| New Book now Available Here is an anthology of over 1100 brief prayers and thought-starters, for each day of the year, with almost 400 original prayers by Bruce Prewer. Included is both a subject index and an index of authors-- an ecumenical collection of about 300 different sources. |
 |
| Title: Brief Prayers for Busy People. Author: Bruce D Prewer ISBN 978-1-62880-090-6 Available from Australian Church Resources, web site www.acresources.com.au email service@acresources.com.au or by order from your local book shop or online on amazon. |
Year
C, Good Friday
John 18:1 to 19:42 or Luke 23: 16-47
Psalm 22
Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12
Hebrews 4: 14-16, 5:7-9
SENTENCES
When they came to the place that is called The
Skull, there they crucified him.
Jesus said, “Father forgive
them, for they know not what they do.”
All the
families of the nations shall worship before him.
All the ends
of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord.
One of the criminals who was
hanged beside him said:
Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.
All the ends
of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord.
Jesus said: This day you shall be with me in
paradise.
All the ends
of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord.
Jesus cried with a loud voice: “Father, into your
hands I commit my spirit.
All the ends
of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord.
All the
families of the nations shall worship before him.
OR -
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief.
When they came
to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him.
He was wounded for our transgressions,
he was brushed for our iniquities.
And Jesus
said, “Father forgive them, for they know not what
they do.”
Upon his was the infliction that made us whole, and
with his stripes we are healed.
Then Jesus
cried out: “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.”
Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.
Jesus,
remember me, when you come into your kingdom
PRAYER
God of Christ crucified, your awesome cross
confounds our pride, and your shed blood leaves us aching with adoration. We
thank you for giving us a place within such a priceless salvation. We pray that
on this most holy day our meagre stocks of faith, hope and love, may be
wondrously replenished. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen!
CONFESSION
“All we like
sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and God has
laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
My Friends, sometimes it is our sins that leave us
discouraged and guilty. Other times it is our foolishness and clumsiness that
makes us frustrated and ashamed. On this
most Holy Friday we know one thing for certain: both our sin and our folly have
the gravest consequences: Jesus our Lord is crucified. Let us humbly make a
common confession as we say together:
Merciful God ,our sure hope on earth and in heaven,
we confess to you and
to each other that we are sinners
who need a most
patient and generous Saviour.
We have not
loved you without reserve,
we have not loved others
without conditions,
we have not even
loved our own souls enough to respect and nourish them..
We have spread
folly rather than wisdom, anxiety instead of trust,
and we have allowed ignorance
and prejudice to misshape our words and deeds.
We have
sometimes crucified good thoughts that emerge from our own hearts
and damned others with faint
praise.
We have
wounded Christ, not with actual blood on our hands
but with a horde of small,
cruel betrayals or compromises.
As we repent
and seek your costly grace;
please let
forgiveness, cleansing, and extensive spiritual repair
take place in us as
we bow before this holy cross.
Through Jesus Christ our Redeemer.
Amen!
ASSURANCE
Sisters and brothers in Christ, it is written for
all to see: Jesus cried, “Father forgive them, they do not understand what they
do.” And again, “While we were still
sinners, Christ Jesus died for us.”
We need not live in perpetual remorse for sins, but
should leave behind those old weights and guilts, and
press on with our high calling. For God is able to bring good out of evil and
joy out of sorrow. By the cross of
Christ, you are a redeemed people!
Thanks be to God!
PSALM 22
Verses 1-2, 6-11, 14-18
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
When
I need you, why do you seem so far away?
I cry out to you by day but you don’t answer,
I
call for you in the darkness but find no rest.
I’m treated like a worm, not a human being,
mocked by some, despised by all.
All who look upon me ridicule me,
shaking their heads and poking out tongues:
“So he trusted God, then
let God have him;
if God is pleased with him, let God save him!”
Yet you are the One who saw
me safely born,
and suckled me at my mother’s breasts.
From my birth I have been in your hands,
since mother bore me you have been my God.
Don’t go away now when I’m desperate
and no one moves a finger to help me.
My life is leaking away like water,
my bones are racked out of joint;
now my heart is melting away
inside me,
my courage has dried up like clay;
My tongue is sticking to my jaws,
as you lay me down in earth’s dust.
A pack of wild dogs are around me,
a mob of thugs encircle me.
They savage my hands and feet
and I can feel pain in every bone.
They gloat and divide up my clothing,
casting lots for each garment.
© B.D. Prewer
1986
FORSAKEN?
My God!
My God, why have you forsaken us;
forsaken us in the cry of the
crucified?
In his horrible helplessness
we are doubly undone,
suffering and dying
alone.
My God!
The nails that pierced Jesus cruelly
also pierce our common humanity;
his utter dereliction touches
ours,
fearing no god reigns above
but all ends in a lonely cry
bereft of light and
love.
