Pastoral Prayer for Easter Day (inspired by 1 Cor. 15))

Holy God:

We give you praise with hearts full of thanksgiving on this, the greatest of days, the day your Son rose
from the dead to show us that death had been destroyed. You have given us the perfect sign of your
faithfulness, you miracle working power, and your love that gives us ultimate victory.

We confess to you that deep in our hearts, the reality of the continuing power of death continues to
weigh us down and limit our ability to celebrate fully. We feel the power of death in our bodies. We still grieve over those who have died ahead of us. We experience the power of death drawing our souls into the dust. We struggle to overcome the sin within us. We struggle to overcome cynicism and a gnawing sense that our world is corrupt beyond repair.

Help us to see the many small and great demonstrations of your life-giving power overcoming the
blasphemous claims of death all around us. Help us to believe in our bones that the resurrection is not
some beautiful fairy tale of something that happened ago, but a demonstration of the way your life
renews all life. Help us to believe beyond our seeing that you are even now swallowing up every kind of death in your victory. Help us to live in every moment so that we will spread your life and participate in the renewing of everything.

Most of all, give each of us new life. To those who have never been made alive by your spirit, may
this Easter Sunday be the beginning of a new birth to a life lived with you, a life of power, joy, and
confidence, a life lived in wonder and awe of your miracle working power. For those of us who have
grown weary and lost our easter vision, help us to feel a fresh surge of your resurrection power making
everything dead within us alive again.

You said that if the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwelt in us, he would give new life to our mortal bodies. So bring healing to every broken body, joy to every broken spirit, reconciliation to every broken relationship, and peace to our broken world.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer based on Luke 15:1-3, 11-32 (the Parable of the Prodigal God)

Holy God

Thank you for bringing us into this house of worship once again today.  Thank you for the joy we feel as we share this hour with those we love.  Thank you most of all, for the grace we feel here, the love you have extended to us, the welcome we feel simply because we are all loved by you and your grace swings the door wide open for all who enter.  We thank you that this place is a sign of the love, the grace, and the welcome that you offer us in all times and all places, that your forgiveness is a banquet of joy and love to which we are continually invited.

We confess that we have often failed to accept your invitation.  We’ve wanted to go our own way.  We’ve needed to figure things out on our own.  Either through our own misunderstanding or through the failed witness of others, we’ve often misunderstood what you are calling us to.  We’ve run from you because we’ve thought that you were a hard task master, or that you wanted to make our live boring or lifeless.  We’ve very rarely thought of the grace you’ve offered us as an opportunity to live lives of celebration and rejoicing, a banquet, a party celebrating your goodness and redemption.

So whether we’ve run away from your grace because wee wanted the life we could create for ourselves more than the life you have for us, or even if we’ve been good religious people who’ve been so stuck on following the rules and being good citizens that we’ve forgotten what it means to truly feast on your mercy, help us to enter your house with fresh love, fresh grace, fresh joy.  Let the party of your grace begin.

Be with those who suffer.  Make them know your closeness and bring them new life.  Bless our enemies.  Bless those who are far from your family.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer based on Luke 13:1-9 (parable of the unfruitful fig tree)

Holy God:

We thank you for the love you have poured out to us, the love you are pouring out right now, and the love you have sent before us for the needs ahead of us.  We thank you that you chose us without regard to our deserving.  We thank you that you have given us your word, your spirit, your very lifeblood.  You have given us each other.  You have given us new hearts and loving friends, countless sermons and Bible Studies, a comfortable building in which to worship, and so much more than we can ever name.  

You have told us to abide in you, and we are thankful that you want to abide with us.  You also said that if we abide in you and your word abides in us, then we would produce fruit that would last.  Those words comfort us, but they also worry us.  Because they teach us that the life you have invested in us should produce a return.  And you have taught us that you will hold us accountable for producing the fruit that your love should produce.

So help us to take a hard look at ourselves, both as individuals and as a church.  Help us to honestly take account of what we have produced--how we have loved others, how we have grown as disciples, how we have helped others to come to faith.  Today, let us honestly hear from you what good has come from all those hours in church and all those sermons and all our religious activity.  We want to be made new.  We want our lives to be fruitful.

We cannot be anything other than what we have always been unless you remake us.  So help us, holy God, to feel our need to be nourished, shaped, transformed, and reconnected.  And help our lives to bring a harvest of righteousness.

Amen.