leadinginworship

Prayer for this warring world

God of angel armies, hear our prayer

for your beloved world.

Cast out the demon of bomb dropping.

Cast out the demon of rocket hurling.

Cast out the demon of bullet shooting.

Cast out the demon of hostage holding.

Cast out the demon of civilian persecuting.

Cast out the demon of ceasefire breaking.

Cast out the demon of perpetual despairing,

that would tell us there is no way to peace.

 

God, you are an impossibility specialist.

Send down angels to melt frozen hearts.

Send down angels to protect civilians.

Send down angels to destroy weapons.

Send down angels to negotiate treaties that last.

Send down angels to gather a scattered people.

Send down angels to heal a broken nation.

Send down angels with good news of great joy

which shall be for all people,

all people who live in this warring world.

 

Longest night prayer

There are good years and bad years,
and then there are years from hell.
Hear our prayer O God, for all who are tortured by war.
You know the anguished cries,
and the hearts that have turned to stone.
These are people who will die unless you save them.
We need a Saviour for those who sit in the shadow of death:
for children who have lost their parents,
and have no one to take care of them;
for teenagers forced to fight,
and who can’t imagine a normal life;
for all who have killed and have witnessed the killing;
for all who are fleeing the violence
and looking for a place of refuge;
for parents who have no choices
and see their children starve;
for seniors who cannot believe the losses they have seen.
God, you know the particular pain of each one,
the stories of death and sexual assault,
the stories of homes and homelands destroyed.
You gather our stories in your arms,
and in this longest night, you hold them and us.
Hope shines like an infinitely distant star,
like a star over Bethlehem,
shining over towering concrete walls
and machine gun battlements.
What we need is angels with good news of peace on earth,
lighting the sky of our lives, offering relief.
On this longest night, in the mystery of your love,
steal into our world again.
Be born again in hearts that work for peace,
who will find a way through the chaos that is war.
By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
and we trust that you will guide our feet
into the way of peace.
This is our prayer, may it be so.

Advent Peace Prayer for Marriages

Mary and Joseph were making an uneasy journey in advent.
Hugely pregnant, and with bills to pay,
they were barely through a conflict that nearly divided them.
God of grace, hear our advent prayer
for people whose marriages are in trouble.
Thank you for romantic love, and the rush of desire:
help couples who feel empty when that fades or disappears,
show them that love is deeper than romance.
Thank you for harmony and partnership:
help couples that have lost their way,
who wallow in conflict rather than pulling through to the other side.
Thank you for lovers who honour and delight:
help couples whose lovemaking has become selfish
and totally devoid of tenderness.
Thank you for unity of purpose and shared pursuits:
help couples who have grown apart
and want different things from life.
Thank you for partners who cherish each other as companions:
help couples who live with walls between them
and have forgotten how to enjoy each other’s company.
Thank you for the sacred gift of intimacy:
help us when we idolize marriage and forget
that friendship in community is the core of Christian life.
Jesus, be with all who are re-learning how to be together
as they walk the long marriage road.
Holy Spirit, you know when there is hope for a marriage
and when partners cannot rally.
Give insight, especially when safety has been shattered by violence.
Help us as a community to support married people,
and to offer unconditional love to everyone,
even when we are broken.

Advent Peace Prayer for Newborn Babies

God our Creator, Ancient of Days,
even as we give thanks for Jesus’ birth,
you behold it happening.
You are beyond time.
You are always sending an angel to Mary,
to Joseph, to the shepherds,
you are always coming again to us,
with good news of great joy
which shall be to all people.
Hear our prayer of thanks
for all you have done, are doing, will do
to save us from our sins.
Thank you for hope that shines out
in the eyes of every newborn child,
regardless of the circumstances of their birth.
Babies born to unwed mothers,
babies born on the road, or in refugee camps,
babies born without a savings plan,
babies arriving needing to nurtured.
You come to us in the least of these.
The cry of the newborn is your cry.
Open our eyes to see you,
and our arms to embrace you.
Open our ears to hear your tiny voice
and our wallets to support you.
Remind us that we were the newborn once.
This Christmas, as we adore Jesus in the manger,
Christ is born again in our hearts, who knows how,
wherever a child is welcomed,
wherever a baby is held.
Emmanuel, God with us, world without end, Amen.

