Our Prayers for You in the New Year 30DEZ25

 

PRAYERS addressing our faith, love, gratitude, fears, anger, disgust, hopes, desires, thankfulness, doubts, forgiveness, salvation, guidance, sorrow, grief, joy and life in 2026 from some of the staff of Sojourners...

Our Prayers for You in the New Year

By Adam Russell Taylor

Dec 30, 2025

As we say goodbye (maybe even good riddance) to 2025, I’m reminded just how much prayer has served as an essential balm, refuge, and strong tower in the midst of such a trying and tumultuous year. Whatever 2026 has in store, I’m confident that we will need to flex our prayer muscles. Prayer centers us in God’s presence. Prayer prepares and equips us for courageous action. Prayer empowers us when we feel weak and encourages us when we feel demoralized.

I’m deeply grateful that we have a staff team that believes in the necessity of prayer, evidenced through the many short ones that they have shared below. My prayer as we sojourn together into 2026 is that our fervent prayers guide and embolden us to advance God’s reign of justice, peace, and steadfast love with greater urgency and courage.

“Lord, teach us to be still in your presence, filled with your love and compassion, and zealous with your joy for justice. May we find reservoirs of rest and double portions of holy discernment. Bind us together with cords that cannot be broken.” —Mitchell Atencio, senior associate news editor

“Lord, shatter the chains of fear which tighten around your people, especially those who work to protect your holy image, found through all things. Help us discern how your will can pierce our grief and paranoia during times of doubt. Let the weight of your spirit, and the fire of your light, gravitate all creation closer to the divine.” —Joseph Barry, donor services assistant

“Creative God, set before us the unadulterated vision of your kingdom on earth. Bring to the surface the prophetic imagination hidden deep within us. And ignite within us the joy and courage to live it out faithfully every day.” —Cortnie Brooks, digital education and outreach specialist

“Faithful God, thank you for your profound love shared with us through the joys and sorrows of the past year. Help us grieve what was lost while holding fast to hope and to your peace as we begin a new year. Grant us strength and courage to meet the challenges ahead, protect the most vulnerable among us, and help us to love one another deeply and to serve you with gladness and singleness of heart.” —Rick Chamiec-Case, director of donor engagement and human resources manager

“God of beauty, help us to see you when all looks ugly. God of hope, help us believe that good things are being done in and through our lives. Guide our steps to walk faithfully in joy, peace, and love, even when our feet are heavy and the way seems unclear.” —Josina Guess, associate editor

“God, in your infinite mercy, spread your hope, peace, joy, and love during this season and beyond. We pray that hearts will be softened and minds changed through our shared humanity, which can only happen through your power. Protect and encourage those who live in fear, and those whose lives hang in the balance. Show up in the light and shadows of our lives. In Jesus’ name, amen.” —Rev. Moya Harris, senior director of programs

“God of new years and new beginnings, make us people who choose hope before cynicism and service before spectacle. Teach us to value proving our empathy over proving that we’re right. Make our hands be steadier than our fears and our love stubborn enough to outlast the news cycles.” —Tyler Huckabee, managing editor, sojo.net

“Light of the World, come lift the darkness out of our eyes. As we ponder what to make of these tumultuous times, keep our hearts closely attuned to what moves yours. Let us seek you in silence, crave you in chaos, and find you in loss. May your everlasting love meet us in the margins.” —Marjorie Rose T. Lim, social media and communications assistant

“God our companion, as we journey this year toward wholeness, set our feet on paths of justice. Expand our hearts to bear uncertainty and give our minds the capacity for complexity. May we witness you repairing what has ruptured, healing what divides us, and when our vision fails, may we trust you all the more.” —Judah R. Lopez, intern

“God, during these dark days we seek your light and your mercy. Give us strength to be your hands and feet in this turbulent world. Comfort us as we face injustice and the despair of so many. Help us to remember each and every person is made in your divine image.” —Cynthia Martens, senior director of circulation

“God, invigorate us with a vision for your peace where wolf lives with lamb, leopard lies with goat, and infants play near the cobra’s den. As we experience conflict, overwhelm, and brokenness, remind us that your love grows from a stump, seemingly dead, seemingly barren. There is hope.” —Matt Murphy, chief operating officer

“God, revive our cold and weary hearts in a world that makes cynicism so appealing. Give us courage to look deeply at all that is broken; show us how to grieve instead of just doomscroll. Be with us in the midst of this mess, and enliven us to the surprising ways you are already at work making all things new.” —Betsy Shirley, editor in chief

Adam Russell Taylor

Rev. Adam Russell Taylor is president of Sojourners and author of A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community. Follow him on Bluesky @revadamtaylor.

