Hidden God,
wherever you are
in your own kind of space,
we watch and
wait for you
to startle us to wakeful newness
in this Advent season.
Come and thrust into us
the spirit of daring and courage
to make flesh on earth
a bit of the
kingdom of heaven.
Come to open the inns
of our minds and hearts
to the miracles of your compassion
and purpose
as Jesus demonstrated them.
Come and make your own transforming way
in the desert of our confusion
and wilderness of me and mine,
so we may
walk with Jesus the hard way
of justice, mercy, and peace among the people of earth.
Come and lift up the valleys
of our discouragement and doubt and denial,
and make level the mountains of our
greed and pride,
so we may see
your glory revealed once more
in us and in all our brothers and sisters,
from the shepherd least to the magi lofty.
Come and fulfill through us Mary's
vision
of mercy stretching to all generations,
of the proud scattered, the powerful
punctured,
of the rich
emptied and the poor filled,
and our lives magnifying your grace.
Come lace our songs, our shopping, our celebrations
with your mystery and strange magnificence,
and let us sense it in the small,
strange stirrings
of the earth
and of our hearts, now and always.
Amen.
Excerpts from MY HEART IN MY MOUTH: PRAYERS FOR OUR LIVES by Ted Loder. Copyright (c) 2000 by Ted Loder. Reprinted by permission of Innisfree Press.
Ted 's imaginative leadership --- described as a breath of fresh air --- led the First United Methodist Church of Germantown (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania in a refreshing openness to hard questions, to change, and to justice for almost 40 years.