Assurance of Pardon

When I lead worship I use a lot of prayer that have been written by other people, so I thought I should start posting prayers/liturgy that I write in case it might be helpful to someone else. You know, completing the circle.

Assurance of Pardon (based on Matt 7:7 and Psalm 51:10)

Like the writer of the psalm, we come to the Lord for help, saying “create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”. We know that when we seek the help of the Lord in our weaknesses, we shall receive this help, for Jesus has said “ask and it will be given unto you, seek and you shall find”.

    

The Prayer of Oscar Romero by Bishop Kenneth Untener

The kingdom is not only beyond our own efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s word.
Nothing that we do is complete.
The kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals includes everything that we are about.
We all plant the seed that one day will grow.
We water the seeds already planted, knowing that they hold promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces efforts far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything.
Knowing this enables us to do something, and to do it well.
Our work may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way.
Our actions present an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are the workers, not master builders.
We are ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.

Mary Oliver reads "The Summer Day" (aka "The Grasshopper")

''Pray like this...''

I just finished reading Prayers of the Cosmos by Neil Douglas-Klotz. He went back to the Peshitta (that's an Aramaic translation of the Gospels that possibly dates back to the 2rd century CE) and came up with a new translation of the Lord's Prayer with extensive commentaries about the different ways each line could be translated. Here is his translation below:

O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos,
Focus your light within us -- make it useful:
Create your reign of unity now --
Your one desire then acts with ours,
as in all light, so in all forms.
Grant what we need each day in bread and insight.
Loose the cords of mistakes binding us,
as we release the strands we hold of others' guilt.
Don't let surface things delude us,
But free us from what holds us back.
From you is born all ruling will,
the power and the life to do,
the song that beautifies all,
from age to age it renews.
Truly -- power to these statements --
may they be the ground from which all my actions grow: Amen.

I considered his commentaries about the facets of meaning of the Aramaic words and came up with my own English translation:

O Immanent Source that vibrates through the Cosmos
Prepare and sanctify the land for the growth of our experience of you.
Consummate this mutual yearning for unity.
Our deepest desire is that the Earth aligns itself with your purpose.
Give us as much as we need to sustain body and soul.
Clear away the negativity of our past, restoring us as we re-establish right relations.
Do not let us follow false illusion and fall into inner turmoil
but free us from our own ignorance.
Your energy creates a fertile healing harmony in the Earth
Moving together, changing, moving together
We meet you in the Great Mystery.

A couple of notes about my translation:

I made a deliberate effect to avoid light imagery because it is falling out of vogue in the inclusive language ethos of the United Church. Apparently people who have darker skin are sometimes offended by the association of ''light'' with positive things and ''dark'' with negative things.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the word ''purpose'' in line four, but I couldn't seem to come any closer to the concept than that. Also, ''right relations'' seems kind of awkward and un-poetic, but again, I was unable to find anything more poetic to capture the idea. If you have any suggestions, leave a comment!

Prayer and Song

I'm halfway through reading Simply Pray by Erik Walker Wikstrom. I highly recommend this book. He combines interesting history, quotes and practical applications for every person to develop their own meaningful prayer practice.

On that note, here is a song  by the Velvet Underground that has been and continues to be a prayer experience for me:

Now here is a prayer I wrote that was inspired by St Francis:

O God

Let me be an instrument of your peace

tune me to sing your praises

in harmony with your whole creation.

amen.

Mark 9: 14-29 Jesus heals a child who has an evil spirit

In this section, Jesus comes back down from the mountain after the transfiguration and there is a man waiting with the disciples who stayed behind. The disciples are all standing around scratching their heads because they weren't able to cure the man's son of the evil spirit that possessed him. Probably nowadays this ''evil spirit'' would be called epilepsy.

So the father implores Jesus to help him, and Jesus tells him to have faith, to which the father replies something along the lines of ''I have faith! Help me out where I need faith''. The semantics of this seem slightly different in French: Je crois, aide-moi car j'ai de la peine à croire! Things like this always remind me that it would be different again in ancient Greek, so if you want to have a really detailed understanding of the Bible, you'd better not be reading it in translation. Fortunately for me, I don't believe that the Bible is the inspired literal word of God. I don't believe that God speaks any human language. I really liked when my minister described the Bible (in a private conversation with me) as ''A chronicle of peoples' struggles with faith: first the Hebrew people, then the early Christians''. That's a great working definition. 


I met an American missionary in France whose translation of choice was the King James version. I was asking her what the best translation was. She didn't really have an opinion on it; she read the King James version because she had grown up with it. It's a bit disappointing for me to think that there are people who believe so strongly in Christianity that they will travel the world to proselytize, yet don't seem to have taken steps to ensure the utmost accuracy of their message. To some people, the Bible is the literal word of God, but I would like to point out that it is definitely not the literal English word of God.


That was a pretty big aside, so now we'll go back to the story. Evil spirit. Dad struggling with faith. So next, they bring the affected boy out, and Jesus notices that people are watching and starts to talk to the spirit and tell him to get out (is this showmanship?). So the boy starts to go into convulsions and foam at the mouth and all that, and then he is really still (I'm no doctor but this sounds like epilepsy, right?). Everyone thinks the boy is dead but Jesus takes him by the hand and pulls him up. Later the disciples ask him why they couldn't heal the boy, and Jesus says that the only way to deal with this kind of thing is with prayer. I love it.

So if I was writing the heading for this story, instead of something along the lines of ''Jesus heals a child with an evil spirit'', I would call it ''Jesus talks to an epileptic boy, watches him have a seizure and then helps him up''. Of course, I haven't finished the book of Mark yet, but I really don't think there was any follow up on this kid. Did he actually get cured or did he have another seizure the next day? Does it matter?

I'm not looking for miracles, I'm looking for some practical advice. Some things can only be dealt with through prayer. I can't go around curing epileptics; I'm not a doctor. I could, however, help an epileptic up after a seizure. Well, once I called an ambulance when someone was having a seizure (for the record, there isn't much you can do except move things out of the way so they don't hit anything while they are convulsing).

Not all healing is bodily. We live in a world of mystery. What happens to us when we are not in our frail human bodies is a mystery. Some things can only be healed through prayer.