Pastoral Prayer for Stewardship Commitment Sunday (based on Gen. 37:1-20, Joseph's Dreams)

Holy God:

We thank you for this place and the people that we find here.  We thank you for the call you have placed upon each of us, for the call we have together.  Give us soft hearts, open minds, and attentive ears today.  Help us to give ourselves to you and your call upon us as freely as you gave yourself to us.

Only you know all that you are doing through this people. Only you know how many hearts are turned to you here, how many kind words and prayers are offered by this people all over our community, how many hungry are fed and disheartened are discouraged through unseen acts of kindness of theses people in their everyday lives.

Only you know what might be--what you might do in us, what might happen through us if we would but put your call first and foremost and serve you completely.  You ahve a dram for a day when every tear would be dry, when you would be all in all, when there would be no hungry, when every person would sit down to eat under his own fruit tree, and every sword would be beaten into a plowshare.  You have a dream for a day when your glory would be so revealed that the whole earth would see it together.  

And yet, hope deferred makes the heart sick. Our dreams have often tarried, and we have often forgotten how to dream because it feels somehow easier than thinking that dreams will never come true.  So teach us to cast aside our dreams and to dream with you.  Teach us to abandon ourselves and to find the joy that comes from investing in your kingdom with all our hearts and lives.

Make us a haven of hope in the midst of despair.  Make us a place of love in a loveless world.  Make us a place that will be a family to those who are alone.  May you kingdom come in us.

Pastoral Prayer (based on Gen. 27-Isaac's blessing of his sons)

Holy God:

You have blessed us beyond all we could ask or think, and we are grateful to you.  You made us in your image, and blessed us with something of yourself within each of our hearts.  You have blessed us with the necessities of life--You’ve given us food to eat, a place to live, clothes to wear, medicine when we are sick, and countless other material gifts that sustain us.  You’ve given us each other--human love, family, friends, and a community of faith full of people who share this earthly sojourn and teach us to walk in your way.  You’ve blessed us with unique gifts and abilities, personality quirks, a million ways that you have formed us and shaped us each as a masterpiece of your making.  You have blessed us with a calling, an opportunity to live our lives for transcendent purpose and to make our lives count for something meaningful.  More than anything, we are grateful for the gift of your Son Jesus, the eternal and perfect sign that your blessing rests upon us, that you love us completely and that you find pleasure in us, that you desire us to walk with you and to be completely reconciled and restored to you.

We are grateful for our blessings.  We’re also sorry that we often fail to be grateful.  We ask your forgiveness.  Teach us to have full hearts--full of joy and gratitude for every good thing you have given.

You told our father Abraham that he would be blessed, that all his seed would be blessed, and that the whole earth would be blessed through them.  So often, we’ve been more interested in being blessed than being a blessing.  Help us to turn our hearts toward a world you love infinitely and to live our lives for the blessing we might share rather than the blessing we might acquire.

The Kingdom of God is Near (or, Love Your Niebuhr/Neighbor)

The three synoptic agree that the proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom of God was central to Jesus' message.  While Jesus spoke often of the Kingdom of God, he never defined it.  He often said, "The Kingdom of God is like...," but he never said, "The Kingdom of God is..."  The Kingdom of God is a way of talking about God's working that requires earthly consequences.  It forces us to talk about what the earthly consequences of God's working in his people will be.  When Jesus made the working of God in human relationships and society central without defining what God's reign in human affairs would look like, he left us with something very fluid.

In "The Kingdom of God in America," Richard Niebuhr wrote about the way that the Kingdom of God had been variously understood as American religiosity had adjusted its understanding of how God would work in the nation and its people.  The Puritans envisioned America that would be a "city set on a hill," and ideal Christian community that would live out the commands of the Gospel in the way its culture, institutions, and laws were established, one that would serve as an example of a godly community for all the nations of the world.  During the revivalistic frontier 19th century, the Kingdom of God came to be understood as a moral transformation in the culture that would result of transformed individual hearts consequent to personal conversion.  Following the excesses of industrialization, the Social Gospel envisioned the Kingdom of God as the institutionalization of Jesus' teachings in laws and practices that were compassionate towards that poor.  Niebuhr recognized that our understanding of the Kingdom of God had as much to do with us as it had to do with what Jesus meant to communicate through the parables.

