Prayers for the Week of July 16, 2023

Please feel free to join us in the prayers prayed in worship Sunday, July 16, 2023:

Hallelujah! Praise God!

Creating, redeeming, loving, healing, saving God,

we give you praise.

You created all that is in love.

From the chaos and the depths –

you shaped a world –

sky and earth and sea.

You set the lights in the sky –

sun, and moon, and stars,

and breathed life into every living thing,

plants and grasses and trees,

the fish that swim, the birds that fly,

and all the creatures that walk and crawl the earth,

and us – even us –

you created us –

and said that all this – all this was good.

Your goodness is planted in your creation

more deeply than all that is wrong.

We give you thanks and praise.

Help us to see the world as you see it –

the world you long for –

a world with healing for every broken bit of us.

We pray for a world in climate collapse.

Help us change our ways on the grand scale that is needed,

that we might mend the world with you.

We pray for those harmed by every system of oppression,

particularly American systemic racism.

Help us to see the ways we are complicit, and stop.

Teach us to look to those who have been harmed the most,

and learn, and join them in the work of dismantling and then rebuilding.

We pray for all those who are hungry, for food enough and more.

For those who are unhoused or far from home, safe shelter.

For those who mourn, comfort,

For those who are ailing in body or spirit, healing.

For every lament, your tender mercy.

Help us to see the world as you see it,

and then say yes to helping you make it so.

To the praise that echoes down through the ages,

to the song that will resound out into forever,

we add our voices,

joining the voices of all who have ever called and praised your name,

praying the prayer that Jesus taught, saying:

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

Photo credit: Benjamin Davies, used with permission via Unsplash