Advent Peace Prayer for our Gun-filled World

God did you know when you gave us creativity
that we would use it to create a tool to kill each other
with the tiniest movement of our finger?
Around our world, bullets are sown into gun chambers
and we reap destruction, life after life mowed down in blood.
Hear our prayer for all who will hold a gun today:
the soldier on the battlefield,
the lone gunman planning a massacre,
the gang member hunting a rival,
the raging husband threatening a family,
the depressed person wanting to end it all,
the playing children who open a drawer
they’ve been told not to open.
Hear our prayer for those who will die today from bullet wounds,
may they rest in peace,
and for all who will be maimed and scarred in body and spirit,
and for all who grieve, and for all who live in fear.
And we pray for those who by shooting someone
will turn their own heart to stone.
You know Lord, that this is a systemic problem:
we live in a gun culture, where shooting is glorified,
and fortunes are made from the production and trafficking of guns.
Today we pray for an advent miracle,
that you would open our eyes to a way forward
against powers and principalities that feed on bloodshed.
Show us a way that politicians and lawmakers and average people
can work together to make a safer society,
a society free from gun violence.

Advent Peace Prayer for the Fish We Will Never See

Lord, you know we give thanks for fish often enough,
the ones on plates on our table, served up hot and tasty.
Today we say a prayer for the fish we will never see,
the ones who live in the streams by our home,
the ones who swim up rivers to great lakes,
and the fish in the wide and salty ocean.
Swimming in the dim light they inhabit a wilderness
of water, theirs from the beginning of time.
We see only the edges, the surfaces.
Hear our prayer for the mighty lake sturgeon,
and for the carp, the bass, the silver chub.
We pray for the salmon we will never eat,
and the sunfish, and the minnow.
We pray for sharks and clownfish,
for mackerel, pickerel, perch.
We are connected with all these by our drains,
by our sewers, by the effluent pipes of our factories.
Our plastic floats on their home,
our microbeads penetrate their flesh,
and their gills breathe water tainted by our chemicals.
You sent us a Saviour who was Living Water.
The water of life that sustains
our brothers and sisters the fish,
is part of our own flesh and blood.
We are all creatures, help us live in peace.
Give wisdom to scientists who study fish,
and bureaucrats who make policies that affect them.
Give us eyes to see what we cannot see,
and a heart to care for all who live in the deep.

Advent Peace Prayer for our So Smart World

Thank you God for giving us
minds that think and ideas that soar.
Thank you for giving us language and writing,
and prosperity that enables education for many.
Thank you for brilliant inventors who created
technological marvels; radio waves radiating,
microscopes magnifying, computers computing.
Thank you that we have even created artificial intelligence
and robots that do work for us and with us.
Today we pray for good things gone bad;
for social media tools that isolate us from our neighbour,
for algorithms that misinform us about our world,
for face-recognition surveillance that curtail freedoms,
and for weapons that can track and kill half a world away.
In our smartness, we have created killing robots,
and now the world is poised on the new frontier
of autonomous weapons.
Hear our prayer this advent season.
Give scientists insight and politicians wisdom
as they negotiate treaties for weapons
we have only begun to imagine.
We feel so smart, but we need the help
of angels with a message of peace on earth.
Let their song ring out this year,
a global anthem for an end to war, against all odds.
You plant that song in each of us,
and in the hearts of every child born this Christmas, Amen.

White Settler Advent Peace Prayer

Creator God
thank you for indigenous and Inuit communities,
strong after centuries of persecution.
Families with deep bonds of love,
wise with elders, rich in culture, lovers of the land,
speaking with powerful voices that cannot be silenced.

God of justice, God of love,
hear our prayer of lament for crimes committed:
for land taken, for children stolen.
for laws that hobbled culture,
for languages legislated out of existence,
for racist policies of every kind
that produced a wicked harvest of poverty.
You know how this toxic power dynamic
has warped the minds of oppressors
and left deep and lasting scars in the oppressed.
We live in uneasy times,
where hatred and prejudice are rampant,
and important decisions are being made
about the occupied  traditional territories
where we live together.

Into this world, send the Prince of Peace,
who managed to balance justice and love
through his death on the cross.
Christ is the one who will help us find the way,
giving us ears to hear every voice,
and mouths to speak repentance,
and eyes to see paths we should walk,
and hands that reach out in friendship,
and shoulders willing to take on the burden
of our shared past.
From this place of brokenness give all of us
a vision of the future, peace-bright,
where children of every colour
have a place to stand, and a place to grow.

A prayer about terror (on the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre)

God of the afflicted:
On this anniversary of the Montreal massacre
where a man who declared feminists his enemy
opened fire in a school,
killing fourteen, wounding fourteen,
on this day we turn to you.
We pray for healing for all affected by acts of terror.
Terror from a bomb, or a gun,
or a knife, or a rope, or a body,
terror from any force poised for cruelty.
You know what happened next.
Be with all who are picking up,
with tears, the pieces of their lives,
painstakingly living to see another day,
and another, and another,
becoming survivors.
Be with them in the fear
that haunts them daily
and pursues them in their dreams.
Be with them in their anger,
which fuels their drive for justice,
and their certainty
that this must not happen again.
And yet it happens to another,
and another, and another.
Almighty God, where are you?
Jesus, do you see our suffering?
Holy Spirit, where is your relief?
God of the terror-stricken,
God of the terror-survivors,
God of the terror-fighters,
God of all who work for peace,
we pray to you today:
deliver us from evil.

