasion of all to be good.  Amen.

Friday in 6 Pentecost, July 9, 2021

Gracious God of New Creation, how can the apparency of entropy and environmental decline affirm creative evolution and not  the decline of devolution?  Give us eyes to understand and create both the real and apparent success of an evolving new creation ordered by love and justice for all people and care for our environment.  Amen.

Thursday in 6 Pentecost, July 8, 2021

God of perfect excellence, how can we surpass ourselves in goodness unless the perfect target be not only seen by us but also emit a powerful lure to make us want what is good more than what is unworthy?  Let your perfect targets of excellence be seen and known to everyone today and a powerful lure attend them so as to attract all people to the excellence of peace, love, justice.  Amen.

Wednesday in 6 Pentecost, July 7, 2021

God of kindness, we do not feel up to the task of being prophets because of  our imperfection and inconsistency; give us boldness to speak for justice, love and kindness even when we do not feel just, loving or kind enough to rebuke others.  Give us grace to be prophets, even against that which is unworthy in ourselves as prophets because as advocates for justice and kindness, we are ever under the scrutiny of how we can surpass ourselves toward excellence.  Give us humility to tolerate our imperfection even while proclaiming the higher standards of justice for ourselves and others and may our moral blind spots be revealed so that we can always be recovering from our hypocrisy of holding to ideals which we have not yet fully reached.  Amen.

Tuesday in 6 Pentecost, July 6, 2021

Eternal God of justice, you call each to be a prophet in life situations when justice and goodness must be stood up for in face of people who have made unjust speech and practice their way of life.  And when injustice has been so banal and regular, give us strength to be prophets who would challenge the habits of injustice with both the words and practice of the justice to affirm the dignity of each person.  Amen.

Monday in 6 Pentecost, July 5, 2021

O God of creative freedom, we ask for divine ability to live with freedom since the divine restraint from perpetual intervention in human cruelty and conflicting and clashing systems in nature redound to the supremacy of freedom and indicate divine willingness to be weak, as Jesus became weak in death on the cross.  The weakness of the death of Jesus on the cross became transformed into a strength in unpredictable ways.  We ask for strength and patience to live within the permissiveness of the freedom for so many horrible things to occur causing human pain.  We assume that because you are within the freedom of creation you suffer with the suffering even as honoring freedom is crucial to make volitional good and evil of human choice the valid character makers.  And in our helpless weakness for many of the horrendous events of freedom, we acknowledge that the sustaining fullness of freedom is still transcendentally good, and in this goodness is our hope.  Amen.

6 Pentecost, July 4, 2021

God of all nations, we love our country because it is our home with the comfortable freedom to worship you, not in a dictated way by government authorities, but in the ways that are individually conducive in our growth to see you more clearly, love you more dearly,  and follow you more nearly, day by day.  Amen.

Saturday in 5 Pentecost, July 3, 2021

Invisible Eternal Word, you are everywhere to be found in your word products, word creations and today we search again for the original state of knowing before we had language as the only way to know.  And we name this original state peace, joy, love, patience, goodness, faith, for when this state touches us in apparency, we know the sublime and we desire the sublime to be our companion, always in time.  Amen.

Friday in 5 Pentecost, July 2, 2021

Omni-Becoming Creative God, let the new combinations within us and outside us uncover and let us see to act better as we seek to confound those who believe that the invention in evil is greater than the inventive possibilities of goodness.  Amen.

Thursday in 5 Pentecost, July 1, 2021

O God of perfect Freedom, in sharing with us liberty, we have used it often to mean that everything that can happen, should happen, and everything that can be said, should be said; we ask for the wisdom of regulation in the midst of permissive license and we ask for strength to fill this world with words and acts of goodness with such volume that the forces of darkness will be hindered from gaining a majority within a creation which you have designated as good.  Amen.

Wednesday in 5 Pentecost, June 30, 2021

Eternal Word, only in you as the prior supposition of knowing can we know our existence and declare conscious of self and others.  I can never leave having been structured by you, and I come always to acknowledge that I am lost in the endless reflexivity of knowing word through word.  Amen.

Tuesday in 5 Pentecost, June 29. 2021

Highest linguistic Being, we would like to be living body language words today acting out the highest values which we have learned as we seek complete personal agreement in feeling, dreaming, thinking, in body language action and in the words we speak.  And let that agreement be expressive of what love and justice would mean in each of our circumstances today.  Amen.

Monday in 5 Pentecost, June 28, 2021

Creating Word of God, we discovered that we are structured by you but not as over-structured programmed machines, but as agents with freedom to know better and worse practice in our quest to discover and live the very best insights of the enlightened structuring of our lives.  Show us your recommended behaviors through Scriptures and the example of people who live well so that we might have the direction to aim the behaviors of our lives today.  Amen.

Sunday, 5 Pentecost, June 27, 2021

O Word of God, the ground of all knowing, we seek the transcendence of knowing without the benefit of language even as we are bound by language to point to such an experience of transcendence.  Whither then can I go from the presence of Language in my life such that I use it not or am not always already coded by its presence? O Word of God, I cannot escape you and so I surrender to the insights within my worded existence which will help me best articulate my life as a language user.  Amen.

Saturday in 4 Pentecost, June 26, 2021

Eternal Word of God, without you I could not know that I am a language user who has come to confess and name God, and to know my self-consciousness as a language user.  Because of you I am lost in language always looking for you beyond words, while I use "beyond words" as the words to describe the state of supposed synchronicity with all things because in the Eternal Word we participate in the All in All.  Amen.

Friday in 4 Pentecost, June 25, 2021

O Eternal Word of God, in your image, we too use words and are used by words in how we are passively coded by the contexts which have taught us our words and actions.  As the Word of God, which is God, created and creates, let us have grace in our words to be creative so that we can enable our world to surpass itself toward the higher goals of love and justice.  Amen.

Thursday in 4 Pentecost, June 24, 2021

Eternal Word of God, your word products are found everywhere and in all knowing.  And when we re-comprise the present with recombinations of the traces of all the words which arise in new attempts of mediate our existence today.  Grant us grace to know correction where our passive word determination through bad habits of environment and culture seem to script us to commit social sins.  Please send some significant Word interdiction to our lives to be clear signs to people about the next steps to love and justice.  Amen.

Wednesday in 4 Pentecost, June 23, 2021

Eternal Word who is God, how will my world and life be comprised and constituted with the language of my life today?  How will I manifest myself in language to other language users in the words I speak, the words I write and the words which are scripted in my body language?  Blessed God of Eternal Word, I did not know that I existed before language came to ruling my conscious life and coding all of the details of which I have not the capacity to focus upon at all.  You are watching the "store" of the universe because my two eyes and limited focus tends to but very local seeing.  Through Christ, O God, I salute you as the Chief Language User whose Words created, creates and will continue to create the pleroma of a diverse world.  And I feel lost as but a shard in the kaleidoscope of endless signification whose ultimate signification I confess to be guided by Love.  Amen.

