Midweek Message – June 17, 2024

Pastoral Prayer

June 15, 2025

            Our God, we come to you, many of us, with mixed and disturbed feelings. It seems, at times, that the center has been lost–that center which holds our lives together in the midst of troubling times.

            Help us reclaim our wholeness. Help us see that our wholeness involves life in community–that we are whole persons only as persons-in-relationship. Take from us any arrogant individualism hiding within us and giving rise to thoughts and actions which are destructive and dehumanizing and which threaten our communal life.

            Our God, become the centering reality of our lives. Let the inclusive love of your son animate us. We want to live grateful for the human complexity of races and traditions which enrich us. Some are new or strange to us. May they remind us of your command to welcome the stranger.

            In a day of national unrest, we give thanks for people before us who committed themselves to the belief that all persons are created equal, that they are made in your image, and that they rightly have a place at the table of community.

            In the midst of ugliness and banality, we find our lives enriched by beauty—the beauty of creation and the beauty of the art springing from the human soul: music and painting and writing and the creation of stories. “For the beauty of the earth . . . for the joy of ear and eye,” hear our hymn of grateful praise.

            Our thoughts are moved by concerns of our people, people in the embrace of this congregation. Our prayer encompasses them: those with challenges of health, those moving through periods of grief, those celebrating new opportunities and new freedoms. For all these, and more, we pray.

            For many, this is a day to celebrate the influence of fathers in our lives, both now and in the past. At the same time, we acknowledge that for many “father” is a painful and hurtful word, that they have been abused and treated unkindly by some who bear that name. On this Fathers Day, we give thanks for those many of all genders and relationships who have been a nurturing and exemplary reality in our lives.

            We offer this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, who has walked before us, and who now walks with us. Amen.

The Reverend Dr. Dale Edmondson

Sunday worship is outside on the church steps this coming Sunday, Wear a hat and bring a lawn chair as we sit/stand and sing for justice this Junteenth Sunday. There will be a short sermon, a pastoral prayer and an offering as well. Coffee Hour will follow.