Monday, March 23, 2015

Lenten Prayer as CtK #trust #lent2015

Prayer:
Gracious Lord,
Grant us your patience and mercy as we learn to trust you. Help us to see, understand, and share the life that springs forth from your will, and to seek this life, forsaking all else. Give to us the fellowship that can only come from dependence on you. Amen.

Thought:
In God We Trust. The words on our U.S. currency almost get this absolutely correct. My only quibble is that the phrase should be, In god We Trust. Do you notice the slight difference? If we make God lowercase, and change the implied meaning from an outside deity (whether Christian or otherwise) into a generic, human made object of service and desire, then our god and the thing we most put our trust in, money, coincide. Since I can't actually change what's printed on money, I'll just say that our currency is a work of fiction, not fact.

We don't often think about trust, and lack of it as being the impetus of our sin and the death and destruction that it inflicts on our world, but distrust, is at the heart of all our sin. What we don't trust in, is God, and that God, at least as the creator and redeemer of all things has been handed down to us, is very good at managing creation and our lives. Sin leads us astray, so that we take the will of God with a grain of salt, but think that our ways of doing things, are what need to be done. We don't trust that God will provide and so we hoard. We don't trust that God wants peace, so we war. We don't trust that God really is forgiving and merciful, so we hang on to our bitterness and hatred toward others. We don't trust God in the bodies God gave to us, so we dress ourselves up, often trusting that the better we look, the better we are.

The power of sin grips us strongly, and tricks us into trusting ourselves rather than the goodness and mercy of God. To trust in God, is something that is learned, often painfully, and not very well, and yet God continues to teach us, and use us to teach others. Our baptismal rite helps us remember this, as it tells parents and sponsors:
you are ENTRUSTED with responsibilities: to with this person among God's faithful people, bring them to the word of God and the holy supper, teach them the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, place in their hands the holy scriptures, and nurture them in faith and prayer, so that your children may LEARN to trust God, (notice trust comes first!) proclaim Christ through word and deed, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace.

About Lenten Prayer as CtK:
During Lent, I am inviting all of you at Christ the King, and anyone who would be willing to join us, to engage in praying together, seeking to hear God and be guided by Christ's life in our life together. To guide these prayers, I will be posting pictures centered around a word for the day. This comes from the facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/LENTPHOTOADAY. Please feel free to join me in posting pictures and thoughts to your social media accounts or to the comments of this blog.

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