An American Benediction
Imagine closing your worship service with the following Franciscan Benediction. How do you think American churches would take it? How do you think your church would take it?
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain in to joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
ht: profbaugh
So beautiful!
The last one “May God bless you with enough foolishness…” is a classic.
I nearly know the Aaronic blessing by heart but I wouldn’t mind knowing this one too.
Sounds like a wake up call if you ask me.
Wow – I totally love this. I’d personally get pretty fired up if I were in a service that used this.
i love it! what a prayer. I’m going to borrow it!
i imagine folks at my church would stand there with a deer caught in the headlights look on their faces, and when the benediction was over, quickly move on to friendly idle chatter.
thats what i imagine anyway. they might surprise me and take it to heart.
good stuff though-challenging…i love it, forget the fluff, give us a straight shot of reality to face the week ahead:)
Fabulous prayer. I think Christians as a whole need to prayer more (without ceasing). And pray things like this. I know I do need to. I need to embrace my hardships and look for ways to let God challenge me to grow as a Christian.
Thanks for sharing.
I love it. It would totally freak people out, but hopefully in a good way. This is my first time to your blog and in looking around a zillion links, I found this one for more liturgies…
http://www.liturgy.co.nz/
Kim, I hope it would freak people out. We are too complacent and apathetic. I like Steve Camp’s song Shake Me to Wake Me. (Ooo- I think I just dated myself.)
I am going to use it this week. So, we’ll see…