Daily Message and Prayer from Reverend Mary White
Good Day and Blessings!
I wonder when was the last time you wrote to a Member of Parliament or Member of the Legislature over an observed injustice?
Or, when was the last time you marched in support of an issue that needed immediate attention? Given the pandemic that has overtaken our lives, we now have an opportunity to discern the various ways we are privileged compared to those who do not share in those same benefits.
A good number of us prefer not to get involved because we are content to remain in our comfortable lifestyle that we have created for ourselves.
Some have the false belief that we all have the same opportunities. We tend to rationalize that it is through their own choices or their own fault that those less fortunate live in poverty, are homeless, have no clean drinking water or suffer with addictions.
We now have time to search our soul, to comprehend the truth that Christ continues trying to convey to the privileged even in our society today.
Maybe for some, this pandemic has a silver lining after all.
Rev. Mary
P.S. Please join us this Sunday, Aug. 23rd for the PRUC Online Worship Service
Reading excerpt from: Ralph Milton “God for Beginners.”
Stay Out of Politics!
The complete Christian life means getting involved with other people. For starters, we get involved with the church community, where we go for love and for strength, for healing and for instruction. Then, we gather up the courage and the love and the insight we’ve been given and go out there into the rest of the world to try to make it better, to struggle against the forces of death.
That’s the point where the Christian church often gets criticized. “The church should stay out of politics and business,” people sometimes say.
Well, we can’t.
At least, not if we are going to keep on being Christians. In the first place, the Bible, and especially Christ’s teachings, are full of statements and rules and stories and wisdom about business and politics and sex and that sort of “worldly” stuff. Jesus never asked us to be “pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by” kind of people. Jesus said that whatever we do for one of “the least of these” (the poorest and most helpless people) we do it for him.
It’s very hard to get involved in the life of the poor and the dispossessed without getting mucked up in business and politics. Christianity is not a cream puffs on Sunday kind of religion.
Poem • The Sun Will Rise by Crystal A.J. Smith
Rage in my heart
Rage out on the streets
Person to Person
It’s passing through everyone
What a horrible feeling
We’re fighting for our past
not yet able to be in our future
Crying and suffering will never be gone
happiness is not yet here
hopefully when people understand
the sun will rise and sunlight
will be received by everyone
then our healing will begin
Our past will be in our past
though never forgotten
Our future will be our future
and with hope and gratitude
that we will move forward
and keep on going peeking back,
learning from peoples’ mistakes.
Prayer of the Day
Healing Creator,
Giver of voices for those not heard. Bring us to an awareness that we are part of a larger problem that is invisible to most of us.
Through your Spirit, provide us with the courage to get involved and support those who are victims of society’s laws that oppress.
Open our hearts to love and have empathy for those who are forced to live in poverty, for the children who go to bed hungry not just for food but also for a better life. Bathe us in living waters filled with compassion that soaks through our very beings. We offer these prayers through Christ our brother and guiding Light.
Amen