My God! That his life should so mercilessly end
surrounded by such pitiless enemies,
loved only by a frightened few
who watched in shock and fear,
leaves us all abandoned
to rampaging
despair.
My God! Into that borrowed, stone-cold tomb
our noblest human dreams are
dragged;
the idealism of youth sinks
into abysmal deeps
and brave defiance
in the darkness
weeps.
Dear God, No!
On that black Friday we are not forsaken!
Not Jesus or any other desolate child of dust!
That day you entered our forsakenness
and bitter chill of death’s
dark night,
you shaped the valley of
shadows
to become an avenue of
light
Our Christ! We praise you, we acknowledge you as
Lord!
Despised and rejected, man of sorrows and grief,
great and marvellous are your
deeds!
Wounded for our transgressions,
and bruised for our iniquities,
you have given your soul
that we may be made
whole.
© B.D. Prewer 2000
(Another
version is found in ‘Australian Psalms” page 92)
COLLECT
Most loving God, please look graciously upon this
your family, for which our Christ Jesus was willing to be betrayed, and placed
in the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon a cruel cross; who with
you and the Holy Spirit now lives and loves forever, one God, world without
end.
Amen!
SERMON: FAMILIAR TERRITORY
The stunning
words of a man being crucified:
“Father forgive them for
they do not know what they are doing.”
Luke 23:34
Also the prescient words of an ancient prophet:
“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of
sorrows and familiar with grief;
and we hid our faces from him.
He was despised and we did not stand up for him.”
Isaiah 53:3
I put it to you that the place of crucifixion is not
unfamiliar to us.
The act of crucifixion is not something we learn
about second hand.
This crucified Christ is no stranger to us.
I am not talking about some devotional exercises
where we may in our imagination visit Golgotha and mourn with the women for our
crucified Lord. Neither am I speaking to those fortunate folk who have actually
visited Jerusalem and visited the holy sites.. Nor do
I mean hymns, prayers or theological theories about the atonement.
It is rather that in your experience, in your very
being, there is a first hand knowledge of crucifixion. In this intimate
experience there is both bad news and good news; appalling and yet also
enthralling.
THE APPALLING NEWS
Firstly, the appalling
inside knowledge of crucifixion. We will look at two aspects of this bad news.
1/ We spiritually crucify others.
I don’t mean physical crucifixion, in a physical,
bloody way. Rather it is how we sometimes casually treat other people, maybe
even those in our own household.
We all have taken part in belittling others,
scorning, wounding, doing what we euphemistically call “cutting them down to
size”. We do not restrict ourselves to
acting in this way with those who do wrong. We even crucify some people when
they do the right things, and their goodness shames us.
It is as if a little bit of goodness in others is
okay. But not too much. If too much of Christ-likeness
appears, we get edgy. Perverted as we
are by the multitudinous tentacles of evil, we cannot bear to see too much
goodness flowering in others while we trudge along on in mediocrity.
Christ-likeness disconcerts us, it threatens and
frightens, it brings out the worst. Thus we the
crucifiers go to work. Snide remarks, half truths, damning with faint praise, attributing bad
motives for good deeds. We delight in stabbing and undercutting and
embarrassing them. We even us the
telling phrase: “we nailed them!”
There has not been one of Christ’s saints who has not been harassed by a Golgotha-like crowd. Hounded by a mob, not
necessarily of very evil people, but of reasonably ‘nice citizens’ who cannot
bear to see their own mediocrity shown up by a brighter loveliness. This
is not a pretty aspect of human behaviour, but then, no Golgotha is a pretty
place.
2/
We crucify ourselves.
We are very familiar with Golgotha because we even
get the hammer and nails out on ourselves. We crucify some things that are
precious and vulnerable in our own being.
One of the early Christian believers said that there
is a little Christ in all of us. It is what the Old Testament called the “image
of God” in us, or the very “breath of God” in us.
Whenever this holy part of our true being rises up
above the level of mediocre thoughts and deeds and tries to express itself more
boldly and lovingly and riskily, then another part of us is aghast and
becomes an accuser. That happens whenever the Christ in us asks for some
drastic change, it calls for a bit of self sacrifice, it
stretches us towards higher goals.
Sometimes the little christ
in us asks us to assert ourselves and our faith, and other times it asks us to
do some very humble things.
Then it is that the crucifier within us (the same
assailant that nails the little Christ in others) goes feral. The crucifer within us
arrests the Christ in us, falsely accuses and judges it, pokes fun at it, flogs
it, and if necessary it will crucify
this good thing in ourselves.
I do not hesitate to make this generalisation: there
is no person in this congregation who has not at some time crucified
themselves.
