Daily Reading for September 25 • Sergius, Abbot of Holy Trinity, Moscow, 1392
We pray for the Church,
where all too often, like Cain,
we have made the worship offered by our brother a cause for hostility and division.
We pray that our Lord may bind us together,
teaching us to value the richness of our diversity
and to rejoice in every fresh glimpse of God’s glory
seen through traditions other than our own.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God.
We pray for those lands where brother and sister fight sister and brother,
divided by arbitrary borders, ideology, or religion.
We pray for those lands where extremes of wealth and poverty are bitterly divisive.
We pray for those lands where power is grossly abused
and the dispossessed bear the heaviest burden.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God.
We pray for all who have been nourished on bitterness
and fed with the wrongs suffered by earlier generations.
We pray for all who have grown to hate people
instead of hating that which evil has done to people.
We pray for the young who are impatient for change
and the not-so-young who resist all change.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God.
We commend to God any special needs known to us….
As we remember the sick, the sorrowful, and all who are in any distress,
let us also remember that God has supremely made himself known to us as Savior
and calls us to share in God’s rescuing work.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God.
Lord, we would heal and not destroy.
Teach us the discipline of obedience to the commandment
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,”
and give us the fortitude to go on obeying to the end.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God.
Let us remember before God those who have died….
Lord, we are all sinners and utterly dependent on your grace.
We praise you for the forgiveness of sins
by which men and women are enabled to rise from death to eternal life.
Lord, teach us to love:
That we may be children of God. Amen.
From The Daily Office Revised, in The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer, revised edition, compiled and adapted by Jeffery W. Rowthorn. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org