Tuesday in 4 Pentecost, June 22, 2021

O God, in what way will the world present itself today, to me and to all?  Pleasure, pain, agony, ecstasy, hunger, abundance?  Since I can only be where I am, my world awareness is very limited even though I know that all is connected in mysterious mutual inter-causal ways.  Help me to trust my limited perceptual causal acts today as I seek to be directed by love, care and justice so that all of my acts will pay it forward for future good of this world.  Amen.

Monday in 4 Pentecost, June 21, 2021

O God whose steadfast love never ceases with faithfulness to sustain all that is because you have taken an identity with all that is, we ask for grace to comprise our portion of our location within your divine presence, so that we might contribute to better future outcomes and stem evil by overcoming it with the good that you inspire us to do.  Amen.

4 Pentecost, June 20, 2021

God, you have been introduced and portrayed as Father, by Scripture and by Jesus who was uniquely your Son.  We thank you for the witness of fathering which has been done so well within human community that excellent fathering became a fitting personal designation for one who cares for creation even as we creatures are oft willing deniers of coming from divine pedigree because of behaviors which are a misrepresentation of the divine image upon us.  We ask for good fathering within our lives today and we as children ask your aid in becoming worthy of the divine image upon our lives.  Amen.

Saturday in 3 Pentecost, June 19, 2021

O God of the emancipated Hebrews from Egypt; you gave an early witness against the abhorrence of slavery and yet humanity has sinned against you and each other in the demeaning exploitation of owning people as property for economic advantage.  Give us grace to confront the loathsomeness of this practice in our past and the courage to be honest about its lingering effects in the uneven practice of justice for all in our world.  And deliver us from the blasphemy of wittingly or unwittingly associating the God of love with any practice of injustice.  Amen.

 Friday in 3 Pentecost, June 18, 2021

God of freedom, you freed your people from slavery and bondage and brought them onto the path of liberty; and again and again you are calling people to be free people who are in the work of freeing other people from every bond of oppression.  Let the call of freedom continue to bear fruit in the lives of all people, not just by published law and constitution, but in the hearts and the actions of people who are committed to live together well in the highest values of love and justice.  Amen.

Thursday in 3 Pentecost, June 17, 2021

Eternal Word, you have created us as beings who use words as a way of knowing and in using words, we know that we partake of the entire universe of words which is founded by you, Eternal Word who was with God and was God from the beginning, even as we are drawn to confess you poetically, using words.  Amen.

Wednesday in 3 Pentecost, June 16, 2021

O Christ, on the troublesome waters; you calmed the storm and yet we thought that you should calm every storm for everyone all of the time for your calming actions to be universally true, and then we realized that the big troublesome water of death is what you calmed for everyone and so you renamed death as a door, an opening to another life.  Amen.

Tuesday in 3 Pentecost, June 15, 2021

Eternal Word of God, you creatively rewrite the entire world each moment as all that is, is the trace of yesterday becoming today, whose traces will evolve to tomorrow's borrowing of all that has gone before.  We ask that from the traces of what has been that new creative advances will arise to inspire us personally and as a human community to know that love and justice is the best possible way for us to be human.  Amen.

Monday in 3 Pentecost, June 14, 2021

Eternal Word of God, help us to sort out how we use the word of our lives.  Help us to be very literal about justice and hunger and alleviating of pain.  But help us to be poetic in our teaching of the inner language of the heart which pertain to love and faith but do not manifest themselves with obvious literalness.  Forgive us the foolish use of language when we have gotten our body language wrong in the harm of others and bring us to follow the scripts of active love.  Amen.

The Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 13, 2021

O God of renewal, are we like Paul deluded in seeing a new creation while our bodies decline and while our world declines because of our rampant consumption of resources and our poor stewardship of the gift of creation?  Must we relegate hope for healing and repair to merely an interior feeling or can we be converted to creative discovery of a new creation of extended life for those who will live long after us. Let inward hope for the new creation become outward reality in the healing of the life of our planet.  Amen.

 Saturday in 2 Pentecost, June 12, 2021

O Eternal Word of God, you include all linguistic possibility and from your great Word essence we would draw today the words to guide our speaking, writing and our body language as we endeavor to be scripted by the best words of all in living lives of love and justice.  Amen.

Friday in 2 Pentecost, June 11, 2021

O God who came to be called King, Ruler, Sovereign of the universe; such designation does not do you full justice since you are unlike any earthly ruler in that you do not tax or demand loyalty but you winsomely draw us to worship you through the incredible gift of having made all and given all to all that you have made.  You are more than a king because your authority is the drawing power of love.  Amen.

Thursday in 2 Pentecost, June 10, 2021

God of what will yet be, we want the continuous surpassing of the past in the now to be known as hope, the intuition of what is better even in face of what we are losing because of the entropy in time of things which cannot maintain a stable state.  We surrender our false stabilities to you today as we look for the continual sustaining which is a remaking in the present while retaining identity traces of what has been.  And we look forward to what will we yet be even as a fragment of what You will yet Be.  Amen.

Wednesday in 2 Pentecost, June 9, 2021

O God, we can only see through the lenses of our imperfect formation and we confess like Paul that we have not attained to completely successful love and so we only see in part.  We ask that the part that we are seeing will always be consistent with wanting to do justice, love mercy and walking humbly before Divine Plenitude which includes all partial seeing in a great pan-optic Becoming.  Amen.

Tuesday in 2 Pentecost, June 8, 2021

O God of sight and light, help us to enhance our ability to see with qualitative seeing so that we can discern the sub-surface of the divine sublime within the seemingly ordinary, not to exaggerate life as more than it is, but to illuminate life with what it can yet be in surpassing ourselves in the many kinds of excellences which stand before us today.  Amen.

Monday in 2 Pentecost, June 7, 2021

O God who gave us births of wonder before we learned to lose natural joy which adult pettiness, trauma, worry and the lure to artificial pleasures have robbed from us; help us to regain the wonder of our first birth and know the underneath profound memory of natural joy as our continuing rebirth into the wonder of life itself.  Amen.

The Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 6, 2021

Creator God, we ask that your moving Spirit will be a continuous repairing of all of the broken results of misused freedom.  Are we broken and unfixable or are we merely unfinished in cosmic trial and error of sentient life coming finally to learn the grace of living in harmony?  We ask that our oft sense of brokenness could be seen in light of becoming a better and newer creation because we have learned to eschew our errors and run to your winsome perfection of forgiving grace which establishes kindness as best outcome of freedom.  Amen.

