When I was in parish ministry I enjoyed writing corporate prayers for worship. Many of those found their way in a collection in the book Let Us Pray. It’s been a while since I’ve written a corporate prayer for worship, but recently my pastor asked me to lead “the prayers of the people†at our church’s Pentecost Sunday service. Here it is below. Perhaps too late for this year, but maybe you can file it away for next year’s Pentecost Sunday.
Pentecost Prayer 2007
Our God,
Giver and sustainer of life;
We thank you on this Pentecost Sunday
For the gift of Church
through your Spirit;
This community of believers, saints, and seekers,
the spiritual Bride of Christ, imperfect, triumphant,
a city of light on a hill.
For we, the naturally hopeful,
need a simple haven
for the myriad ways we’re capsized,
taken adrift by storms in life.
And we who love beauty
need a finer way to convey faith and hope,
the pure joy of living,
disappointment and perplexity,
than our daily mundane and profane manners allow.
Here, in our grief-numbed speechlessness, in all its inflections,
we find a voice for sorrow through word and ritual,
through fellow pilgrims who speak in our stead,
sing our dirges, utter the prayers that will not leave our lips,
and claim, for us, hope for healing
of mind and spirit.
Here we lay down dreams deferred, unmet expectations,
the hurt of every time we’re ambushed
by trivial or stupefying irony;
Here is our place, when in our times of pure incredulity,
we find a place of refuge and hope
and can believe again.
For all these reasons we thank you, our God, for the Church;
but mainly bec
