Seen, Loved, Freed: Sermon for Proper 16 C, the 11th Sunday after Pentecost

The question of keeping a Sabbath can seem quaint and old-fashioned and even ludicrous to many of us. Our culture prizes busy-ness so much that even our days away from work aren’t often really away from work, thanks to cell phones and email. And even on weekends, our lives are jam-packed with activities—taking the kids to lessons and practice for sports teams, doing laundry and fixing up our homes. Even our leisure activities are all too often a whirl of activity. Sometimes our culture can even make volunteering not so much voluntary but part of our competition with each other. 

But when I was a kid, there were still these things called “Blue laws.” Does anyone remember them? These were state and local laws that actually shut down businesses on Sundays. By the time I was a kid, it was only until noon on Sunday, because after church we Okies had to buy our beer and our snacks so we could watch football after church, but still. And just like in our gospel today, these laws had unintended consequences. 

And that’s the problem illustrated by the reaction of the synagogue leader in our story who protests Jesus’s healing of this poor woman on the Sabbath. He privileges his interpretation of the law over the intent of the law regarding the Sabbath. He privileges a moral system over the moral imperative to compassion. 

That, and the fact that, for the third time in five weeks, we see someone triangulating again. Because I hope you pay attention that the synagogue leader doesn’t approach Jesus to question or complain. Oh no-- instead he complains to the crowd, not Jesus, about what Jesus has done that he thinks is a violation. 

Once again: trying to score cheap points off of someone publicly when you disagree with them rather than talking to them directly is absolutely dirty pool, people. When people engage in triangulating behavior like this, it almost always is about their own threatened sense of power or personal issues, rather than really trying to work with someone else. The synagogue leader sees that the crowd is enthralled by Jesus’s power to heal—and it threatens his position as an authority. So he sets out to prove his competence—and Jesus’s lack of authority. 

The synagogue leader does not see what a miracle this healing is for this woman--all the leader can see is that, in his mind, the timing isn’t right. And Jesus is having none of that. As we see over and over again in the gospels, when you privilege human-made interpretation of rules over real human suffering, you always come down on the wrong side of God’s kingdom. And that’s exactly what Jesus then points out, to the crowd the synagogue leader has attempted to manipulate. 

Jesus makes it clear that the purpose of the Sabbath is not to place another set of burdens on people. No—just the opposite: the purpose of the Sabbath is freedom. Freedom from work. Freedom to worship and center ourselves in God. Freedom to be with those we love. Freedom from anxiety. Note that when he heals the woman, he frames it within the context of freedom, the kind of freedom that doesn’t oppress others, but the kind that immediately enables her to give praise to God and stand upright and joyful before the altar of God. Jesus speaks of freedom because it is praise that is the highest expression of our freedom to worship, then and now. 

In the New Testament, religious authorities are constantly confronting Jesus regarding his violations, in their opinion, of cleanliness and Sabbath regulations. In these stories, the religious leaders are always watching to see what Jesus will do—and also to be able to testify as to his apostasy for violating the Sabbath. Jesus confronts the leaders and questions whether it can even be unlawful ever to heal on the Sabbath. They never seem to actually SEE what Jesus is doing, however, perhaps because they are blind, from a compassionate point of view. 

Here’s the thing: this goes back to the lawyer’s question of Jesus as to what the greatest commandment is. Do you remember Jesus’s answer? I hope so, because at the 8:00 service we have the ultimate cheat sheet, since we say it every Sunday. 

Because the controversy we have before us is based on pitting both halves of the Great Commandment against each other: the synagogue leader promotes rigorously observing the Sabbath as the fulfillment of “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, strength, and mind.” Jesus performs miracles of mercy and healing, which certainly is the fulfillment of loving your neighbor as yourself. 

However, Jesus refuses to concede that this should ever be an either/or proposition. It is obvious that Jesus believes that these two acts are complementary, that healing the suffering IS showing faith in and love for God, ESPECIALLY on the Sabbath. 