Saturday in the Week after Trinity Sunday, June 5, 2021

O Heavenly Parent who asks us to do your will; your will is the expression of the correct use of freedom within the entire field of freedom where the results of the absolute past have left traces what what comprises our present life.  In hope we seek the great possible good for our future so that when we make actual, hopeful goodness, and we can leave for the future, traces of goodness to influence even more future goodness.  Father, Son and Holy Spirit, give us grace to propagate the good will in events of love and justice today.  Amen.

Friday in the Week after Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2021

O One, who lures us toward the incarnation of love and justice in our speech and bodily language acts; Give us spiritual grace and power to contribute to the creative advance of love and justice in our world today, and let the horror of the unforgivable deeds in life motivate an avoidance of the same even while we build structures of overcoming evil with good.  Amen.

Thursday in the Week after Trinity Sunday, June 3, 2021

God of Freedom, such freedom implies that you have choices, best choices and best practices for us to follow in this world of vast freedom.  Your Son taught us to seek your best choices for our lives, the will of God and as we can seem lost amid all of the choices which need to be made, let us assess our choices by the standards of love and justice exemplified by the life our your Son Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Wednesday in the Week after Trinity Sunday, June 2, 2021

Loving God, we tremble that the words of Jesus referred to an unforgivable sin against the Spirit when people called the spiritual healings done by Jesus evil.  We know that the effects of evil ripple forever in the realm of freedom and continue to return through repression and future events of the same.  We beseech you to forgive the ignorance of those who act with evil but only through enlightened wisdom which can bring repentance, amendment of life and reparations toward the main spiritual calling of humanity in the field of freedom, to overcome evil with good.  Amen.

Tuesday in the Week after Trinity Sunday, June 1, 2021
God of love and justice and hope, we know that to be loving and just requires courage because not everyone is ready for love and justice to be universally practiced. Forgive us when we limit love and justice to our familiar and favorite community of people and when we are blind or fearful about seeking justice for those beyond our circle. And let us never think that the work of love and justice is finished. Amen.

Monday, in the week of Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2021 (Memorial Day, 2021)
Gracious God, in our human failure to love, we have set ourselves against each other in myriads of ways thinking that war is the only solution to such disagreements among people. We have set standards for just wars and we have ask some to take oaths of protecting us to the point of their sacrificial deaths. And some have had to fulfill their calling to their own deaths on the behalf of those whom they protect. Bless the sacrifice of the fallen and may we still hold the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross as the only last needed sacrifice. Let the standard of being living sacrifices still inspire us to end war, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021
O Godhead of ultimate creative ministry, sometimes we need your parental nurture when we are vulnerable children; sometimes we need the model of you being exemplary human being, and we ever need to know an internal glue of connection as time expands the occasions of becoming and we need to know that such expansions in time will not destroy us but only alter us toward the possibility of what is well toward a better Goodness when Freedom is made our best friend. Amen.

Saturday in the week after Pentecost, May 29, 2021
Almighty God, we call forth your aid and assistance in three dynamic modes to apply to our lives, first parental tenderly care for the nurturing of our child aspect of personality which retains our unremembered first birth and manifests again through divine loving lure a conscious renewal of continuing natal spiritual refreshment. We need you as our adult sibling Jesus to set our minds with strategies for best appropriate living for each of our life contexts. And finally we need an aspect of ourselves which is a clean heart and renewed right spirit and so we ask for the Holy Spirit to be the deepest interior grounding of our lives to help us tolerate our lives and our conditions as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling with faith that we have that the fullness of Godhead is working in and for us. Amen.

Friday in the week after Pentecost, May 28, 2021
Holy Trinity, we may try to avoid you because we have known the weakness of those who represent parenting, childhood and disunifying spirit events. And where our language and inadequacy of human analogy fail, we cannot avoid You as the full Absolute Past from which we came, we cannot avoid using words in a manner whereby we accept them as a valid way of knowing you because of the eternal Word Christ, and we cannot avoid you as filling our environment with mysterious Presence such that we can experience each other with a mysterious conductivity which we honor as Holy Spirit. Since we cannot avoid you, O Trinity, we wish to be caught up in your Interior Fellowship of Love. Amen.

Thursday in the week after Pentecost, May 27, 2021
God, who has created the vast tapestry of life, too often we can only see the backside of Life's tapestry with the seeming chaotic tangle of threads in random disarray. We thank you that you give us moments to see the front side of Life's tapestry to see the purposeful beauty of how the harmony of differences gives us the aesthetic vision of Oneness and we confess that you have made all things well and that your Spirit is still weaving the tapestry of today for us. Amen.

Wednesday in the week after Pentecost, May 26, 2021
O God, with whom all things are possible, we present to you today our impossibles, especially the great gap between the Holy Spirit as Unity and the experience in our local situations of the conflict of diversities compounded by individual egos at the center of individual perceptual universes. We live is a world of so many versions of reality, we wonder if the Spirit can be the magician to bring unity except in intermittent and sporadic serendipitous experience. Can unity prevail, O Holy Spirit, or must unity accept the freedom of the perpetual clash of diverse beings? Holy Spirit, weaver of the diverse fabrics of the Quilt of Time, can the aesthetic whole Quilt be perceived with a beauty which blends the ugly and painful events into a meaningful reconciled whole? And does ultimate reconciliation of all minimize the pain and suffering in the particular event? And can anyone, minimize the pain of other people for them even if one comes to reconciliation about one's own pain? Holy Spirit of the impossible and of contradictions, your continued becoming what has been is also an integration of all that has been, and in faith we trust your integration of all that has been. Amen.

Tuesday in the week after Pentecost, May 25, 2021
Holy Spirit, from you we experience the esprit de corps of the entire created order. In you we can recognize that we are a community of interrelated and connected beings and to know you is to learn not just that we are connected but to learn in wisdom how we best can live our connectedness with all things, especially with God and all people on whom the image of Christ can be found. Amen.

Monday in the week after Pentecost, May 24, 2021
Holy Spirit of God, we applaud you for the sameness of things over time even as we recognize your inspiration for the differences over time. In you we retain all of the traces of an absolute past even as in you make the past the womb for the birth of the new moments of what will be different from what has happened before. And we confess today that where there is life there is Spirit and we want to dress you O Spirit with the finest presentation of love and justice today. Amen.

The Day of Pentecost, May 23, 2021
Come Holy Spirit, and comprise within us the script of how we should be and live; but don't stop with letting us know how we should live, empower us with the gifts to do what we need to do and when we need to do what is right and we shall credit you for what is good about us in what we do and say. You are our divine connection with everything now, everything past and everything future and let this divine connection be known as love today. Amen.

