[Prayers for a New Year for the Wine Before Breakfast community, beginning a series on faith and faithfulness reading Colossians. The text for this service was Colossians 1.1-14.]
Faithful God, it is January,
winter, the start of a new year:
a time when people talk of newness and renewal,
of fresh starts and fresh beginnings;
a time when we savour what has gone by or hurry to forget it;
a time when we look ahead with excitement or anxiety.
Starting a new year, sometimes we feel renewed,
other times simply stagnate.
O God, hear our prayer and draw near to us.
(prayers for a new year)
Faithful God, it is January.
We begin reading Paul’s letter to a new church
which speaks of fruit and growth.
But, O God, it is January,
and as the soil is frozen so are we –
where comes the fruit, the growth, the renewal?
Can one be worn out from hopefulness?
O God, hear our prayer and draw near to us.
(prayers for all that hurts)
Faithful God, it is January.
We are old in our faith or we are new:
often we are both.
The Church in Colossae, too, is both old and new,
the words spoken to them so long ago now given to us:
each generation growing upon the last
but also treading the same well-worn paths.
And as our siblings both past and present
hold us in prayer,
so, too, do we hold them.
O God, hear our prayer and draw near to us.
(prayers for the Church around the world)
Faithful God, it is January.
Frozen, yet still the soil teems with life:
life that is, and life that is to come.
We know some of what we are planting,
and what is planted in us,
but some catches us unawares,
as a sunset does, or the bloom of crocuses
scattered under the snow.
Thus is the Kingdom: faith, hope, and love
binding us together in you
in ways we know and do not yet know.
O God, hear our prayer and draw near to us.
(prayers of thanksgiving)
Faithful God, grow us in the knowledge and love of you,
that the works of our hands may be pleasing to you.
O God, you are a God of abundance;
may faith, hope, and love continue to bear fruit in us,
as it has in so many others,
to the glory of your name.
Amen.