Indeed, as Jesus himself notes, does not healing actually hallow the holy day? Is not this daughter of Abraham worthy of as much consideration as even one’s livestock? His blunt comparison probably provided a much-needed shock to his critics—and to us today, as well. Think of the people who get outraged at animal cruelty and yet don’t blink at the prospect of children in cages without adequate hygiene, rest, or health care. Is it because they refuse to see them as if they are our own children? I don’t know. 

Our gospel story is a story of incredible generosity. The woman who is bent over is not depicted as approaching Jesus—instead, Jesus sees her and approaches her. 

And let’s just stop right there and really hear that. What an amazing thing—Jesus really sees her, not as disabled, but as a beloved child of God. He sees her, even bent over, which makes her even smaller than the tiny space women were usually begrudged in the public arena then and often still now. That limited female space was even more constricted in a place like a synagogue, where 10 MALES were required to be able to meet, even if there were 400 women present. Yet Jesus sees her as a “daughter of Abraham”—subtly using the feminine form of a common label for Jewish men. He sees her as a beloved child of God deserving of as much consideration as anyone. He sees her—even as those around her have ignored her and her plight, shrugging it off with “Nothing can be done.” 

The attitude of the synagogue leader is clear: She’s already been this way for 18 years, so what’s one more day in order to preserve the Sabbath as HE sees fit to interpret that. 

Jesus turns that on its head: the time already spent bent double is too much; what is the point of waiting one more day when the means for not just healing but freedom stands right in front of her? To make her wait would be an act of injustice—and certainly of needless suffering. 

Jesus offers her freedom from her affliction NOW. And that promise and that healing extends to us, today, right now, as well. Because I am convinced that too many of us have our backs bent double, too, just like that woman in the synagogue. And we can’t tell just by looking who that applies to, but it’s safe to assume that EVERYONE carries some burden we don’t know. Our backs can be bent double by neglect, through the wounds and scars many of us bear from our childhoods, from traumatic experiences we may have encountered throughout our lives, accidental or not. 

We, too, long to hear Jesus pronounce our freedom and help us stand upright. And the loving gaze of Jesus sees each and every one of us just like he truly saw that woman. The good news is that Jesus offers us—all of us!-- that freedom, offering it to us in the name of a love that sees us exactly as we are, that loves us no matter what, but then doesn’t just leave us there. That amazing love that Jesus offers each of us is like that balm in Gilead, that makes the wounded whole. 

But while we’re accepting that love and that freedom that pours over us like a balm, we are also called to ourselves embody the generosity and empathy that Jesus does. That’s the privilege and essence of discipleship. Our healing NEVER stops with us. Our healing empowers us to be agents of healing in the name of Jesus for the sake of the entire world—no exceptions. 

Because, beloveds, there is no doubt that one of the greatest plagues of our modern time is refusing to really see each other- to see each other, to honor the divine spark in each other without questioning who is worthy and who is not. Just like that lawyer a few weeks ago, we want to know what the limits of the people we have to acknowledge as our neighbors are. But what this world needs is radical acceptance and radical empathy. We are called to lend our strong backs to those bent over from bearing pain or hatred. 

Too many of us—and it seems to be growing!-- are far too comfortable with failing to honor each and every person as fellow human beings. Too many of us are far too inured to each other’s pain and suffering—as the continuing crisis on our southern border, and all over the world, demonstrates. We inoculate ourselves against caring in a variety of ways: by telling ourselves that those who are suffering deserve it; or that we’re sorry, but they have to wait for freedom in the midst of their suffering in the name of rules far more capricious than the Sabbath-day work injunction. 

Some even take pleasure in the suffering of others, especially those different from them, and see that suffering as justice, and I am not just talking about the criminal justice system. 