Sunday School, November 28, 2021 1 Advent C

 Sunday School, November 28, 2021    1 Advent C

Learning to Read Signs

Discuss the signs which occur in natural because of anticipating regular cycles.  When one puts a seed into the ground one waits and looks for a little leaf to poke out of the ground.  When one see blossoms then one can expect to see fruit.  There are other sign which we read like when it is cloudy, and when the clouds are dark, it is more likely for rain to follow.  We know that when we see smoke we just assume that it comes from some kind of fire.

Jesus asked his friends to learn to read what was happening in their lives so that they could be prepared to make the right response. 

Some times we need to have special signs, signs given by our laws to keep us from hurting ourselves.  For example, a Stop sign is not a natural sign; it has been invented by people and we use Stop signs to keep people from running into each other in their cars.

The Bible is a book of signs.  It gives us lots of “Stop,”  lots of “Don’t do this”  signs, and lots of “Please do this” signs.  Why?  Because the Bible is a book to help prepare us to live our very best.  It is a book that gives us the signs of how we are to treat each other.  It is a book of warning about what can happen to us if we don’t follow the signs for living a good life.

When we go to school we often have to face Judges.  The Judges at school are the tests that we have to take.  The tests show us how much we learn or did not learn.

Jesus said that we will all have to face a Judge in our lives.  He called that Judge the Son of Man but his friends knew that Jesus was also the Son of Man.  If we have a good relationship with Jesus as our Judge and are always learning from him, then we will not have to fear Jesus because we know that he will be a loving Judge who will only want us to work at getting better.

Let us begin the season of Advent by learning to read the signs for how we can live better lives.  And let us know that we are always getting ourselves ready to meet the very best Judge of life, Jesus as the Son of Man who we know and love and who we are delighted to perform the deeds of our lives for.

A Sermon

  Jesus said, "Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.” 

  Jesus told his friends that they needed to learn how to read signs.

  There are natural signs and there are signs that we make.

  What is the red sign that has 8 sides on the road?  What does that sign mean?

  There are natural signs too.  What do dark clouds and wind mean?  What does smoke rising in the air mean?  What does the changing of the color of leaves mean?  What does it mean when leaves have fallen off the tree?

  How do you learn to read signs?  You look and watch and when you see it happen over and over again, you learn.  You also learn from your teachers and parents how to read signs.

  There are also signs that we have to learn to read when we are with each other.  For example, what might happen if we say something that is not nice to someone?  It might hurt their feeling.  It might make them cry.  What happens if you push or hit someone?  It might hurt them.

What happens if you eat twenty candy bars all at once?  You will get a sick tummy.

  So we have to learn to read the signs of how to live good lives.  We have to learn the signs of living bad lives, so we can learn to live better.

  God gave us the 10 commandments as a sign of how to live a good life.  And if we don’t follow these signs, we can get into lots of trouble.

  We are in the season of Advent, the first season of the Christian year.  The season of Advent is season of preparation.  It a season of learning how to read the signs of God in our lives.

  Jesus Christ is the greatest sign of God to us.  He was given to us to show us how to live.  During the season of Advent, we prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ and to look forward to future coming again. When we see love and kindness, we can be sure that we are reading the sign of the presence of Christ in this world.  Let us learn to read the signs of God’s presence in our world, so that we can avoid making some serious mistake.  If we learn to read the sign of God in our lives, we can avoid making some serious mistake.  Let us during the season of Advent learn to read the signs of God in our lives.  Amen.

Intergenerational Family Service with Holy Eucharist

November 28, 2021: The First Sunday of Advent

Gathering Songs: Light a Candle; Prepare the Way of the Lord; Eat this Bread, Wait for the Lord; Soon and Very Soon

Lighting of the Advent Candle: 

Song: Light a Candle

            Light a candle for hope today, Light a candle for hope today, light a candle for hope today.              Advent time is here.

            (Sing twice)

Liturgist: Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

People: And blessed be God’s kingdom, now and for ever.  Amen.

Liturgist:  Oh God, Our hearts are open to you.

And you know us and we can hide nothing from you.

Prepare our hearts and our minds to love you and worship you.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Song: Prepare the Way of the Lord (Renew! # 92)

Prepare the way of the Lord.  Prepare the way of the Lord, and all people will see the salvation of our God. (sung as a canon)

Liturgist:         The Lord be with you.

People: And also with you.

Liturgist:  Let us pray

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Litany Phrase: Alleluia (chanted)

O God, you are Great!  Alleluia

O God, you have made us! Alleluia

O God, you have made yourself known to us!  Alleluia

O God, you have provided us with us a Savior!  Alleluia

O God, you have given us a Christian family!  Alleluia

O God, you have forgiven our sins!  Alleluia

O God, you brought your Son Jesus back from the dead!  Alleluia

A reading from the First Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians

Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

Liturgist: The Word of the Lord

People: Thanks be to God

Liturgist: Let us read together from Psalm 25

Show me your ways, O LORD, * and teach me your paths.

Lead me in your truth and teach me, * for you are the God of my salvation;

in you have I trusted all the day long.

Remember, O LORD, your compassion and love, * for they are from everlasting.

Litany Phrase: Thanks be to God! (chanted)

Litanist:

For the good earth, for our food and clothing. Thanks be to God!

For our families and friends. Thanks be to God!

For the talents and gifts that you have given to us. Thanks be to God!

For this day of worship. Thanks be to God!

For health and for a good night’s sleep. Thanks be to God!

For work and for play. Thanks be to God!

For teaching and for learning. Thanks be to God!

For the happy events of our lives. Thanks be to God!

For the celebration of the birthdays and anniversaries of our friends and parish family.

Thanks be to God!

Liturgist:         The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Luke

People: Glory to you, Lord Christ.

Jesus said, "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." Then he told them a parable: "Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man."

Liturgist:         The Gospel of the Lord.

People: Praise to you, Lord Christ.

Sermon:  Fr. Phil

Children’s Creed

We did not make ourselves, so we believe that God the Father is the maker of the world.

Since God is so great and we are so small,

We believe God came into our world and was born as Jesus, son of the Virgin Mary.

We need God’s help and we believe that God saved us by the life, death and

     resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We believe that God is present with us now as the Holy Spirit.

We believe that we are baptized into God’s family the Church where everyone is

     welcome.

We believe that Christ is kind and fair.

We believe that we have a future in knowing Jesus Christ.

And since we all must die, we believe that God will preserve us forever.  Amen.

Litany Phrase: Christ, have mercy. (chanted)

For fighting and war to cease in our world. Christ, have mercy.

For peace on earth and good will towards all. Christ, have mercy.

For the safety of all who travel. Christ, have mercy.

For jobs for all who need them. Christ, have mercy.

For care of those who are growing old. Christ, have mercy.

For the safety, health and nutrition of all the children in our world. Christ, have mercy.

For the well-being of our families and friends. Christ, have mercy.

For the good health of those we know to be ill. Christ, have mercy.

For the remembrance of those who have died. Christ, have mercy.

