Pastoral Prayer for Advent 2, December 6, 2020 

Lord we have lit the second candle of the advent wreath on our journey towards the manger. It’s a difficult journey this year God, our normal markers look different. We don’t feel the stress to fit everything in but we feel different stresses. We feel the grief of a nation and world; for our friends and family who have lost spouses, parents, and siblings to COVID or to other causes but cannot grieve and honor them in ways that are helpful. We feel the despair of those who have lost jobs or struggle with bills. We feel the exhaustion of young families who juggle full-time work and virtual school. We feel all the things God, and they seem to be heavy all the time. 

Help us to realize that the weight of what we feel is because we were built to be compassionate, we were built to be healers and repairers. Help us O God to feel not only the weight of despair, but to find the opportunity in the midst of the heaviness. Use what we feel to propel us to actions that bring hope and healing. Indeed, you sent your Son into our world to teach us how to do that; how to do good and prioritize good; a promise we heard echoed in our gospel today. You sent your son as the ultimate servant of light and love, and it is towards his arrival that we wait, patiently and impatiently, in anticipation and in desperation, we wait. 

We wait because we know that the kind of life he lived and led and modeled for us is the kind of life that will truly bring the healing and peace and justice that God wanted for our world, that we so desperately need. We wait, because we too seek to be servants of light and love. Guide our hands to work towards bringing light to places of darkness. Form our words, both written and typed, texted, or tweeted to be words that speak in respect; words that encourage, uplift, and educate. As we seek to be servants of light and love, the tools we have to work with are our words and our work; our actions and our inactions, our willingness to hope and the one in whom we put our hope in. Give us courage to use the tools we have, and all the feelings we have, to be a part of the solution to all the challenges we see. Thank you for calling us to partner with you in the healing of our world and may we rise to the opportunity. In the name of the one whose birth we await, Amen. 

Rev. Darcy Crain