We have criminalized poverty in this country especially in the 170 years since the Industrial Revolution, and we are told over and over that poverty and hunger are the results of character flaws or stupidity rather than a travesty of systemic oppression and institutional structures that siphon wealth away from the poor and middle class, redistributing wealth upward into an ever-tinier circle of people who cannot possibly spend all that they have in a hundred lifetimes. 

Our society has grown too comfortable with the phrase “the working poor” even while pretending that poor people don’t work—because too many refuse to truly see the poor and all the groups who have been “othered” like that woman as full human beings. 

Refusing to see and acknowledge the essential humanity of others was also the basis for the system of racially-based chattel slavery imposed on African captives and their descendants for over two hundred years, and that was first imposed on indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and the Caribbean almost from the landing of Christopher Columbus in 1492. 
Slavery can only exist when we refuse to acknowledge those who are enslaved as human beings. It is indeed important that we contemplate the echoes of that blindness this week, as we remember the 400th anniversary of the selling of the first 20 African captives to English colonists in Virginia—what some African American historians call the beginning of African American history. 

 This history is still permeated with the refusal by too many people in our country to truly see people of color as being just as deserving of freedom and liberty to move around in public spaces like our neighborhoods and schools and shops—a casual freedom just to “be” in a public space that too many of us take for granted for ourselves.

Permit Patty called the police on a family BBQ in a park

When the first assumption made when seeing a person of color or a young person is not that they are a citizen entitled to sit in a coffee shop or park like anyone else but are presumed to be a potential criminal or interloper who is out of their “proper place,” none of us are truly free. 

Perhaps we could see a connection here between this woman, bent double and minimized by those around her, and those who bear burdens that make them invisible or objects of scorn and rejection in society today. Because here’s a truth: there are many ways for one’s back to be bent double. There are entire groups of people who call out to us to be seen and freed of their added burdens. And one of the most prevalent ways we add to this problem today is by blinding ourselves to the systematic burdens of injustice, oppression, contempt, poverty, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia that we see rising up again in our world. 

Jesus insists that healing on the Sabbath honors the original intent of God that the Sabbath be a day dedicated to God and godly things. The argument here is over just what practices make a day holy—and Jesus’s answer is, “Miracles and healing!” 

Too often we set the law and compassion at odds against each other—and that kind of thinking always leads to undermining the very purpose and spirit of the law in the first place. Laws began when people began to live in community, in relationship with each other. Laws should not be invented just to trip people up. They should exist to maximize the happiness and security of everyone. Laws that provide freedom at the expense of someone else being placed in danger are neither just nor do they make society stronger. Laws only exist in community because the purpose of law should be the flourishing and security of everyone. 

Embedded within this story is a call to action to us—to examine our own minimization of others. To examine our failure to truly see each other—especially those who are far outside our familiar circles. And even more, to examine our silence in the face of others being minimized and bent double by the weight of that erasure. To examine our excuse for inaction in claiming that we are powerless to challenge and fight against the denigration of others based on who they are or where they come from. 

Jesus insists that one of the highest forms of honoring God is by honoring the image of God that resides in EVERYONE, no matter what. And once we are willing to truly see that, we realize that the most sacred use of our freedom is to work for the freedom of others. From being bound double by fear and suspicion, freedom lies in letting love heal us and bind us to each other.

The love of Jesus sets us free from all that keeps us bent over in pain—may we lend our strong backs to those bent over from pain or hatred. We have been seen, loved, and freed by the grace of Jesus our Savior. Let us now go forth and do likewise. 

 Amen.

Readings
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17

Preached at the 505 on August 24 and at the 8:00 and 10:15 services on August 15, 2019, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Praise to the Creating God: Speaking to the Soul, July 25, 2018

Yesterday morning, I rose early, and took my prayer book and Bible out into the fields, meadows, and woods that surround the cabin where I am staying for a mini-retreat, as a busy month draws to a close. This summer has brought even more changes and challenges than usual: one beloved dog suddenly died, another has been found to have lymphoma. Our youngest child is getting ready to head off to college, and his embrace of this new phase of life is both sweet and bitter, and I have been called to my first parish after spending the summer serving as a supply priest all over the central part of the diocese. So this respite was most welcome, indeed. 