For the forgiveness of all of our sins. Christ, have mercy.

Liturgist:         The Peace of the Lord be always with you.

People:            And also with you.

Song during the preparation of the Altar and the receiving of an offering.

Song: Wait for the Lord, (Renew # 278)

Wait for the Lord, his day is near.  Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heart.

 Doxology

Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him, all creatures here below.

Praise Him above, ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Prologue to the Eucharist

Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, for to them belong the kingdom of heaven.”

All become members of a family by birth or adoption.

Baptism is a celebration of birth into the family of God.

A family meal gathers and sustains each human family.

The Holy Eucharist is the special meal that Jesus gave to his friends to keep us together as the family of Christ.

The Lord be with you

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts

We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to God.

It is right to give God thanks and praise.

It is very good and right to give thanks, because God made us, Jesus redeemed us and the Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts.  Therefore with Angels and Archangels and all of the world that we see and don’t see, we forever sing this hymn of praise:

Holy, Holy, Holy (Intoned)

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of Power and Might.  Heav’n and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. 

Hosanna in the highest. Hosanna in the Highest.

All may gather around the altar

Our grateful praise we offer to you God, our Creator;

You have made us in your image

And you gave us many men and women of faith to help us to live by faith:

Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachael.

And then you gave us your Son, Jesus, born of Mary, nurtured by Joseph

And he called us to be sons and daughters of God.

Your Son called us to live better lives and he gave us this Holy Meal so that when we eat

  the bread and drink the wine, we can  know that the Presence of Christ is as near to us as  

  this food and drink  that becomes a part of us.

The Prayer continues with these words

And so, Father, we bring you these gifts of bread and wine. Bless and sanctify them by your Holy Spirit to be for your people the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Sanctify us by your Holy Spirit so that might love God and our neighbor.

On the night when Jesus was betrayed he took bread, said the blessing, broke the bread, and gave it to his friends, and said, "Take, eat: This is my Body, which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me."

After supper, Jesus took the cup of wine, gave thanks, and said, "Drink this, all of you. This is my Blood of the new Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me."

Father, we now celebrate the memorial of your Son. When we eat this holy Meal of Bread and Wine, we are telling the entire world about the life, death and resurrection of Christ and that his presence will be with us in our future.

Let this holy meal keep us together as friends who share a special relationship because of your Son Jesus Christ.  May we forever live with praise to God to whom we belong as sons and daughters.

By Christ, and with Christ, and in Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit all honor and glory

 is yours, Almighty Father, now and for ever. Amen.

And now as our Savior Christ has taught us, we now sing,

(Children rejoin their parents and take up their instruments)

Our Father: (Renew # 180, West Indian Lord’s Prayer)

Our Father who art in heaven:  Hallowed be thy name.

Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done: Hallowed be thy name.

Done on earth as it is in heaven: Hallowed be thy name.

Give us this day our daily bread: Hallowed be thy name.

And forgive us all our debts: Hallowed be thy name.

As we forgive our debtors: Hallowed be thy name.

Lead us not into temptation: Hallowed be thy name.

But deliver us from evil: Hallowed be thy name.

Thine is the kingdom, power, and glory: Hallowed be thy name.

Forever and ever: Hallowed be thy name.

Amen, amen, amen: Hallowed be thy name.

Amen, amen, amen, amen: Hallowed be thy name.

Breaking of the Bread

Celebrant:        Alleluia! Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.

People:            Therefore let us keep the feast.  Alleluia!

Words of Administration

Communion Song: Eat This Bread , (Renew # 228)

            Eat this bread, drink this cup.  Come to me and never be hungry.  Eat this bread, drink this cup,

            come to me and you will not thirst.

Post-Communion Prayer

Everlasting God, we have gathered for the meal that Jesus asked us to keep;

We have remembered his words of blessing on the bread and the wine.

And His Presence has been known to us.

We have remembered that we are sons and daughters of God and brothers

    and sisters in Christ.

Send us forth now into our everyday lives remembering that the blessing in the

     bread and wine spreads into each time, place and person in our lives,

As we are ever blessed by you, O Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Closing Song: Soon and Very Soon, (Renew # 276)

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king; soon and very soon, we are going to see the king; soon and very soon we are going to see the king.  Hallelujah, hallelujah, we’re going to see the king.

No more crying there, we are going to see the king; no more crying there, we are going to see the king; no more crying there, we are going to see the king.  Hallelujah, hallelujah, we’re going to see the king.

No more dying there, we are going to see the king; no more dying there, we are going to see the king; no more dying there, we are going to see the king.  Hallelujah, hallelujah, we’re going to see the king.

Dismissal:   

Liturgist: Let us go forth in the Name of Christ. 

People: Thanks be to God! 

Christ as King, Really?

Christ the King Cycle B Proper 29 November 21, 2021
2 Samuel 23:1-7 Psalm 132:1-13, (14-19)
Revelation 1:4b-8 John 18:33-37

Lectionary Link

Today is the Feast of Christ the King, and many may greet such a presentation of Christ as King, with the same cynical skepticism as Pontius Pilate when Jesus was held in captivity.  "So you are a king?"  said Pilate.  The bleeding sarcasm is obvious like, "Well, most people who are real kings don't stand in chains before me.  I guess you might be a legend king in your own mind.  I hope that such fantasy is working for you."

This feast day invites us to explore our understanding of monarchies and then try to re-appropriate an insightful notion of how Christ can be a king for us today.

There were biblical kings.  God did not want Israel to have kings; they had leaders like Moses, Joshua and the Judges and High Priests.  But the people wanted a king like the other nations and so Samuel complied, but warned the people that a king would usurp resources of the land.   But the people thought, "we need to be good at war to protect ourselves; and we need a king to be good at war among the nations."

So God gave Israel the first two kings at the hand of the last great Judge, Samuel, who poured oil over the heads of Saul and David in an anointing ceremony.  The Hebrew word for such anointing is the word from which Messiah derives.

Israel had perhaps two noteworthy Kings, David and his son Solomon.  Neither were perfect.  David arranged for the murder of a man whose wife he stole, and that woman Bathsheba was the mother of Solomon, who was famous for his wisdom and for building the first Temple.  He was also responsible for sending Israel on a downward trajectory, because in marrying so many wives and having so many concubines, he allowed the gods and goddesses of his wives to have a place in Israel in opposition to the One Lord God.

The kings of Israel did not do well; the kingdom was divided, the kingly lineage died when foreign conquerors carried the people off into exile.

What does an exiled and oppressed and kingless people do?  They dream about the good old days of David.  Their dreams gives birth to a vision of a future king like David who will be one to restore Israel to the greatness like the Davidic times.

It did not happen, and people continued to dream and be inspired to write all kinds of visionary literature about a future great king.

