Responding to the Mission of God in Prayer

This weekend I had the opportunity to lead the responsive prayers to each of the three teaching sessions on The Plant’s annual retreat. 

For the first section we responded to the last stanza in Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem "as kingfishers catch fire, as dragonflies draw flame":

Í say móre: the just man justices;   
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—   
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,   
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his   
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

This poem outlines what it means to be missional: to be Christ for others.  We prayed through this poem, asking to be just people, to keep grace, to live before God as we would want to be seen in God’s eyes, to be Christ to others, and to be Christ to each other. Responding to the call to restore, reconcile, and heal as God’s mission, our group then continued to pray through three breath prayers, taken from N.T. Wright’s Trinity prayer, that match the model of restore, reconcile and heal.

Restore: God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, set up your kingdom in our midst.
Reconcile: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Heal: Holy Spirit, Breath of the living God, renew us and all the world.

During the next session we responded in prayer to the call to be active in the mission of God and what that looked like in our lives in a physical way: by drawing our prayers with crayons.  This exercise allowed the people in the group to put thought onto paper in a creative way that was physical and creative.  Creativity is a bridge to a deeper understanding of our lives and ourselves, and praying through drawing created a sacred space for the Spirit to speak tangibly to the group.

Finally, during the last session we prepared ourselves to live out the mission of God by taking communion in a joyous and intimate manner, learning that communion is instructive: we do not do to remember bread and wine, we repeate communion often because it teaches us how to be missional and be Christ: through community, sharing, love, and worship.