Lord, I am not the beggar with a disability waiting at the gate of the church. But I understand their plight better this year. As I stand in the breach of church–trying to hold open the bridge between the world and worship. As we collect money for food pantries, and try to find ways for communities to meet and pray. I feel like we too are stuck at the gate of the temple.
Sometimes we are outside the temple, begging to get in, yet unable to pray.
Sometimes we are at the gates of heaven, barely breathing in and out.
Sometimes we are waiting by the side of someone who is on the cusp of death.
Lord, the breaches are gaping right now: the gap between rich and poor, healthy and sick, abled and disabled, the privileged and the marginal, essential and nonessential, the black and the white and the rest of the people of color.
Help us to be the disciples at the breach, fixing our eyes upon them, seeing not just their stated wants but also their deeper needs. Help us to to touch those who are stuck, and to take their hand and walk with them in the community. Even if that touch and walk is only metaphorical today.
Lord we know what it’s like to be in the breach.
Show us how to be the helpers, the healers, we pray.
Remind us that no help is too little, that we are longing for one another’s company, touch and presence.
Help us to be present and stand in the breach, we pray.
Amen.
Eastertide Resources
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Author: katyandtheword
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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