Jesus of Nazareth in his history was not such a person; and so the Gospel of John purposefully shares the skepticism of Pilate, "So, Jesus you're a king?  Really?"

Fast forward to America.  We are the heirs of a government based upon not having kings, since we with enlightened political thinking came to share the view that "absolute power, corrupts absolutely."  We wanted to be rid of the control of the English Monarchy. 

What is one of the differences between the rule of the many and the rule of the few?  The rule of the few or the one can be very efficient and such can be beneficial for all if the one or the few are perfect and omni-competent and caring people, but such perfect people don't exist, so the rule of the few and the one tend toward cruel dictatorships or oligarchies with no respect for diversity.

We see now in our democracy that the rule of the many has revealed the public incompetence of many politicians, many of whom seem to be dominated by very narrow special interest groups.  Some people wish for the rule of the few and the rule by the wealthy.  Some want a theocracy; General Flynn recently said we should have a country with only one religion.

What do many people like to do with the notion of monarchy?  We make them into dream kingdoms and iconic symbols with "Royals" who we want to be good for tourism and nostalgia.

The most prominent kingdom in America is the cinematic kingdoms of Disney.  We make romantic child friendly kingdoms with "child morality plays" of good and evil, but mainly we want to sell lots of stuff and Halloween costumes from such romantic figures of kings, queens, princes and princesses.

When we try to find a place for Christ the King, we are forced to admit that Christ the King is more like a romantic Disney King rather than a warrior king like David, because Christ the King is an inner and spiritual king.

Christ the King does not have the same manifestation as the Jesus of history.  The Jesus Movement spiritualized the notion of the Messiah as being a Risen and Ascended Person of Significance.  What does Risen and Ascended mean in practical terms?  It means that the Risen Christ is available through the Holy Spirit to the inner lives of people in such a way that loyal relationships have occurred.

A large group of people came into the experience of a spiritual relationship with the most significant and omni-competent person of their lives.  They did not actually see Jesus the person; but the constellation of words which surrounded him could over take and influence lives, and those lives were energized and changed so that they could change the world in external and physical ways.

The Risen Christ came to be named the perfect, omni-competent King.  He was the only one who was good enough to deserve the authority of kingship, because all earthly kings have been failures, in some way.

So while the Risen Christ the King is like the imaginative kings of Disney creations, the Risen Christ inspires such profound interior spiritual relationship, that significant effective changes happen in the hearts of loyal subjects; but not just in their hearts because the loyal followers of Christ make real changes in the external world.

What kind of changes?  The kind of changes which are known as kindness, love, and justice.  Kindness, love, and justice have material and physical reality, meaning that spiritual Christ the King has continued fleshly, incarnational, body language significance.

We pray "thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven," because we believe that the very best of the interior world of love, justice and kindness has to be very external and physical love, justice, and kindness in the specific lives of people.

The validity of Christ as King is only challenged if we make it Disney-like romantic and sentimental piety, and not world changing, people changing, love, justice, and kindness behaviors.

God and Christ are too good for the notion of kingship, because we will not know earthly figures who are omni-competent enough to be worthy of the title and the requirement of what perfect kingship can and should mean.

Christ is idealized kingly person who uses absolute power, not for aggrandizement, but for service and love and kindness.

We need the personification of the right use of absolute power, and so we have Christ the King to inspire our lives to be converted to use the power of our lives, not for self or tribal aggrandizement, but for the effective service of love, kindness and justice.

The understanding of Christ as King, is the way that we rehabilitate and rightly use power and and authority.  And remember if we follow the spiritual Christ the King, we will not live in palaces or pride, but like Jesus we will humbly follow our heavenly parent in the ways of kindness for the people in our world who need it.

In this way, I invite each of us to worship Christ as our king today.  Amen.

Sunday School, November 21, 2021 Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King,

 Sunday School, November 21, 2021    Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King,  B proper 29

Theme: Christ as a King

A time for discussing how Jesus is and was a king.
Does our country have a king?
Did we used to have a king?  Yes, when we were an English colony but we did not want to be ruled by a king.  Americans formed a government without a king because of our belief in democracy.
So if we don't believe in having a king, how can we use the notion of a king as a title for Jesus Christ?

King was an important person in the biblical times.  The most famous king of Israel was David.  The very best kings were so good and right for their times that people believed them to be chosen by God to rule their people.  Samuel anointed or poured oil over the head of David to make him king.  This act of pouring oil, meaning that God's Spirit is electing a person to be king, is where the word Messiah comes from.

Jesus Christ or Jesus the Messiah, means that we confess Jesus to be a Special Chosen person of God to rule our lives.  This does not mean that Jesus has to have a throne and an army and be a ruler of a government.  It means that Jesus has become a model of the very best of person who has persuaded us to be the very best that we can be.  Jesus is a king because he has given us a perfect model on how we are to live our lives.  Jesus is a king because God made him stronger than death in his resurrection.

In the discussion at the trial of Jesus, Pontius Pilate mocks the meaning of Jesus being King of the Jews.  This is how the Gospel writer of John's Gospel were trying to show us that Jesus was not a King like the Caesar or like King Herod.  These kings rules by using fear to force people to obey them.  Jesus is a perfect king because Jesus as a king works through God's Spirit to persuade us to be better people.

So what kind of king do you like?  One with great armies and one that forces you to obey?  Or one who shows you how to be the best person you can be and persuades you and encourages you to be the best person you can be?

You and I can choose to make Jesus the King of our lives even though Jesus will not force us to do so.  This is the very best kind of king.


  Today is the end of the longest church season.  What is the longest church season?  Pentecost.  If this week is the end of the Christian year, then that makes next Sunday, New Year’s Day.  And what do we call the first day in the Christian New Year?  The first Sunday of Advent.  So what Christian season comes after the season of Pentecost?  Advent.
  We have a special name for this Sunday, the last Sunday in the season of Pentecost.  It is called the Feast of Christ the King.
  And so today we want to think about how Christ is our King.
  We heard the reading from the Gospel today and we wonder how Christ can be our king.  The reading that we have listened to tells us about how Jesus died.  In fact, he died when the soldiers of the great Roman king, the Caesar put him on a cross.  And they put a sign on the top of the cross that was making fun of Jesus.  The sign said: Jesus, King of the Jews.  How can a person who dies this way be a king?
  Let me show you another cross.  This cross is called the cross of Christ the King.  Do you see that Jesus has on wonderful robes and he is wearing a crown?  This cross is different from the other cross.
  How did Jesus become Christ the King?  He became Christ the King, because he did the strongest thing that could ever be done; he came back to life and he promised that God could give us life after our deaths too.  That is a great thing.  And that is why Christ is our king.
  And since we know that Christ is our king and since we know that God is bigger and stronger than death, do you know what that means?  It means that we can live our lives without fear.  We can live our lives with joy, love and faith, because we know that Christ is our King who has been stronger than death.
  So today, let’s celebrate because Christ is our King.  Christ is stronger than death.  And we can live with joy and faith because Christ is our King.  Amen.



