Sunday Prayer – 8/3/2014

Sunday Prayer – Based on Job

(A Prayer of Confession)

Good and gracious God,

We all love you.
Only,
it would seem,
that we don’t love the same you.
The you we love,
is the you we have created.

We love discovering that you
are much like us –
after all we are created in your image,
right?

We love those moments
when when a piece of scripture
confirms the things we long suspected
and gives us divine permission
to hold on to
biases, judgement and even damnation.

Unexpected God,

break into the “realities”
we have created.
Confirm within us
the thing that our spirits
already know –
that you are too big to be contained
in some limited earthly conceptualization.
Invite us to experience
the breadth and depth of you
in a way we have never felt secure
in exploring before.
Direct us toward a faith
that is not dependent upon certainty –
a faith that is fascinated with
the questions –
a faith that gains energy and strength
in a uncertainty
that points to the existence
of something bigger
than we
could ever fully understand.

May we find humility
in that knowledge.

May it gut our overstated piousness
to its core
and created in us
a God-shaped space
that seeks out
only the reality
of you –

a reality
founded in,
nurtured by,
reliant upon,
enlivened with

love.

Teach us to make love
our default position.
And in that God-shaped space,
may we find
an unending desire
to envelope the world
and all the people in it
with a grace and love
that it has never known before.

Amen.

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