Prayer for the Week of March 17

In the gospel of John we remember the story of Mary pouring a whole jar of nard over Jesus’ feet, causing all manner of mixed reactions: from Judas criticizing the waste of a year’s salary on the act, to Jesus proclaiming that she was making an annointing for his burial. In our own life, how are we spending and and being spent? Here the prayer we prayed on this fifth Sunday of Lent, and below it the quote from Howard Thurman Rev. Kent quoted in his sermon.
We wonder: in the world of all grace, all forgiveness, all re-living, all resurrection: are we all giving? In the ways we have squandered our inheritances, we can only hope that some of them spoke of great love, and inspired greater good. We pray that all our outpourings, however meager, might carry a whiff of greatness in them, a scent of Mary’s sweet and costly dedication to a greater cause, a deeper love.
Hear us in our lavish gifts, but guide these actions, Lord, that they may point to you. Curb the spending that is mindless reinforcement of our importance. But, when we pour out our hearts and wallets, let them be for causes worthy of you… and of our best selves. In lavish devotion, in simple prayer, in helping others, in sustaining your community: help us give with grace and receive with wisdom all that prepares us for your kin-dom. May we sustain with vigor those we always have with us. May we never run out of ways to prepare the feet of peace to walk ever closer to you and the poor whom you love.    –Rev. Kent Gilbert
 

We are reminded in many ways of the quiet ministry of the spirit of the living God in your lives and in the life that abounds around us. The little healings of the silent breaches, the great redemptive acts when times are out of joint, the lifting of our horizons of hope when to have hope seems to be against all wisdom and against all judgment, the stirring of the will to forgive when for so long a time we have been buried under an avalanche of great hostilities—there are so many ways by which the ministry of the living God tutors the spirit, corrects the times gives the lift to the days. —Howard Thurman, The Centering Moment, 1969