Intergenerational Family Service with Holy Eucharist
November 21, 2021: The Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King

Gathering Songs: Hosanna, Hosanna, Majesty, Spirit of the Living God, The King of Glory Comes

Liturgist: Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
People: And blessed be God’s kingdom, now and for ever.  Amen.

Liturgist:  Oh God, Our hearts are open to you.
And you know us and we can hide nothing from you.
Prepare our hearts and our minds to love you and worship you.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Song: Hosanna, Hosanna in the Highest! (Renew! # 71)
Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest!  Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest!  Lord we lift up your name with hearts full of praise; Be exalted, oh Lord my God! Hosanna in the highest!

Glory, Glory, glory to the King of kings! Glory, Glory, glory to the King of kings! Lord we lift up your name with hearts full of praise; Be exalted oh Lord my God! Glory to the King of kings!

Liturgist:         The Lord be with you.
People: And also with you.

Liturgist:  Let us pray

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen..

Litany Phrase: Alleluia (chanted)

O God, you are Great!  Alleluia
O God, you have made us! Alleluia
O God, you have made yourself known to us!  Alleluia
O God, you have provided us with us a Savior!  Alleluia
O God, you have given us a Christian family!  Alleluia
O God, you have forgiven our sins!  Alleluia
O God, you brought your Son Jesus back from the dead!  Alleluia

A reading from the Revelation of St. John the Divine

To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.  Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen.  "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

Liturgist: The Word of the Lord
People: Thanks be to God

Liturgist: Let us read together from Psalm 132

For the LORD has chosen Zion; * he has desired her for his habitation: "This shall be my resting-place for ever; * here will I dwell, for I delight in her.
I will surely bless her provisions, * and satisfy her poor with bread.

Litany Phrase: Thanks be to God! (chanted)

Litanist:
For the good earth, for our food and clothing. Thanks be to God!
For our families and friends. Thanks be to God!
For the talents and gifts that you have given to us. Thanks be to God!
For this day of worship. Thanks be to God!
For health and for a good night’s sleep. Thanks be to God!
For work and for play. Thanks be to God!
For teaching and for learning. Thanks be to God!
For the happy events of our lives. Thanks be to God!
For the celebration of the birthdays and anniversaries of our friends and parish family.
Thanks be to God!

Liturgist:         The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John
People: Glory to you, Lord Christ.

Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answered, "Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?" Pilate replied, "I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?" Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here." Pilate asked him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

Liturgist:         The Gospel of the Lord.
People: Praise to you, Lord Christ.

Sermon:  Fr. Phil

Children’s Creed

We did not make ourselves, so we believe that God the Father is the maker of the world.
Since God is so great and we are so small,
We believe God came into our world and was born as Jesus, son of the Virgin Mary.
We need God’s help and we believe that God saved us by the life, death and
     resurrection of Jesus Christ.
We believe that God is present with us now as the Holy Spirit.
We believe that we are baptized into God’s family the Church where everyone is
     welcome.
We believe that Christ is kind and fair.
We believe that we have a future in knowing Jesus Christ.
And since we all must die, we believe that God will preserve us forever.  Amen.

Litany Phrase: Christ, have mercy. (chanted)

For fighting and war to cease in our world. Christ, have mercy.
For peace on earth and good will towards all. Christ, have mercy.
For the safety of all who travel. Christ, have mercy.
For jobs for all who need them. Christ, have mercy.
For care of those who are growing old. Christ, have mercy.
For the safety, health and nutrition of all the children in our world. Christ, have mercy.
For the well-being of our families and friends. Christ, have mercy.
For the good health of those we know to be ill. Christ, have mercy.
For the remembrance of those who have died. Christ, have mercy.
For the forgiveness of all of our sins. Christ, have mercy.

Liturgist:         The Peace of the Lord be always with you.
People:            And also with you.

Song during the preparation of the Altar and the receiving of an offering.

Song: Majesty, (Renew # 63)
Majesty, worship His majesty.  Unto Jesus be all glory, honor, and praise. 
Majesty, kingdom authority flow from His throne unto His own;
His anthem raise. 
So, exalt, lift up on high the name of Jesus. 
Magnify, come glorify Christ Jesus the King. 
Majesty, worship His Majesty; Jesus who died,  now glorified, King of all kings.

Doxology
Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him, all creatures here below.
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Prologue to the Eucharist

Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, for to them belong the kingdom of heaven.”
All become members of a family by birth or adoption.
Baptism is a celebration of birth into the family of God.
A family meal gathers and sustains each human family.
The Holy Eucharist is the special meal that Jesus gave to his friends to keep us together as the family of Christ.


The Lord be with you
And also with you.

Lift up your hearts
We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to God.
It is right to give God thanks and praise.

It is very good and right to give thanks, because God made us, Jesus redeemed us and the Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts.  Therefore with Angels and Archangels and all of the world that we see and don’t see, we forever sing this hymn of praise:

Holy, Holy, Holy (Intoned)
Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of Power and Might.  Heav’n and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. 
Hosanna in the highest. Hosanna in the Highest.

All may gather around the altar

Our grateful praise we offer to you God, our Creator;
You have made us in your image
And you gave us many men and women of faith to help us to live by faith:
Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachael.
And then you gave us your Son, Jesus, born of Mary, nurtured by Joseph
And he called us to be sons and daughters of God.
Your Son called us to live better lives and he gave us this Holy Meal so that when we eat
  the bread and drink the wine, we can  know that the Presence of Christ is as near to us as  
  this food and drink  that becomes a part of us.

The Prayer continues with these words

And so, Father, we bring you these gifts of bread and wine. Bless and sanctify them by your Holy Spirit to be for your people the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Bless and sanctify us by your Holy Spirit so that we may love God and our neighbor.

On the night when Jesus was betrayed he took bread, said the blessing, broke the bread, and gave it to his friends, and said, "Take, eat: This is my Body, which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me."

After supper, Jesus took the cup of wine, gave thanks, and said, "Drink this, all of you. This is my Blood of the new Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me."

Father, we now celebrate the memorial of your Son. When we eat this holy Meal of Bread and Wine, we are telling the entire world about the life, death and resurrection of Christ and that his presence will be with us in our future.

Let this holy meal keep us together as friends who share a special relationship because of your Son Jesus Christ.  May we forever live with praise to God to whom we belong as sons and daughters.

By Christ, and with Christ, and in Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit all honor and glory
 is yours, Almighty Father, now and for ever. Amen.

And now as our Savior Christ has taught us, we now sing,

Our Father: (Renew # 180, West Indian Lord’s Prayer)

Our Father who art in heaven:  Hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done: Hallowed be thy name.