 

Windridge Solitude cabin.

The gentle ridges and slopes that are home to the retreat center were farmland just a few years ago, but there are stands of trees and swaths of wildflowers and grasses ribboning through the property calling for exploration, and benches conveniently situated for meditation and observation. It’s been dry here in mid-Missouri, and the grass crunched underfoot, startling grasshoppers to explode from the path just ahead of my boot, their wings brilliant yellow bowties until they caromed into a new patch of thatch, no doubt glaring balefully at me.

Every few steps, I would pause. Sight, sound, touch and smell were all enticed as I walked. Cascading showers of golden birch leaves, prematurely aged by the drought, arrowed down from above and stippled the path like raindrops and landed on my shoulders. The sweet smell of the pastureland across the fence, recently hayed, reminded me of the blessing of each breath. The nodding grasses, hip-high, parted by the breeze to reveal, mixed among the tickseed and spent, desiccated coneflowers, the hilariously named “bastard toadflax” plants that interrupted here and there with their green foliage and wee white flowers. Droning flies and rasping beetles and buzzing bees and dozens of kinds of birdsong were carried on the welcome breeze. In the woods, the trees held the shade with a mother’s care and murmured and rubbed together companionably in the wind. 

As I rounded a bend in the path, a meadow opened before me, and three deer exploded from the verge of Indian grass and sedge that fringed the field mere feet away from me. Deciding it was a sign as good as any to pause, I sank down onto a bench and began morning prayer. Afterward, I let my Bible fall open, and this is what my eye fell upon, from Job 12:7-10:

“…ask the animals, and they will teach you;
   the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
   and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
   that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing
   and the breath of every human being.”

Even in this former farm, the variety of native species have resurged in this little corner of Earth, helped by the Sisters who care for this place with a mixture of tenderness and practicality. All the living things here proclaim the wonders of God’s continuing, present-tense handiwork, the ongoing creation that reminds me that the very ground so easy to take for granted beneath our feet is a living thing beloved of God, sustaining us all, and drawing this prayer of praise to the Creating God:

Most Merciful God,
who is creating the heavens and earth,
I sing a song of praise and gratitude
for all the wonders of your hand.

For the electric flash of a bluebird
racing from redbud to hackberry,
the swoop of the martin over a pond at dusk,
and the mockingbird standing sentinel on the rooftop,
Creating God, I give You praise.

For the rasp of cicada,
the swooping trill of the wood thrush,
and the hammering percussion of the woodpecker,
Creating God, I give You praise.

For the tumble of black swallowtails on summer phlox,
the sparkle of dragonfly wings,
and the industry of the bee on Queen Anne's lace,
Creating God, I give You praise.

For the spiced scent of fallen leaves
subsiding into earth,
and the greening tang of hedge-apple,
Creating God, I give You praise.

For the sinuous branches of this bur oak,
and the curling bark of the river birch,
Creating God, I give You praise.

Holy One, Ground and Source of All Being,
You adorn the Earth with beauty
and sustain us by your abundant grace and tender love.
Bear us within your embrace this day,
that we remember our kinship within creation,
and dependence upon this good Earth,
that even now is bearing us through space.

Plant your peace and compassion within our hearts,
O Lord of Life,
and make your face to shine upon all for whom we pray.

Amen.

This was first published on the Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on July 25, 2018.

