What Are We Waiting For

These are worship materials for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost--Call to Worship, Prayer of Invocation, and text and audio of scripture and preaching. If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, you can begin your search for that here.

Call to Worship Psalm 42 Adapted

One: As a deer longs for flowing streams, 

so my soul longs for you, O God.  All: My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. One: When shall I come and behold the face of God?  All: Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your waterfalls and flumes; all your waves and your billows have gone over me.  One: By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. 

All: Why are you cast down, O my soul,

and why are you disquieted within me? One: Hope in God!

All: We shall again praise him, our help and our God.

One: Our praise begins now, in greeting one another, the first taste of fulfillment,

“The peace of the Lord be with you.”

All: And also with you.

Prayer of Invocation (in unison)

Glorious God who promises and fulfills, grant that our worship today might be a looking forward to what is to come, a hopeful leaning into what, by your grace, shall be.

We’ve known a lot of disappointment these days, a lot of loss. We’ve become used to having our expectations dashed, our aims frustrated. We grieve what is no longer.

We also hope.

Grant that our hope might be sweet, our longing might be as a foretaste of fulfillment. Grant that the life we imagine living once again will abound evermore with your mercy and love, might build up evermore your justice and truth—and that our imagining this will be its advent among us.

We pray this mindful of Paul, whose longing for your church to abound in purposeful love spurred him on through victory and hardship, satisfaction and suffering, and who at last proclaimed this simple command: “Rejoice.”

Like him, again we say that we might so do: “Rejoice.”

In Christ, amen.

Scripture & sermon audio.

Scripture & sermon text.