Please feel free to join us in prayer this week with the prayers prayed in worship, September 20, 2020:
Holy, Loving God,
from the beginning,
you have accompanied your people,
with manna in the morning,
and water from the rock,
enough for the living of each day,
and then for the next.
For your abundant grace
and your providential presence,
we give you thanks and praise.
We come to you, bringing our need,
and the need of the world.
We pray for the needs of each day,
healing for those who are hurting,
food for those who hunger,
shelter for those living outside,
comfort for those who mourn,
renewed strength for all who are weary.
Help us find ways to sustain each other
and an aching world.
We bring the needs of a world wrapped in pandemic,
and pray for healing and an end to the plague of COVID19.
We pray for health officials and medical professionals,
with gratitude for their heroic care.
Gird them with strength and wisdom as they lead us.
Help us find practices of self-discipline and care
that sustain and protect life,
and that communicate
broadly and expansively our love and care.
We pray for an end to systemic racism –
for the wisdom to see and understand how racism
persists and is at work
in individual, collective, and systemic
action and inaction.
Give us courage to dismantle what needs tearing down,
so that we can build with you
a world that values and protects human dignity.
We grieve today, and give thanks for
the life of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
We give thanks for her heroic, sacrificial work for justice,
that opened the promises of the Constitution
for so many, and particularly for women.
We pray that you will raise up justices and judges,
and help us build a judicial system
that honors Equal Protection of the law,
that values and protects human dignity over the interest of corporations,
that provides checks and balances to the raw exercise of power,
and that has at its heart
the well-being of the most vulnerable in our midst.
We pray for the upcoming election,
help us to choose leaders who are
truthful, moral, compassionate, and wise.
Help us reject lies, meanness, racism, and hate of every kind.
You are the God of the long haul,
help us find ways of living lives of meaning and love
in these difficult days.
Trusting in you, we join our voices,
with the voices of all who have called on your name,
praying the prayer that Jesus taught:
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.