Done on earth as it is in heaven: Hallowed be thy name.
Give us this day our daily bread: Hallowed be thy name.

And forgive us all our debts: Hallowed be thy name.
As we forgive our debtors: Hallowed be thy name.

Lead us not into temptation: Hallowed be thy name.
But deliver us from evil: Hallowed be thy name.

Thine is the kingdom, power, and glory: Hallowed be thy name.
Forever and ever: Hallowed be thy name.

Amen, amen, amen: Hallowed be thy name.
Amen, amen, amen, amen: Hallowed be thy name.

Breaking of the Bread

Celebrant:        Alleluia! Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.
People:            Therefore let us keep the feast.  Alleluia!

Words of Administration

Communion Song: Spirit of the Living God, (Renew # 90)

Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.  Spirit of the living God fall afresh on me. Break me, melt me, mold me, fill me.  Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.

Spirit of the living God, move among us all; Spirit of the living God, make us one in love: humble, caring, selfless, sharing— Spirit of the living God, fill our lives with love.

Post-Communion Prayer

Everlasting God, we have gathered for the meal that Jesus asked us to keep;
We have remembered his words of blessing on the bread and the wine.
And His Presence has been known to us.
We have remembered that we are sons and daughters of God and brothers
    and sisters in Christ.
Send us forth now into our everyday lives remembering that the blessing in the
     bread and wine spreads into each time, place and person in our lives,
As we are ever blessed by you, O Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Closing Song: The King of Glory, (Renew # 267)

Refrain: The King of glory comes, the nation rejoices. 
            Open the gates before him, lift up your voices.

Who is the king of glory; how shall we call him?  He is Emmanuel, the promised of ages. Refrain

In all of Galilee, in city or village, he goes among his people curing their illness. Refrain

Sing then of David’s son, our Savior and brother; in all of Galilee was never another. Refrain

Dismissal:   

Liturgist: Let us go forth in the Name of Christ. 
People: Thanks be to God! 

Temple Edifice Complex and the Apocalyptic

25 Pentecost B 28 November 14, 2021

Daniel 12: 1-3 Psalm 16

Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25 Mark 13:1-8

 

Lectionary Link 

Some of the milestones in history have been created by what has happened to buildings.

 

9/11 is an event where buildings were destroyed as well as the precious lives of people and that has marked our history forever.  But we did not proclaim the end of the world.  We responded by destroying lots of building and people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

The Day that lives in infamy was an attack on the ships and the buildings of Pearl Harbor, and the people there.   And we did not declare the end of the world, but we did unleash a response which included the only use of atomic weapons in human warfare.

 

Harm which comes to people and their homes create unforgettable milestones and those who have known the damage of Californian earthquakes and fires and landslides know that their lives were changed forever.  You don't live the same after such a thing happens; one's life get redefined.

 

The greatest building and the greatest city of Jewish identity, the Temple in Jerusalem were destroyed in the year 70.  And life could not be the same for anyone who lived in Palestine or who claimed Jerusalem and the Temple as their spiritual homes.

 

After the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, life could never be the same.  Though life does involve rebuilding and repetition of similiar events.  Jerusalem has been destroyed and rebuilt several times.  Although the last Temple has never been rebuilt, the portion of the Temple known as the Wailing Wall has been a constant symbol of the once complete standing Temple, and a spiritual pilgrimage place for many,many Jews.

 

The history of oppression, exile, destruction of cities and homeland are found throughout the history of biblical people.   This repeating history is so common that a genre of history was created to respond to these recurring destructive attacks in the lives of people.

 

This genre of history is called "apocalyptic literature," and the Gospels include sections of the oracle of the Risen Christ speaking the various images of what has been called apocalyptic.

 

We have had to live with biblical literalists who have used the apocalyptic literature continually to presume to know God's will in our history about the end of the world and precisely when the armies of Jesus the King to return to make sure that "we the good guys" will win.  Presuming to be insiders about the end of the world, creates community drama and entertainment and works to raise money to keep mega-churches and TV preachers in their high styles of living.

 

How can you and I acknowledge the apocalyptic genre of the Bible without avoiding it or without being embarrassed by scientific naivete?

 

Apocalyptic means an "unveiling."  And one could understand the human history as becoming in time, as a continuous unveiling, as a continuous evolution, and as a continuous birthing process.

 

Might we take the insight of time being a continuous binary; the binary of before and after.

 

And if time is always a before and an after, where does the apocalyptic reside?  Where does the unveiling occur?

 

Might we understand the apocalyptic as the threshold between the before and the after, as an extended time of adjustment to what has passed away and what has become new?

 

The oracle words of Jesus channeled by the Gospel writers in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem deal with threshold, the unveiling of the new and different time.

 

Before the Temple and after the destruction of the Temple.  That's where the unveiling apocalyptic experience is revealed.

 

What do the apocalyptic words of the Risen Christ reveal about life after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple?

 

1-First a warning, about all the people who will claim to know why things precisely happened.  The history of the world is the history of conspiracy theories being spun by people who claim to have secret knowledge and information.  And it does give people the comfort of thinking that they are in control because they can provide an answer for why bad things have happened.  Conspiracy theories prove that there is a "sucker born every minute."  But the words of the Risen Christ warn against following the prophets of conspiracies.

 

2-A second insight of the Risen Christ about the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem is what we might call a supreme ambiguous positive.  What is the supreme ambiguous positive in life?  Labor pains, birth pangs.  I've never had them, but I have experienced a person closely having them, and so I have also experienced the glorious new lives that followed the birth pangs.

 

Let us take the birth pang image from the words of Jesus as being insightful about the apocalyptic as the threshold between the old which passed away whether we wanted it to or not, and the new which is fresh but challenging because we have not yet gained the ability to learn new responses.

 

Our era like every era in our country is in its own kind of apocalyptic.  There is an unveiling and we are in a liminal time between what is passing away and how we are becoming new.

 

Our country has seen a revolt against justice and kindness for all our people.  Our country has seen a revolt against the basic science of vaccinations and wise behaviors during a pandemic.  We have perhaps lost half a million lives needlessly because of our attitudes toward health science.  The unveiling of how minorities have long been treated has angered people who do not want our unjust ways revealed.  And we have been exposed in how we have failed at the equal provision of life, liberty, health and safety for all people in our society.  We are uncomfortable and even angry that our failures are exposed.  We are in pain; and as people of faith, we need to be those who can articulate these pains as "apocalyptic birth pangs."  We need to hold on to the arrival of the birth of our better angels as people learning to live together well with mutual respect and integrity.

 

Today the words of Jesus invite us to the "apocalyptic," the unveiling during the time of birth pangs.  Let us do our faith Lamaze methods of breathing prayer as we hold on to the birth of the better angels of people learning to live the life of God's love together.  Amen.