I grew up with very little reflection on the Kingdom, but I've found the Kingdom of God to be increasingly central to my thinking of God's work and intention.  N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope talks about how we often think about God's place ("heaven") as far removed from our place ("earth").  The proclamation of the Kingdom of God means that God's place and our place are interlocking and interchangeable, that God's working and God's reign are always breaking through and transforming our world.

I think that the Sermon on the Mount is a great place to begin to reflect on the Kingdom of God.  We often approach the Sermon on the Mount as a religious and ethical treatise that tells how Christians ought to act.  I think it's more than that--it's a description of life in God's world, the way that things work in contrast to the way that we've learned that they work in the "real world."  In God's world, a world that lives and breathes and breaks forth in human interactions and may be approximated in Christian communities and societies inspired by the citizens of heaven, things function differently than we have been conditioned to believe.  The poor are rich, the merciful receive mercy, people absorb the evil of the world rather than reacting to it and spreading it.  The Kingdom of God is a picture of what life looks like when the love of God rules in the affairs of people.

Niebuhr certainly had some sense of this.  Generations before the "missional" movement, he said that Christianity is always a movement, never an institution.  The institutions follow the movement and exist to serve it, but the story of Christianity is always a story of a people living together and interacting with the world God loved enough to send his Son to die for it.  History is always told with a focus on the institutions, but the institutions always follow what God has done among his people.

Whatever the Kingdom of God is, I think that if our telling of the Gospel is to be true to the message of Jesus, it must be centered in conversation about the Kingdom of God.  As Christians are continually debating how we must be citizens of our nation and what the political consequences of our faith ought to be, a fresh reflection on the Kingdom is urgent.  The Kingdom of God is a way of talking about how the Gospel hits the ground in the way we interact with each other and the culture around us--perhaps a primary cause that our effort to be "relevant" has focused on pop culture references, snazzy graphics, Christian hipsterism, and edgy music is our failure to reflect clearly on what Jesus was getting at in all those parables of the Kingdom.

I can't define the Kingdom of God.  That's probably a good thing, since Jesus never did.  But I find myself thinking about it and talking about it more and more.  I can't help but feel that a focus on the Kingdom can't do anything but lead me in the right direction.

Pastoral Prayer based on Gen. 15:1-7 (Abraham trusted God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness)

Holy God:

We worship you because you are God. We praise you because you are worthy of praise. We thank you
because you have been good.

You are always, always faithful. We turn to the left and to the right, and your spirit never leaves. You
keep drawing us back to yourself. You keep drawing us back to truth, to reality, to life, to hope.

Teach us to trust you. Teach us to hear your voice, to believe your promise, and to live boldly in
response to your call. Make us your own again. Bind us together as one people, a people who care
for each other, who share our challenges and our blessings, and work together to see your Kingdom
established in our community. Help us to have eyes to see those who need to be blessed through
us. Help us to see those who need the blessing that you’ve given to us, that you have called to share
through us. Call us afresh to share the Gospel with those who are without hope, to encourage those
who are downtrodden, to feed the hungry and clothe those without clothes, to visit those who are
lonely.

Holy God, we are grateful for the love we feel here. We thank you for the opportunity to gather with a
family of faith, to be built up in hope, to hear your word and be renewed, to have the broken places in
our lives mended, and to sing your praise.

Help us to live our lives in joyful gratitude for all you have done.

Amen.

Don't Freak! (or) It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

Wednesday night was the night of the first presidential debate.  During prayer requests at Bible Study, folks asked for prayers for the country and for the election.  Those kinds prayers are commanded by scripture and are very important.  Prayer requests for how the debate would go were joined to comments about how important the election will be and how critical a time this is for our country.  These comments are certainly true to some extent, but they also elicited a response in me.  I think that Christians should have a bigger perspective beyond the hysteria in the greater culture, and we easily find ourselves swept up and becoming more anxious and reactionary than even our non-Christian neighbors.

