Beautiful words of a prayer written by my friend and colleague Rev. Michael Livingston and delivered in worship Sunday.
O God our God, like the disciples after that glorious morning of rebirth we have…
Post resurrection blues: the shouting is over, so what now? We’re clueless, locked in our routines, without energy or direction, keeping our heads down, settling for apathy, witnesses to appalling hatred and injustice, curiosity, wonder dimmed when if we would only reach out and touch an-other the universes would fall away and reveal heaven here among us in the God like faces of everyone we see and spirit filled presence of the spaces we occupy together.
Post resurrection blindness, if something has changed we are not sure what it is, we are who we were, passions muted, the past our personal and communal prison, there are no bars yet we are not free, trapped by our prejudices, our fears, our false confidence in what is temporal, the precision of our correctness, when if we would only allow ourselves to be touched by even an-other the scales would fall from our eyes and the rich palette of our common humanity would resound in the languages cultures religions ways of being and believing that are our collective gift to one another and the gift God, your, creation keeps giving.
Post resurrection hunger: there must be more, how to find it, how to catch it, to fill our nets with satisfaction, more—the euphoria of abundance, that is the calling fulfilled by tending sheep, by tenderness to others, by breaking bread and eating fish with the stranger whose name is Jesus. He catches all the families of the earth and the net is not broken.
Jesus, of the resurrection; stop us in our tracks. Teach us to fish, to trust, to forgive, to seek justice, to recognize your grace, to love, to live the prayer you taught us to pray:
Our father…