God of creation, we are grateful for your Word, the

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Prayers of the People for Sunday, 9/11/16, based on Jeremiah 31:31-34 Community Church of Vero Beach, Rev. Dr. Casey G. Baggott

God of creation, we are grateful for your Word, the Dabar Adonai – your vital spirit that moves among us still, creating, bringing us this new day, every chance, each beginning. Today we have brought to you an offering from the abundance that is ours. Receive our offering and let it help to secure new beginnings for others, wherever there is need for fresh hope and fresh starts. Receive as well, on this fifteenth anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, our thoughtful, mournful, and hopeful remembrances. Our world still reels with violence and unrest and teeters toward terrorism. Heal all the anger, we pray, that promotes such violence and unrest. Teach every heart the sort of love that your Son demonstrated, as the only sure way to change this world. And let the promise of peace finally be realized among nations, among peoples, within families, and even within our own troubled souls. When life’s uncertainties tempt us to cling for security to projects, purposes, and practices of human design, help us remember that no earthly authority may make a claim to permanence which belongs to you, alone, O God. Let us not confuse the temporary good we create for the permanent truth you offer. Help us be willing to let all perishable things pass away, as time sweeps on, with the assurance that you are the imperishable constant that will see us through. Make us then, not reluctant witnesses to the inevitable cycles of life and faith, but their awed and grateful observers. Help us to welcome the new things you are about to do among us. Keep us watching with hopeful anticipation as the cracks appear in old, outworn ideas and structures. Remind us that perhaps it will be through those very cracks that your life-renewing spirit may find room to bubble up and bring the restoration we crave. And allow us, we pray, O God, to be willing to let our own lives be periodically transformed, reformed, and renewed, as well. Write your covenant of grace boldly and lovingly across our imperfect hearts – erasing records of our wrongs, claiming us for your own, shaping us to your purposes, drawing us ever nearer to you. Help us to be, O God, Christ’s people -- people of pliable minds and hearts who follow his call to meet new challenges, to love new people, to care with new depth, to learn new duties, to strive for greater good. Let your vital, creative, energizing spirit dwell within us always, to shape us and move us, dispelling our fears and granting us hope for all we cannot yet see or know, enabling us to trust you, as Christ did, for the future you oversee. We pray these things in Jesus’ name, as we use his words, saying together: The Lord’s Prayer.