Peace Prayer for Those Living with HIV/AIDS

Immanuel, thank you for being with us in our HIV/AIDS filled world.
We pray expecting your presence among us!
Be with all who live with the effects of this disease.
Be with those who wait to die because they have no access to medication.
Be with children who received HIV as a legacy from their parents.
Be with orphans and families who have lost loved ones.
Be with countries who have millions of citizens with HIV/AIDS.
Be with all who are stigmatized and ignored because they have this virus.
Be with researchers and scientists who work to find a cure.
Be with corporate executives who control access to affordable medications.
Be with healthcare workers and caregivers who comfort and encourage.
Be with all who have lost hope because of HIV/AIDS.
Forgive us when we don’t give a thought to this disease
because it does not personally affect us.
Help us see your face in the thirty-six million people
who live with this disease.
Lord, we long to hear the angel's song of peace:
empower people of good will to work
for justice and healing for all
who suffer from HIV/AIDS.  Amen.

A Settler Prayer for Peace

Creator God
hear our prayer for settlers everywhere,
for people living on land stolen
and traded unfairly from indigenous peoples.
You know our cruelties,
our disregard for cultures and histories,
our cavalier dismissal of treaty rights,
our personal prejudices, our institutional racism.
We are part of a colonial system so insidious,
those who benefit don’t even see it, even when it’s in front of our faces.

You are a God who names, a God who hears.
You know the name of every missing and murdered indigenous woman.
You heard the cries of every child in every residential school.
You know the original names of every landmark,
in languages that no one living knows.
You hear the earth groaning as it is torn and broken,
its holy balance polluted and poisoned.
Send us a chinook peace to melt our permafrosted hearts,
a Great Spirit of hope that blows through our land,
rearranging landscapes, upsetting tables where money is counted.
A wind that changes our hearts and gives us courage
to seek justice, love kindness
and walk humbly together,
settler and First Nations, Inuit and Metis,
for we are all God's children.

An everlasting light: Christmas Eve prayer for Bethlehem

God of grace, today we pray for peace for the city of Bethlehem.
It has had more than its share of conflict,
as it's changed from a sleepy little town to a bustling city
that is visited by millions each year.
Lord, you know the walls that separate people in Bethlehem;
walls of concrete, walls of prejudice, walls of hatred,
walls between Israeli and Palestinian,

walls between Jew and Christian and Muslim,
walls between cultures and languages.
We can hardly think of another place on earth
with such high walls and such deep hostility.
Yet this is where you were born:
your everlasting light still shines in those dark streets.
Thank you that your light shines
in the goodwill of people who do not return evil for evil,
it shines in the patience of people who wait for a better future,
it shines in the creativity of people who make plans for peace,
even as powers and principalities make plans for war.
Your hope shines in refugee camps, in narrow city streets,
and hope shines in churches around the world
who pray tonight for peace in Bethlehem.
Bulldozers and tanks can’t crush that hope.
Laws and regulations can’t stifle that hope.
Blockades and barricades can’t stop that hope.
Bombs and guns can’t blow it up.
Tonight the eyes of all the world turn to Manger Square,
as we remember the birth of the Prince of peace.
“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of the heavens.
No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin,
where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.
O holy child of Bethlehem! Descend to us we pray;
cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels, the great glad tidings tell,
oh come to us, abide with us, our Lord Immanuel.” 
Amen.

[the last eight lines are by Philips Brooks, "O Little Town of Bethlehem".
He wrote this hymn” in 1867 as he reflected on his visit to Manger Square in Bethlehem.]

What Child is This? Advent Peace Prayer for Children

What child is this?

This hungry child, this child with AIDS,

this child afraid of bombs and soldiers,

this child too poor to go to school,

this child from a refugee camp,

this child abused and neglected,

this child crying and uncomforted.

What child is this?

This child is not a statistic,

this child is not collateral damage,

this child is not a mistake,

this child is not the enemy.

What child is this?

This is a child of God,

this is a Christ child,

this is our child.

Lord Jesus, born a child and yet a king,

you remind us that each baby

is a holy infant, tender and mild.

We say a prayer for all the dear children in your tender care,

all the children in the world.

In a world where so many do not sleep in heavenly peace,

empower us to be your peacemakers.

Thank you for the gift of each baby, each child of hope.

Advent prayer for peace in Afghanistan

As we wait for the anniversary of your birth, Lord Jesus,

we are waiting for peace in Afghanistan.

