"The greatest of these is love" - On not looking too hard for the Church's raison d'etre

Below is the Prayer of Intercession I composed and offered within the worship service at which I was also preaching yesterday. I don't often post prayers of my own. This one touches deep places in the way I look at the world, the church and the people who move in and out of our lives. If using some or all of it lifts your heart and hands to God so much better. It is written around the seldom noted superlative at the end of I Corinthians 13, "Faith, hope and love remain, but the greatest of these is love". For all our talk of mission and missional - there is a job description for the Church that isn't hard to understand - just hard to live in, live up to, live towards. 

Eternal God and Father,

Whose infinite yet intimate love

shared from all eternity between Father, Son and Spirit,

is the same love you have poured into our hearts by that same Holy Spirit.

 

 We pray for all those people in our lives,

Who have been touched and transformed by love,

faithful, unselfish, generous, joyful, love.

Lifelong friends and good neighbours

wives and husbands, parents and children,

sisters and brothers, best friends and new friends

overcoming differences in language, race, gender, religion.

O God, in that rich life of love as Father, Son and Spirit,

We see love’s inexhaustible possibilities:

 

So we pray for those whose lives are broken for lack of love:

Children whose safety and health come second to adult demands;

Friendships ended by exploitation and backstabbing;

Marriages shredded by unfaithfulness and broken promises;

Families fractured by social pressures, whether poverty or affluence;

Neighbourhoods where love is weakness and compassion despised

Businesses whose bottom line isn’t the welfare of the work-force;

 

We pray for Churches, and for our church

which you have called to be the Body of Christ,

to embody and to model the love of God in Christ,

which is gift of the Spirit and the sign of your Presence

May our love for others, like your eternal love,

Be generously given, lovingly available,

patiently faithful, willingly sacrificial

persistently hopeful, and self-evidently joyful.

 

We pray for those we’ve only heard of on television,

Those whose lives disintegrate under pressures of hate and violence,

Whose lives are in different ways, damaged, diminished, defeated,

by the absence of love, a vacuum filled by the power of hate.

Two boys whose home was so toxic they tortured other children

The 19 year old whose reckless driving killed his friend

The mother who made her own son ill, to gain media attention

The teacher injured trying to separate fighting pupils

The baby abducted in Ireland, and returned on the Cathedral steps

The Sikh neighbour stabbed to death defending a young woman from a mugger

These and so many more, human lives caught in the crossfire of love and hate,

we hold them before your healing mercy:

 

God of love and hope,

we pray for our society, our city, our neighbourhoods,

and for ourselves as your ambassadors of love

Make us ministers of reconciliation with a passion for peacemaking

Fill us with compassion for the poor, the hungry, the lonely

Like Jesus gives us eyes to see Zacchaeus hiding in shame;

courage to ask the name of violent terrified Legion;

to stand between the vulnerable victim and those holding the stones;

to touch with tender risk those who like the leper are feared and excluded;

to see the best in the Samaritan and go do likewise –

to open our arms in welcome like the prodigal father

to take our loaves and fishes and bless them to the use of others,

and so to be perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect;

whose sunlight love gives life to all within its radiance,

whose rain of mercy falls with life giving refreshment,

who reaches out with a love that warms and waters,

embraces, holds and heals a broken world,

and all this, in Jesus' name and in the power of the Spirit,

Amen.

Comments

[Tony]

Would be OK for me to adapt the news section and use this myself? Obviously, I wouldn't publish it :)

[Craig]

Are you a week ahead in Scotland on the lectionary readings or is it fortuitous that this was your text for prayer last week, and may i adapt these prayers myself for this coming Sunday

[Jim Gordon]

Hi Tony and Craig - by all means, adapt and use. I wrote it for praying and am happy for it to be used as a help towards binding the wide earth about the feet of God by the gold chains of prayer, to adapt Tennyson. No lectionary connection Craig - one of a series of sermons I'm having the privilege of sharing in one of our churches.

[chris]

Thank you so much for posting this - may I also copy and use? I'd love to have been there to hear you pray it.

[Jim Gordon]

Hi Chris - by all means use it and may it be for blessing.