We have blood on our hands, and some of it is our
own blood. We are both the crucifiers
and the crucified: despised and rejected, a creature of sorrows and familiar
with grief, and we hide our faces from it.
There you have it. The appalling first hand
knowledge we have about what goes on at Golgotha.
Enough! Enough of the bad news!
THE ENTHRALLING NEWS
There is, thank God, some good news, the enthralling
side of this brutal drama.
What we all
need is someone who will love us enough to heal our torn being. Unless we find
an unconditional lover, we are lost in our own tragic Golgotha.
It is not sufficient to say that God loves us when
we are repentant. We need a God who loves us while we are still rebels! It is not enough to say that God loves the
little Christ in us but hates the crucifier in us. Because
both are really us. Unless
God loves us when we have blood on our hands, at the very time when we are the
crucifiers, then we remain
split personalities. We
must have a God who loves us not just when we are the victim but also when we
are the assailant.
On Good Friday we look on a crucified person who is
the perfect Christ, the true image of God in human flesh. He is all we were meant to be. To use a
description from Martin Luther, on the cross hung the “true-man”. Here is
true-man, the only non-crucifier.
It seems to me that at that moment on Golgotha all
creation held its breath. What would be the outcome of such ultimate treachery
by humankind? What will God do to those who crucify the loveliest, most whole
person ever to wear human flesh; his only True Son? Maybe even the heavens held
their breath at that ultimate-awful moment.
No other cruelty we have afflicted on others,
nothing we have perpetrated against ourselves, can be more repugnant than that
Golgotha event. Nothing can outsin
this evil. “Despised and rejected, a God of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’.‘
Yet from the hill of Golgotha there sounds a lone
voice, the most lonely voice in history, speaking
above the waves of pain; it is the Word which sets us free: “Father
forgive them for they do not know what they are doing”
God in Christ takes all the evil upon himself and says: “I love you even at this moment, my
crucifiers.
I love you, in the midst of this scorn hatred,
abuse, and most depraved crime. I love you. I love you.”
“He was
wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, upon him was
the punishment that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.”
The cross is the unlikely place of unequalled
healing. We are embraced with an unconditional love which claims the whole of
our divided being, and brings together in reconciliation both assailant and
victim, the crucifer and the crucified .
That is the final truth both then and now.
Now, yes now, on this very Good Friday!
Trust it and be healed! Now!
Trust it today and forever!
Trust it and know for yourself that “with his
stripes we are HEALED!”
WE BELIEVE
We believe in the glory of the crucified Christ
whose name we honour and adore.
We believe in the loss that is gain, in sorrow that
gives peace,
in failure that is success,
and in death that brings life.
We believe that his shame is our hope,
his suffering is our healing,
his grief is our joy, and his
desolation is our home-coming.
We believe that the glory of God was in Christ,
reconciling the world unto himself.
Amen!
INTERCESSIONS
Let us pray.
God our wounded healer, by the holy cross of Christ
Jesus, you have reconciled the world unto yourself. We quietly and humbly thank
you for so great a salvation and we pray that it may be known and trusted all
over the world. Bring us together Lord;
Bring us
together Lord, bring us together in love.
We pray for
people at odds with themselves, their mind and heart like divided kingdoms, at
war and out of control. By your reconciling grace, bring us together Lord;
Bring us
together Lord, bring us together in peace.
We pray for
folk who are at loggerheads with others; hitting out at family friends,
neighbours and work mates. By your reconciling grace, bring us together Lord;
Bring us
together Lord, bring us together in mercy.
We seek your
help for groups in our nation who are alienated socially, politically,
economically, racially. By your reconciling grace, bring us together Lord;
Bring us
together Lord, bring us together in hope..
We ask for the healing of nations from ancient
enmities, new conflicts, ongoing injustices, suspicions, and hatreds. By your
reconciling grace, bring us together Lord;
Bring us
together Lord, bring us together in community.
We pray for the scattered people of your church.
Enable us to bring our diverse gifts into a common love and service. By your
reconciling grace, bring us together Lord;
Bring us
together Lord, bring us together in faith.
God our wounded healer, we thank you that any true
wisdom and love in our prayers is already being answered and any foolishness is
denied. Through Christ our Saviour.
Amen!
SENDING OUT
Christ Jesus died on a cross so that we might begin
to live as we were intended to live.
We are not our
own, we have been redeemed at great price.
Go then, go out into the secular world and live
really well!.
Live gratefully, live humbly, live daringly, live
lovingly, live fully.
The love of
Christ sustains us.
Amen.
The peace of
the reconciling God, which goes beyond all understanding, keep your hearts and
minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
And the blessing of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, will be with you now and ever more.
Amen!
THAT ARE CURRENTLY AVAILABLE
BY ORDERING ONLINE
OR FROM YOUR LOCAL CHRISTIAN BOOKSHOP
