Pastoral Prayer for Reformation Sunday and All Saints' Day

Almighty God, Father, Son, and Spirit, Creator of the heavens and the earth, You spoke this universe by the Word of Your power, and You continually uphold it all by that same Word, and by the mighty working of Your Spirit.

And therefore we praise You and we worship You, as the only God, the only true God. You are Holy and Mighty and Gracious and Just and all Glorious. And we know this because this world and its story is full of Your glory. You framed the heavens and the earth and filled them with treasures, and when we disdained that gift and reached for our own glory, You sent us out into the world. But your grace has followed us down through the ages. And in the seed of the woman you have told and are telling an amazing story.

We give you thanks for righteous Abel who offered worship to you in faith though His brother hated him and spilled his blood on the earth. We praise you for faithful Enoch who walked with you and for Noah who was a preacher of righteousness and the judgment to come. We praise you for Abram who left his father’s house and went to a foreign land on the basis of Your promises. Thank you for the faith of Sarah who laughed when you promised her a son in her old age. Thank you for Rebekah who believed the promise of God and tricked her husband into obeying you. Thank you for the faith of Jacob who blessed his rebellious sons and trusted Your promises despite all appearances. Thank you for Joseph who did not compromise with his master’s wife to stay out of trouble. Thank you for the faith of the midwives who disobeyed the king’s wicked order to kill the Hebrew boys. Thank you for the faithfulness of Moses though Israel was stubborn and hard-hearted. We praise you for Rahab who hid the spies and lied to the soldiers who were looking for them. Thank you for her grace and cunning. Thank you for Joshua who taught the people how to destroy cities with trumpets. And for Gideon who knew that every battle belongs to You. And we worship you for Deborah and Barak and Jael, and we praise you for Siserah’s head crushed by a tent peg. Thank you for David who was a man after Your own heart; thank you for his faith and courage and for his sling and for the songs that he sang. Thank you for Jeremiah and Ezekiel; thank you for Micah and Jonah and Malachi, prophets who declared Your word fearlessly despite the consequences, despite the shame, despite their inadequacies.

Thank you for Matthew who wrote his gospel by faith. Thank you for the Apostle Paul and Timothy and Titus his disciples who were also faithful pastors and evangelists. Thank you for Phoebe who was a faithful servant of Paul and the church in Cenchrea. We don’t know much about her, but she reminds us of how there were so many faithful saints in those early days of the church who suffered and sacrificed and served gladly for the sake of the Kingdom. We thank you for St. Stephen the first Christian martyr who saw our Lord Jesus in the sky and did not flinch when they stoned him to death. Thank you for Ignatius who was devoured by lions because of his love for you. Thank you for Eustachius and Germanicus and Polycarp and Justin and Irenaeus and Hippolitus and Lawrence and Alban and Sebastian, and the countless thousands of others who gave their lives willingly for the sake of Christ, who did not consider their lives more valuable than the salvation You have won for us. We praise you for mothers who watched their children burned at the stake, and we praise you for children who were faithful even to death.

We thank you for Constantine who loved you and ended the persecution of Your people. We thank you for Athanasius and Augustine and Ambrose and Leo and Gregory. Thank you for Boniface and Bede; and for all those nameless scribes who copied out the Scriptures faithfully over the centuries so that we might have them today in our hands. Thank you for Thomas Acquinas and John Huss and Wycliffe and Calvin and Bucer and Luther. And thank you for Luther’s wife, Katie. We praise you for Cranmer and Hooper and Latimer and the many faithful Huguenots who were slaughtered for their love of the cross. We give you thanks for John Bunyan and John Foxe and William Carey and George Whitefield and John Wesley for their faithful proclamations of the gospel. We praise you for Hudson Taylor, Gresham Machen, Jim Eliot, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Alexander Schmemann, Bessie Wilson, and Betty Appel.