Keeping the Sabbath: Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 4B)

In our gospel today, Jesus is confronted about two separate incidents in which he is judged to be violating the spirit as well as the letter of the law prohibiting work on the Sabbath. These two vignettes come on the heels of Mark 2:18-22, where the Pharisees confront Jesus about not observing fasts with his disciples, in comparison to even the disciples of John (of whom Jesus may have been one at some point, given his baptism by John). And of course John and his disciples fasted—John preached about repentance of sin and lived out in the desert wearing rough clothing and eating locusts—I’d fast too, if that was my diet.

Jesus and his followers are accused of violating the Sabbath in our gospel today because they are plucking heads of grain and snacking on them as they walk through a farmer’s field. I’ll be honest, one of the things that has always bothered me about this set-up to this story is how the Pharisees knew it happened in the first place? Did they have spies stationed among the wheat stalks? Did they sit around and gossip on the Sabbath as someone else told them? Because I am pretty sure gossip doesn’t really accord with keeping the Sabbath holy, either.

Then Jesus on his own enters a synagogue, where he immediately encounters a man with a “withered hand.” Note that Mark’s gospel shows the Pharisees taking it for granted, even here in only the second chapter of Mark’s gospel, that Jesus COULD heal the man’s hand. Not “could he,” but “would he?” Their priorities are so scrambled that they are willing to brush off a miraculous healing, as long as they can use that healing as a weapon against Jesus.

Ultimately, here, Jesus defends keeping the spirit of the Sabbath, by privileging people over practices. The Sabbath was made for the good of people—and in most cases, people’s good can’t help but be served by observing a day of rest. Yet, there are acknowledged exceptions even to the observance of Sabbath: even the most observant person is allowed to work to prevent suffering, or to save a life. And yes, the irony is not lost on me that we clergy are the worst about that, and Sunday is a day of work for us.

Yet, the purpose of the Sabbath is restoration, in other words—and what is more in the spirit of that than restoring strength through eating, and restoring the ability to make a living by healing a hand? In healing the man, Jesus restored him to wholeness and agency. Especially in Jesus’s time, workers depended on their hands for their livelihoods.

The question posed in our gospel reading from Mark today is this: how do we best live a faithful life? There is obviously a difference of opinion here between the Pharisees and Jesus. But before we go off railing at the Pharisees, let’s remember that far too often we modern Christians devolve into rule-followers rather than healers. We must be on guard that we don’t make the Pharisees “those hide-bound Jews” rather than “us.” Texts like this have been used against Judaism for millennia, and that misses the entire point. If we are really honest, there is a Pharisee lurking in the hearts and minds of each and every one of us, at one time or another.

Living a faithful life has to be grounded and rooted in love and integrity, in trying to make ourselves holy reflections of God’s mercy and grace in the world. Jesus is not saying that keeping the Sabbath is pointless—far from it! As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel points out, in the story of creation that starts the book of Genesis, God makes things and admires them, calling them good. But the first time God blesses and makes holy is not connected to a “thing” at all. The first thing God blesses and sanctifies is the Sabbath—a period of time, not a thing at all. And by tradition, the spirit of the Sabbath, as is the case with all laws, is grounded in relationship, not in things.(1)

As modern Christians, most of us don’t even come close to keeping a Sabbath in terms of rest, refraining from “work,” and from acquisitiveness. There are too many other things going on. I am old enough (and from the Bible Belt) to remember when stores were closed on Sunday until noon. The assumption was that you should be in church during that time—including the employees. Yes, it’s true. But gradually, in the 1970s- 1980s, that stopped. Now, partaking in commerce is a 24/7 proposition. Any time you want something today, you can probably locate it online and start it zooming toward your mailbox or porch with just a couple of clicks of a mouse, trackpad, or phone. 

But what if we understood that we are called to a holy work in keeping the Sabbath—the holy work of listening to each other and caring for each other, regardless of differences? What if we understood keeping the Sabbath as calling us to remember that community and the compassion that is the foundation of community is sacred, as Jesus repeatedly teaches us?

