Meditation/prayer Lectionary B 23rd Sunday after Pentecost after Mk 10:46-52

Eternal spirit

Source of all wisdom and knowledge, the One who guides our lives and can bring us peace in the midst of division,

We come to you this day unsettled and afraid.  Hearing the news of more shootings and bombings, we wonder at the world that is changing around us.  We your people of love and peace are a gathering of those who hope for good and not evil to reign on the earth.  Outbreaks of violence around the world deeply trouble us. We become unable to grasp the toll on our cities, our communities, and our lives.  The sense of sadness and grief overpowers us. We are paralyzed into helplessness.

And yet we see the work of your Son, who was there with those who most needed him.  His listeners would so often push aside those who were most in need, saying, “be silent,” or “don’t bother the Master.”  But your Spirit persisted and you gracious Son stopped their arguments and their pettiness, and healed those who came forward to Him.  He healed the leper.  He stopped the bleeding of the woman who touched his robe.  He healed the blindness of Bartimaeus who could not see.  Overriding the selfishness of his day, your Son came to heal and bring together the wounds of our world.

We likewise come to you this day in need of your healing presence.  Where we are having trouble seeing, bring us sight.  Where he can no longer hear the fear in each other’s voices, restore our ability to listen to one another.  Help us to protect ourselves from harm but to touch the lives of those around us in need.

We pray especially for those directly affected by the recent violence.  The violence of our time with its divisive rhetoric and actions has pulled us away from you and your vision of Peace for all humankind.  Give us the grace to hear the voice of the blind, to experience the hopelessness of those in poverty and caught up in the power of illness.  We hope to be the person whose touch heals the crying of the child in distress, the mother in fear for her family, the father trying to support his family.  Their voices are easily drowned out in the loud tones of busyness, authority and power in our desperate world.  But help us to hear the voice of your Son telling us to “call them to me,” and become the agent of healing in this tine of uncertainty and grief.

For we are your people, the sheep of your pasture, and listen to the Shepherd’s call.  And it is in His Name that we bring this before you.  Amen.