The revised “Book of Common Worship” offers this explanation of the prayers of intercession in the Service for the Lord’s Day: “Prayers of intercession and supplication are offered for the mission and ministry of the universal church and the local congregation, care of creation and the right use of resources … compassion and reconciliation; healing and wholeness for all who suffer and other special needs.”
In the breadth of these prayers, worship planners must ask: Who is missing at the table? Who is missing from the community’s cry for compassion and reconciliation? As we consider the cries for the world, for our local communities and for ourselves, what voices and situations have been omitted from our prayer?
Brené Brown, defining compassion, says, “Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion.” By understanding and lifting up this reality, our prayers for others become a shared expression for all of humanity.
And with this understanding, the voices of those struggling with a myriad of issues must be included in the petitions of our gathered community — not only for the benefit of the struggling, but for the reconciliation of the entire community.
The new “Book of Common Worship” offers resources for healing and wholeness services for a communities as well as individuals. Certainly, offering healing and wholeness services is a way to compassionately recognize and support those struggling, but it is through the regular inclusion of a wide variety of concerns in the prayers of intercession that we realize full incorporation of all into the community.
For example, our hymnal “Glory to God” provides a number of hymn texts that lift up the longing for healing that are especially appropriate in services recognizing the communal effect of addiction. While not included in “Glory to God,” Dan Damon’s hymn, “Hope of the Earth,” recognizes that addiction reaches beyond drug addiction and connects it to an ecological issue: “Breath of the earth, our trees are sacrificed; greed leads the way to profit at what price? False gods consume, addictions beg for more.”
Another powerful example of hymns that embody our prayers of intercession can be found in Thomas Troeger’s text, “God Weeps with Us Who Weep and Mourn” (Glory to God, #787). It sums up our theological understanding for why voicing the prayers of the suffering and singing their song as a regular part of our worship is so important: because God is present in the lives of those individuals and shares our concern, no matter what those concerns are.
Joshua Taylor is the director of worship and music at First Presbyterian Church of Dallas. He is also the instructor of sacred music studies at the University of North Texas College of Music and a member of the executive board for the Presbyterian Association of Musicians.
