In my 40 years of church attendance (!) I have experienced numerous styles of financial request: annual stewardship campaigns, megachurch building funds, pass the plate offering, gifts and tithes envelopes, basket on a stick shaken in face, etc. I’m proud my current church for being the least money obsessed of any I have attended, while performing a constant labor of love for the poor and the overlooked. It takes cash to own a building and minister to a society’s ‘other’; it also takes faith and tact to ask for those resources, trusting that they will come, and pivoting to seek out the community’s non-monetary resources when they don’t.
I was asked to write a prayer for Hot Metal’s upcoming focus on giving. Some of the language I took directly from others – Father Richard Rohr, St Francis, the book of Matthew – and at the time I was reading the crucial and revelatory book See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur. I thought a good prayer needed structure but I wasn’t sure where to find a model so I fell into triads of verses – 1. reminding ourselves who God is, 2. asking for healing of our wounds, 3. stating our intention for active practice – with a final closing communal commitment to seal the deal.
Giver of breath and bread:
You are the creator God who raises us up from dust to infinity.
You are the sustainer of all life.
You are the source of every beautiful thing in our world and in this faith community.
Show us how to stop measuring, counting, and weighing our material worth and our worldly success.
Expel from us our fear of scarcity and our addiction to luxury.
Grow in us a generosity that sees past the borders of our familiar neighborhoods and beyond the boundaries of our mortal lives.
Remind us daily to practice a simplicity centered on Jesus.
For in giving, we receive.
In forgiving, we are pardoned.
And in embracing the needs of the other, we find ourselves held.
We commit to placing our treasure in you, for in doing so, we trust that we will discover our own hearts.
Amen.