We praise you for all Christian wives and mothers who have offered their daily labors to their husbands and children with cheerful love of Christ. Thank you for how they have given of themselves in so many small ways rising early, staying up late, making meals, doing laundry, teaching lessons, disciplining, and loving, pouring themselves out, serving gladly, offering their bodies as living sacrifices to you. And we bless them now before Your throne and we give you thanks and praise for them. Thank you for faithful children down through the ages who image what we must become to enter the Kingdom. Thank you for peanut butter and jelly smears on their faces. Thank you for their prayers and their lessons. Thank you for their exuberance. Thank you for the gift of faith you have bestowed upon them. And thank you for the millions of little ones that we have not yet met but who rejoice around Your throne in glory. Thank you for the poor, the sick, the outcasts, the mentally and physically disabled. We thank you for your people who make us laugh, thank you for those who tell stories, thank you for those who remember and help us remember. Thank you for all honorable occupations. Thank you for hard, honest work. Thank you for secretaries and auto mechanics, thank you for writers and missionaries, thank you for doctors and nurses and accountants and artists. Thank you for teachers and deacons, thank you for coaches and architects and pilots and janitors and senators. We praise you for your people in China and Russia and Egypt and Ivory Coast and Columbia and Mexico and Finland and Italy and France and Iraq and Afghanistan and Myanmar. We thank you and we praise you for all your saints, all your faithful down through the centuries, and we praise you for those who are still yet to come, that innumerable company of saints yet to play their part on the stage. We thank you that in the gift of the Spirit you have rushed us up into the heavenly places and that by Your mighty working we are united to all your saints throughout time and space and that in a mystery we are bound together in Christ.

Our gracious God and Father, we are undone by your goodness, we are glad, and we are deeply grateful to you. But we are most deeply thankful for our Lord Jesus Christ who is the Holy One of Israel, the One who has been anointed with the fullness of Your Holy Spirit, the One in Whom all saints find their rest. We praise you for our Lord Jesus Christ who is the only begotten Son of God and who is the seed of the woman come to crush the serpent’s head. And we give thanks to You for all Your people chiefly because in them we have seen Christ manifested. For You have poured out His Spirit on all flesh, and You have begun to remake this world by Your wonderful grace and love.

And so we worship You now, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for You are worthy of all glory and praise, unto ages of ages. Amen!

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A Prayer for Russia

By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Our Father All-Merciful!
Don't abandon your own long-suffering Russia
In her present daze,
In her woundedness,
Impoverishment,
And confusion of spirit.
Lord Omnipotent!
Don't let, don't let her be cut short,
To no longer be.
So many forthright hearts
And so many talents
You have lodged among Russians.
Do not let them perish or sink into darkness
Without having served in Your name.
Out of the depths of Calamity
Save your disordered people.

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Still King

One of the gifts of the lectionary and church calendar is the backbone it gives to our lives. If these gifts are the collective, devotional wisdom of the Church down through the centuries, then they are Fathers advising us about how to pray and what to pray for and when. Of course we may generally pray for anything at any time, any place. But following the lead of our Fathers places some healthy constraints on us. While we may face a particularly trying situation, we may find ourselves in Christmas or Easter. Or we may be blessed with overwhelming gifts and kindness and mercy and find ourselves in Advent or Lent or Holy Week. And this doesn't mean that we must put on superficial faces to fit in with the tenor of the calendar. But it does offer a deeper wisdom to our situations. Even in deep, abounding joy and laughter, there must be a humility that recognizes our need for grace and mercy. Likewise, in our deepest sorrows, if we are entreated to sing psalms of joy and give gifts to one another, it is the wisdom of the Fathers that reminds us to rejoice in all things and to give thanks even in the shadow of death.

Something similar is found in praying through the Psalter on a regular basis. As the inspired prayer book of the Church, the Psalter leads us to pray for things we wouldn't ordinarily pray for, thank God for things we might not otherwise remember to thank him for, and again it directs the tenor of our lives, offering a masthead to our ship in the main.

In one of the Psalms for this morning's prayer, Psalm 99, it says, "The Lord is King, be the people never so impatient; he sitteth between the Cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet."

We have our storms and trials and victories and battles, and still the Lord is King, still he sits enthroned.

