A New Tool!

I am so excited to be working with a new amp for Sunday morning worship. This little VOX provides a nice tone and a volume that won't make the front of house engineer loose their mind!

Elegant Design

Worship leading this week at Perkins School of Youth Ministry

An Advent Prayer Mindful of Sandy Hook Elementary School

Pastoral Prayer for Advent III

God, we gather again today to worship you in the midst of another national tragedy. We turn our eyes to the hills, asking once again, from where does our help come? 

We are rightly filled with other questions...

When will your peaceable kingdom come, oh God?

Why do these tragedies continue to occur, each one seemingly worse than the one before?

Why must there be so much suffering in the world?

Where are you?

What does it mean for the Prince of Peace to be born into this world which is filled at times with such horrible violence?

God, in the midst of this time of intense grief, help us to not settle for easy answers, simple platitudes, or vague conversation.

Help us God, strengthen us, and remind us that the light shines in the darkness and that the darkness can never overcome it. Let us seek to live out your love in the world.

Holy Spirit, transform our hearts from the ways of violence to the path of peace. Transform each of us into islands, into small oasis’s of peace, joy and contentment, in the midst of a world that desperately needs us to be peacemakers, just as Jesus calls us to be.

Holy Spirit, help our nation to have the conversations we must have to reduce these senseless acts of violence.

Jesus, help us to proclaim with you through our words and through our lives that goodness is stronger than evil, that love is stronger than hate, that light is stronger than darkness, that life is stronger than death.

Remind us God, when we forget, the words of the prophet Isaiah, “surely it is God who saves us.”

In this season filled with joy and yet also sadness we hold in the light of God’s love and grace those we name in silent prayer in our hearts...

moment of silence....

We also lift to you, oh God, those connected with the suffering in Newtown....

insert other intercessions here followed by the Lord’s Prayer

Adventures in Missing the Point...

I'm pretty sure this is not what God had in mind with the whole Incarnation thing...