Sometimes we have a tendency to privilege institutions and systems, especially legalistic systems, over human good, to the point of almost deifying them. We cling to institutions and systems of law because they make us feel secure, because we believe that they work for us. But if we fail to unplug from our striving for possessions every now and then, if we fail to hold our treasured laws at arm’s length and take a good look at them, we can all too easily miss the fact that institutions and legal systems can and do fail other people. Our constant busyness sometimes numbs us to the very real costs that accrue to ourselves and others when we forget that time itself is sacred and holy, and that we will not pass through any day again.

The foundation of all law, after all is relational. Those who live alone have no need for law. Law is there to regulate our common life together—and in the case of religious law, it is there to mandate our relationship with each other as well as our relationship with the Divine.

Back in the 1980s, a singer named Bruce Hornsby had a smash hit with his song, “The Way It Is,” which talked about the common failure to respond to the needs of others who were oppressed by racism, or those who were homeless or unemployed, left behind by the changing economic conditions of the era. Hornsby sang about the tendency of simply turning a blind eye on the suffering of others by claiming helplessness with a shrug, and the comment “That’s just the way it is—some things will never change….”(2)

When we adopt attitudes like that, it is to justify our inaction as helplessness, which is actually quite a different thing. We are attempting perhaps to insulate ourselves from the demands of compassion. And that’s where Jesus’s point becomes clear: the heart of the law is relationship. The heart of the law is love: loving God, and loving our neighbor, as Jesus states in the Great Commandment in Matthew 22:36-40. Jesus’s call and example to us to keep the Sabbath centered around restoration and relationship also calls us to action for the sake of others—for the sake of love.

One of my favorite writers and poets, Wendell Berry, has made it a practice to walk around his Kentucky farm on Sundays. Since 1979, he has written a series of poems that have had their birth during these walks, which he simply calls “Sabbath Poems.” This is one of them, entitled “Amish Economy”:

We live by mercy if we live.
To that we have no fit reply
But working well and giving thanks
Loving God, loving one another,
To keep Creation's neighborhood.

And my friend David Kline told me,
"It falls strangely on Amish ears,
This talk of how you find yourself.
We Amish, after all, don't try
To find ourselves. We try to lose
Ourselves"-- and thus are lost within
The found world of sunlight and rain
Where fields are green and then are ripe,
And the people eat together by
The charity of God, who is kind
Even to those who give no thanks.

In morning light, men in dark clothes
Go out among the beasts and fields.
Lest the community be lost,
Each day they must work out the bond
Between goods and their price: the garden
Weeded by sweat is flowerbright;
The wheat shocked in shorn field, clover
Is growing where wheat grew; the crib
Is golden with gathered corn,

While in the world of the found selves,
Lost to the sunlit, rainy world,
The motor-driven cannot stop.
This is the world where value is
Abstract, and preys on things, and things
Are changed to thoughts that have a price.

Cost + greed - fear = price:
Maury Tulleen thus laid it out.
The need to balance greed and fear
Affords no stopping place, no rest,
And need increases as we fail.

But now, in summer dusk, a man
Whose hair and beard curl like spring ferns
Sits under the yard trees, at rest,
His smallest daughter on his lap.
This is because he rose at dawn,
Cared for his own, helped his neighbors,
Worked much, spent little, kept his peace.(3)

The Sabbath is a time to remember to stop, to remember that we are upheld by God’s generous grace and mercy—grace and mercy that heals our wounds and restores our souls by calling us back to ourselves. Jesus reminds us that healing and restoration are what the Sabbath is all about. Jesus does not call us to be secure from each other, but rather to be vulnerable to each other as only those in community can be, acknowledging our obligation to the needs of the other who is made as much in the image of God as we ourselves are.