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Church Calendar as Training for Prayer

One of the great blessings of the Church Calendar is the cumulative wisdom it brings to us in directing our prayers. The disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, and he gave them the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father. But the apostles did not stop there. They taught their congregations to pray for all sorts of needs and situations, to give thanks in all things, to pray for those in authority, to pray without ceasing, to cast their cares upon the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. If God is our Father, as our foundational prayer teaches, then he is our Father at all times and in all places. And this apostolic wisdom has continued to grow and expand throughout the history of the church. The Calendar is training for prayer. The feasts and fasts of the Church Year are lessons in worship. During the Advent Season we are taught to pray in expectation, we remember Israel in exile awaiting the Messiah, we remember that we too await the Messiah who will come at the end of the ages to judge the living and the dead and to raise us up with new bodies when death is no more. But we not only await our King at the end, we must learn to wait on the Lord throughout our lives. We must wait and pray for many situations that are completely outside of our control. We must wait and pray for wayward children. We must wait and pray when we are afflicted with disease, when we are in pain, when we have offended someone who refuses to forgive us. We must wait and pray when finances are tight. We must wait and pray when we have lost a loved one. Sometimes sin afflicts us and no matter how hard we try, it does not seem to leave. And God does not seem to hear our cries, our pleas, our prayers. And Advent teaches us to continue to pray to our faithful Father. Advent teaches us to pray to the God who has come, to the God who will come, to the God who comes. The entire Christian Year is a tutorial in prayer. It reminds us to pray without ceasing, that prayer is the life-breath of the Church.

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Peterson on Prayer and the Middle Voice

Eugene Peterson says that prayer is like the middle voice.

Active and Passive voices we know fairly well. Active means the subject is doing the verb; passive means the subject is being acted upon by someone or something else. Middle voice "is that use of the verb which describes the subjects as participating in the results of the action." Peterson uses the example of "counsel." "I counsel my friend" is in the active voice. "I am counseled by my friend" is in the passive voice. "I take counsel" is the middle voice. In the middle voice the subject participates in the results of the action which is initiated by someone else.

In prayer, we are invited to join the deliberations of the heavenly assembly and particularly, we are invited to participate in the council and deliberations of the Father, Son, and Spirit. We, like Abraham, reason with God; we, like Moses, are invited to present our case before the Godhead. But we have been granted participation in God far beyond what the faithful patriarchs enjoyed. We have the status of sons; we have been given the Spirit which cries out to God, "Abba, Father!" We are joined to the Son by the Spirit and are welcome to speak with the Father about the state of our life, the state of our family, the state of our world. We are invited to participate in what God is doing in the world. We are not the primary actors or initiators, but we are expected to participate in and join in the action through pleas, through our intercession, through our cries for mercy.

Peterson explains: "Prayer and spirituality feature participation, the complex participation of God and the human, his will and our wills. We do not abandon ourselves to the stream of grace and drown in the ocean of love, losing identity. We do not pull the strings that activate God's operations in our lives, subjecting God to our assertive identity. We neither manipulate God (active voice) nor are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice). Prayer takes place in the middle voice." (The Contemplative Pastor, 103-104)

Of course when we think of results we usually think about what we want to see happen or change. But participating in the results doesn't necessarily mean that what we want actually happens. Of course in the cases of Abraham and Moses we see instances where prayer does prevail with God. But if we have been granted the status of sons, and we have the Spirit of Christ, then we have to remember that much of our prayer may be like Christ's prayer. And some of the clearest glimpses of Christ's prayer life are seen in the garden just before his arrest and betrayal. Christ's prayers participated in the results of the action of God in the world, but we know from Christ's own words, he struggled through that, he argued and pleaded with his Father in his circumstances, while perfectly trusting the will of his Father. Praying like sons may mean facing similar situations as the Son in the garden, the Son before Pilate, the Son on the Cross. But of course that should come as no surprise since that same Son invited us to follow him by taking up a cross. But the hope of course is that the same result as came to the Son comes to every son. Resurrection awaits all every son of God.

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