0306_05
March 6, 2005 – 4th Sunday in Lent
Revised Common Lectionary Readings
1 Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 23
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41
One Thing I Know
*Call to Worship
God is mystery and awe,
God is Spirit and truth,
God is grand creator and holy Christ.
The one moment of love,
the one gift of healing,
the one act of grace,
the one holding to hope,
and by this we know
that God is with us.
*Prayer of Invocation
Be our God now –
creator, Christ and Holy Spirit.
Touch the place that you once touched in us
and remind us again of the gift
of your presence with us and within us.
Be real to us in this moment,
that we may be gathered up in love. Amen.
*Prayer of Confession
There are times, O God,
when we forget we ever knew you.
We enter an empty space
or a dark night of the soul,
and you seem absent from us.
We forget the past experiences of your love
and feel that you have left us.
Our hearts are filled with doubt
and the future looks lonely
as we grapple with our lives
and their questions and traumas.
Sometimes it is as if our lives
sit alone in the universe,
and we cannot find our way back to you
and to the care of others.
Silent reflection.
Come, Holy Spirit, come.
Remind us of your grace, loving Jesus,
and forgive us when we choose to live
distant from you.
If we are given words of hope by others,
stories of their life with you
that have transformed them,
but we do not trust this good news
or discourage them,
or if we push away small gifts
that you offer to us
because we insist on a larger miracle –
Come, Holy Spirit, come.
Remind us of your grace, loving Jesus,
and forgive us when we choose to live
distant from you. Return us to faith
and enlarge our hope, O God. Amen.
*Words of Assurance
Our God is the God who seeks us out,
who searches for the lost
and carries us toward grace.
Even in our feebleness of faith,
we are forgiven and brought home to God.
Amen.
*Prayer of Thanksgiving
We give thanks to you, O God,
for the miracles small and large
that appear like sudden flowers
on the pathways of life.
We thank you for humble people
who hold open to great possibilities
and who refuse to have their joy dimmed
by cynics and those whose power is threatened.
Thanks be to you, O God,
for the wonder of your healing love. Amen.
*Stewardship Thought
If we all shared our experience of our faith journeys, we would probably find that most of us would have all sorts of puzzling questions and experiences as we have lived that journey. However, most of us could say, “But one thing I know . . . ,” and we could recount a story or a moment when God was present in our lives in some transforming way. It may not mesh with all sorts of other parts of our story, but on this our faith rests. Often our faith is not neat, it is complex and has mystery lying within it, but there is embedded in it a testimony from which we cannot move. It would be interesting to invite each member of the congregation to share that one story if it exists for them – often we have not really done that for each other because there are other more puzzling things that lie around it.
*Offertory Sentence
Let us bring our gifts, however humble,
to the one who gives us all that we have.
*Offertory Prayer
We bring these gifts in faith, living God.
We pray that you will take them
for adding to the miracles of kindness
that you show to us and to the world. Amen.
*Prayer of Intercession
Dear God, bearer of miraculous life,
we know that there are people
in numbers too great to count
who wait each day for their lives to be changed.
They wait for gifts of healing,
or even basic health care,
which would be like a miracle in their lives.
They wait for enough food to feed their children,
or even a day when they could enjoy the food
that we take for granted.
They wait for an end to violence and abuse,
for the chance
that they might wake up without fear.
They wait for opportunities in life
that would make each day a delight in growing
rather than endless labor.
Silent reflection.
We pray for all these people, O God,
and for others whose voices are rarely heard.
The people pray.
And now we pray for ourselves, O God.
Create in us many miracles, O God.
Heal us from apathy and indifference,
and from cynicism and refusals to believe
that we could be part of just changes.
Create in us many miracles, O God.
Raise up in us prophetic witnesses to your love,
and those who bring testimonies
to the grandeur of your gifts.
Create in us many miracles, O God,
that we ourselves may see and believe in
the hope of your reign. Amen.
*Commissioning
Let us go out from this place
and tell the people what God has done for us.
*Benediction
And may the miracles of God
spread over the world
in gifts of faith, endurance, shared love,
healing, and forgiveness,
ringing out the wonder of transforming
possibilities for all people. Amen.