In our gospel today, Jesus points us back to the establishment of the Sabbath in the amazing self-giving that allowed God to create in the first place. Jesus reminds his critics—and that means us-- that the ground of Sabbath observance is tied to the ongoing creation God is effecting in the world around us—and in our hearts. And keeping Sabbath can definitely be a vital part of that. It is holy time that is meant to help us remember who we really are: God’s beloveds, made to work for what our Jewish friends call tikkun olam: the healing, repair, and restoration of the world. The Sabbath reminds us that we find our deepest meaning not in things, but in relationship with and for the sake of others.

The Pharisees were not wrong in lifting up the Sabbath, but in forgetting that the end is not mere obedience, but compassion. The Sabbath was made for us; we were not made for the Sabbath. Like the boy Samuel, we are called to keep it, to keep it and make ourselves holy in the keeping. In our time, may keeping the Sabbath remind us that all our time as disciples, whether at work or at rest, is rightfully turned to hearing the call of love and compassion. If it doesn’t serve the causes of love, mercy, and healing, we are not doing it right. Time to turn and start again, upheld by the spirit of grace that is the heart of the Sabbath, no matter what day of the week it is.

Amen.


Preached at Calvary Episcopal Church, Louisiana, MO at 10 am and St. John's Episcopal Church, Eolia, MO on June 3, 2018.

Readings:

1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20)

Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

Mark 2:23-3:6

References:
(1) Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (FSG Classics), pp. 5-8.
(2) Bruce Hornsby, performed by Bruce Hornsby and the Range, from the album The Way It Is, 1986.
(3) Wendell Berry, 1995, from This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems, 2013, pp. 160-161.

Images:
(1) Jesus heals the man with the withered hand, unknown orthodox icon.

Prayer 1954: Second Sunday After Pentecost B (Mark 2:23-3:6)

Most Holy God,
who hallowed creation and blessed it:
we rise to hear your call
and offer your our thanks, our praise, our hearts, our time.

You called all creation good,
bathed in light and shrouded in enfolding dark,
the stars' hymns the accompaniment
to the work of your fingers,
the life-giving breath of your Spirit,
the sanctifying song of your Word.

Yet only the Sabbath you called Holy.
Teach us to keep your Sabbath, Blessed Jesus,
by the love and compassion we bear into the world,
by the healing and grace we embody through your love.

Nourished and sustained by a worship-shaped life,
may we seek to serve each other and You, O God,
as true disciples and heirs
of your mantle of love and compassion.

Almighty and Merciful One,
our times are in your hand:
sanctify our work and our rest to your purposes,
and place your blessing upon those for whom we pray.

Amen.


Image: Jesus heals thehand of the man in the synagogue on the Sabbath (Mark 3), source unknown

Prayer 1314: Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Mural by Faith47.

Lord Jesus Christ, we bow before You, and ask that You lead us into your path of holiness and love. 

Let us raise a joyful noise to the Lord and come into God's courts with thanksgiving! Let us join hands around the altars of the Almighty, united in truth and spirit with one another. Let us open our table to all, as we hope to rejoice at the heavenly banquet. Let us seek not just comfort but transformation, dedicating all that we are the the service of God. 

Bless and keep us under the shadow of your wing, O Holy One, as a mother nurses her newborn babe. Lord Jesus, give your angels charge over all who call upon you today, and look with favor upon those for whom we pray.

Amen.

Prayer 1076

Almighty God, we gather in your courts, worshiping you in heart, mind and unity, praising You for your goodness and mercy. Let us gather to give thanks to our God, whose mercy endures forever. 

Lord Jesus, may your peace rule in our lives; may we bow the knee of our hearts, and live out your compassion in the world. May we bear each others' hopes and fears in gentleness and care, and turn away from anger, malice, and greed. May the Spirit of Wisdom take root in our hearts and make us lovers of peace and justice. 

Lord, may all who come to your table today be fed in body and soul, strengthened and filled with joy to do your will. Heal us of all our wounds, O Lord, and give solace to all who mourn or suffer in any way. Blessed Savior, abide with us and guide us, we pray, and stretch forth your healing hand over those we now name.

Amen.