We have created a war that goes on and on;

military operations come and go,

bombs get dropped or planted,

hospitals fill up and empty,

graveyards in Afghanistan and around the world

are visited by those who mourn.

And we have not found peace.

Saviour, where is your relief?

We need your strength and consolation.

We need release from fear and sin.

We require a rest from war.

And so today we ask for deliverance.

Deliver us from a mindset that takes war for granted,

that is unaffected by casualty figures,

that gives up hope for an end to conflict.

Deliver us from corporations that make billions

selling arms and armaments to countries at war,

profiteers who would like to see this war go on and on.

We pray for Afghan civilians,

who have endured too many foreign occupations.

We pray for Taliban fighters,

who believe in the cause for which they risk their lives.

We pray for foreign troops,

who also believe in the cause for which they risk their lives.

We pray for political and military leaders,

for religious leaders and diplomats on every side.

Open every heart to a longing for peace,

not just for themselves, but for their enemy.

Taliban, American, Canadian, all nations in Afghanistan

holding the bodies of their dead,

weeping together and saying, “Enough.”

Afghani people standing up to govern themselves,

providing justice for men and women.

This vision of peace is monumental and seemingly impossible,

but we know that you are the Prince of Peace,

and we ask for this gift in your name.  Amen.

HIV/AIDS Advent Peace Prayer

Dear God, you proclaimed your presence to Mary and Joseph

and walked with them to Bethlehem.

This advent, we listen for your voice;

we ask you to walk with us in our HIV/AIDS filled world.

We pray expecting your presence among us!

Be with all who live with the effects of this disease.

Be with those who wait to die because they have no access to medication.

Be with children who received HIV as a legacy from their parents.

Be with orphans and families who have lost loved ones.

Be with countries who have millions of citizens with HIV/AIDS.

Be with all who are stigmatized and ignored because they have this virus.

Be with politicians and corporate executives who control access to affordable medications.

Be with researchers and scientists who work to find a cure.

Be with healthcare workers and caregivers who comfort and encourage.

Be with all who have lost hope because of HIV/AIDS.

Lord, we hear the angel's song of peace!

Fill the hearts of people around the world with good will

so that together we can work for justice and healing

for all who suffer from HIV/AIDS.  Amen.

Advent Prayer for People Living with Violence

At this time of year as we sing “Silent night”

with its echoes of calm and heavenly peace,

we say a prayer for all who live in homes

where peace is absent.

We pray for children who live with fear,

whose homes are not a place of safety,

who live with beatings, both physical and verbal.

We pray for seniors and other vulnerable people

whose caregivers do not care

as they are neglected or degraded.

We pray for all who are emotionally abused,

and who are not loved, honoured and cherished.

We pray for women who have had to flee their homes

or are afraid to flee their homes.

We pray for women and men who have been sexually violated,

and who are haunted by terrible memories

and a continual fear of violation.

May love’s pure light this season empower us

to come to the aid of your hurting people.

We join together to sing Alleluia and thank you

for your grace that transforms our world.

In the name of the Holy Infant,

Christ our Saviour, Amen.

Prayer to the Prince of Peace

Perfect love casts our fear

and so today we pray for your spirit of love on our world.

Cast out the shooting of bullets into people's bodies.

Cast out the explosion of bombs in crowded places.

Cast out the desperation that leads people to terrorist acts.

Cast out the making of walls that divide and imprison us.

Cast out the prejudice against people of a certain race or culture.

Cast out the political structures that perpetuate violence.

Cast out the hatred that produces fear.

Send down the courage to reach out in peace.

Send down the resolution to not return evil for evil.

Send down the creativity to find peaceful political solutions.

Send down the wisdom that politicians and diplomats need.

Send down the commitment to work together to end terrorism.

Send down the power of nonviolence to create change.

Send down the comfort and justice that victims need.

Send down the love that will end our fear.

We ask these things in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, Amen.

Good Tidings Advent Peace Prayer

Dear God: 

The newspaper brings nothing new

only an old, old story of war—

more bombing, more shooting, more bloodshed.

One more family wailing a funeral song.

Against the backdrop of brutal images,

we hear the old, old story of an angel with good news,

who brought good tidings of great joy for all people.

Angel of Bethlehem, we long to hear your song again this day.

We want good tidings for countries in crisis.

We want good tidings for people who long to govern themselves.

We want good tidings for soldiers caught in webs of violence.

We want good tidings for all who grieve, and who see no end to grieving.

We want good tidings for terrorists whose actions spread fear and anguish.

We want good tidings for ordinary people who long to live in peace.

We want good tidings for children, who long to inherit a country

where peace has blossomed.

Jesus, our Saviour,

you escaped Herod’s best-laid plans.

May your Spirit of peace be born again this year

in the hearts of all who work for peace.  Amen.