Billy Joel once sang, "The good old days weren't always so good and tomorrow's not as bad as it seems."  To those who think our country is in its worst shape ever and our problems are bigger than they've ever been, I say, "No way!!"  In 1968, the Democratic Convention in Chicago had to contend with widespread riots and demonstrations while the convention was going on.  These demonstrations were shut down by an extraordinary show of police brutality and violence.  This was a time that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were killed, the country was torn apart over Vietnam, and our ideological split was even deeper than it is today.  Folks say that our society has lost its morality, but I think that in some ways, the 1920s and 1970s were much less moral than our time.  In the 1980s, I can remember growing up wondering every minute if the Soviet Union would end the world and blow up all humans in a nuclear holocaust.  The U.S. nearly threw out the Constitution and became socialist during the Depression before things settled down under FDR.  Does anyone really believe it's more difficult now than it was during the Civil War? Or during the "Gilded Age" when a few people were ultra-rich and most people were living in tenements or just on the verge of losing the family farm, when children worked 12-hour days and there was no such thing as a weekend?  Once upon a time our country was a tiny little country and twice it took went to war with the biggest empire in the world.  Things have been a whole lot scarier and a whole lot worse.  Folks say that we used to be more Christian than we are now, but we have had times when our Christianity was much more about cultural church-going than true discipleship, and we have had times when people participated in Christian faith far less they they do now.

The people who run elections make their money by convincing us that this election is the most important of all time.  The people who run for office get people to the polls by convincing us that this election is the most important.  The news media makes their money by selling their products--convincing us that this election is the most important of all time (and wherever you get your news is the media, not just the sources of news that don't tell you what you want to hear--that includes NPR and FOX, Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, Sean Hannity and Huffington Post, Daily Beast, the New Yorker and New Republic, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times).

The issues are important, and dangers are all around us.  But the issues have always been important and the world has always been full of danger.

Presidents do very important work, and becoming president is an arduous process.  Our nation has separation of powers, so there's only so much any president can actually do (BTW, the conversation about the pizza man's 9-9-9 special was a ridiculous waste of time because no Congress, Democrat or Republican, would ever have gone along).  Candidates are so fully vetted that there is very little we don't know about them and a lot we know about them isn't so.  No one sets out to be president and actually gets far enough to be a party's nominee if that person doesn't deeply care about the nation and its people.  It's just too difficult to be worth it otherwise, and there are many other avenues for folks to express their ambition if that's what they're in it for.  At the same time, it now costs a billion bucks to run a campaign, so no one gets to be president without writing a whole heck of a lot of IOUs.  What this means, in my opinion, is that no matter who wins, it can only be so good or so bad.  People make money and a name for themselves by telling you that Barack Obama is a socialist or Mitt Romney is a crook, that the world will collapse if the other guys wins, or the world will be all better if their guys wins.

I'm only 37 years old.  I've seen it get a little bit better here or a little bit worse there, but I don't believe in any Messiahs or Apocalypses in politics anymore.

My concerns as a pastor are always related to how the church will be the church.  My concerns as a citizen are always related to how people will contribute to their local communities and participate in a democratic society.  So I worry more about folk's reaction to the election than the election itself.  

Please friends--If your guy wins in November, don't set your hopes too high.  Don't expect miracles.  Don't expect a quick fix.  Don't expect a willing Congress or an agreeable world community.  Your guy will not usher in a New American Golden Age.  If you want a better America, you will still need to go to work the next day and do your job to the best of your ability.  You will still need to volunteer in your community, to help your neighbors, teach your kids to read and study and have character and compassion, and you will still need to think hard and clear about the issues of the day.   America (and the world community in which America co-exists, for that matter) will not get better if each of us don't make it better everyday, no matter who is president.

And if your guy loses in November, DON'T FREAK.  Don't assume that this will mean that the economy will go in the toilet or that wars and terrorism will envelope the earth or that individual liberties will be cast aside by one version of totalitarianism or another.  These things may happen, but if they are going to happen, there's little Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will be able to do to stop them and little they can do to make them come to be.  God will still be God, and Jesus will still be raised from the dead.

The sun will come up on November 7.