1st Quarter - Year A- Issue of WorshipAid
December, January and February (2001-2002)

Prayers for December 9, 2001

2nd Sunday of Advent

Call to Worship (Based on Matthew 3:3)

Leader: The voice of one crying in the wilderness:

People: Prepare the way of the Lord,

Leader: Make God's paths straight.

All: Because this is the Lord's Day, the day of our Lord's resurrection, may we rejoice and be glad that God is bringing forth a kingdom of peace and justice.

Prayer of Confession

Creator God, you have given us a beautiful and peaceful world, but we have polluted and disrupted it by our pursuits of greedy profit and wasteful life style. You have sent us prophets to call us back to your peaceable kingdom, but we have scorned and persecuted them, from the days of Amos and Jeremiah to those of Martin Luther King, Jr. When we have been wronged, we too often have reacted in blind rage, as if violence and hatred could solve our problems. Forgive us for our part in the malaise of our times, and in forgetting that with the coming of your Son you have inaugurated a new age. In the silence of this moment help us to renew our broken relationships and cast out all harmful thoughts that stand in the way of our becoming instruments of and witnesses to your peaceable kingdom: (Silent prayer)

This we ask in the name of your Son, the Prince of Peace, Amen.

Responsive Pastoral Prayer (Based on Isaiah 11:6-9)

People: The wolf shall live with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.

Leader: Gracious God, you would call us into Your peaceable kingdom. Bring us up short in our pursuit of power and prestige, that we might see the errors of our ways and follow more closely the One called the Lamb of God.

People: The calf and the lion and the fatling shall live together, and a little child shall lead them.

Leader: Loving God, your Son declared that we must become like little children in order to enter into your kingdom. We thank you for the gift of our children who still serve as examples and hope.

People: O God, our strength and shield, we have made a world in which we must warn our children against the kindness of strangers, a dangerous world in which children and their mothers are often the first victims of terror and violence.

Leader: Grant us the wisdom and the courage to work for a better world, one in which the children of all nations and creeds, "red and yellow, black and white," are precious not only in Jesus' sight, but in the sight of all men and women.