A Sermon on Snacking and the Stupid Things People Say 2MAI12

AMEN Rev Bolz-Webber, and thank you....

sermon on Snacking <——-Click here to listen along. Sermons are a spoken art form!

^36b“Peace be with you.” ³⁷They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. ³⁸He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? ³⁹Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” ⁴⁰And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.⁴¹While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” ⁴²They gave him a piece of broiled fish, ⁴³and he took it and ate in their presence.
-Luke 24

Easter lasts for 50 days for Christians.  Most of the culture thinks it’s over when we’ve managed the vacuum up the last of the long thin ribbons of green plastic Easter grass off the carpets and the children have come down from their sugar highs.  But long after the White Sales at Macy’s have ended, the church is still celebrating Easter.
And you’ll notice that for a holiday that is supposed to be about new life and resurrection and the Glory of God and for some reason bunnies, we really get very little of that in the resurrection accounts.  But what we do get in the stories of Jesus appearing to his disciples after the resurrection is a great deal of fear and doubt and wounds and bread.  There aren’t a whole lot of answers in these texts, but for some reason there is a lot of broiled fish.
Our reading for today finds the disciples gathered together 3 days after Jesus died. All they knew was that their friend and teacher and Lord was dead and in the face of loss and everything they knew changing they were scared and they were doubting. And this is understandable. And it was here that Jesus suddenly stood among them.  And in their fear and disbelief he doesn’t judge them, he doesn’t rebuke them, he doesn’t try and convince them of the truth…he just offers himself.  See my hands…touch my feet. I am here. Don’t be afraid. Let’s eat some broiled fish.
The truth is that Jesus is scary, because, as he makes clear to the disciples, you can’t know him at a distance, on your own private terms. You cannot think your way to knowing Jesus through the answers you find in your own private Bible study, or through spiritualizing him as an otherworldly symbol.
You can’t know Jesus by spiritualizing him.  Not the guy we read about today who turns to his completely freaked out friends who have no idea what this all can mean and asks them the really crucial and deeply spiritual question of; “so do you have any snacks?” I wonder if what this text is saying to us is that if you get all transcendent and spiritual floating above the disappointingly broken physical world, you may just miss Jesus all together because that’s him over there at the snack table. Which is an embarrassing place to have the Lord hanging out.  But despite all our attempts to spiritualize, cleanse and middle-class up Jesus he just stands there eating broiled fish with his bare hands, holes and all.
Reading this story this week and about how the disciples were scared and doubting and really wanting some answers and getting nothing but broiled fish I was taken back to when I was a student chaplain at a hospital.
And how terrifying it was to think that I would be the person people expected to come up with a satisfying answer to why their husband is in a coma.
I’ll never forget my first experience in the trauma room.
A motionless man in his 50s was on a table and they started doing things to him not meant for my eyes and sorely misrepresented on TV shows.
One nurse was cutting his clothes off, and another was hooking up things while a Doctor was putting on gloves and I lean over to the nurse closest to me and was like,  – everyone seems to know what their job is but what am I doing here? She looks at my badge and says You’re job is to be aware of God’s presence in the room while we do our jobs.
It just didn’t seem like enough.
Then later in the little white room with just enough space for four love seats and as many boxes of tissue I’d sit with people in their loss. I would stand by and witness the disfiguring emotional process we politely call grief and I had no answers.  I’d bring them water, make some calls for them, keep bugging the doctors to give us more information, but words of wisdom I had none.
People wanted answers, or maybe it was just me who wanted answers, but I soon learned that and all I had to offer was my presence, a glass of water and cliff bar.  Only later did I realize: that’s just what Christianity is.
As many of you know, Travis, a young man in this congregation was baptized at the Easter Vigil and then the very next day he ended up on a plane home to see his father who had mysteriously ended up in the ICU.  Many of us have been praying for Travis and his family for 2 weeks and were saddened to find out that his father died on Thursday. His father’s death was sudden, and unexpected. Travis and his family have simply been robbed.
While talking to Travis on the phone Thursday I found I just didn’t have much to say.  And honestly I had to fight the urge to say something even if it was stupid just so I could feel like I had said something at all. But that never helps.  You hear a lot of nonsense in hospitals and funeral homes.  God had a plan, we just don’t know what it is. Maybe God took your daughter because he needs another angel in heaven. But when I’ve experienced loss and am feeling so much pain that it’s like nothing else ever existed the last thing I need is a well-meaning but vapid person to say when God closes a door he opens a window because that then makes me want to ask where exactly that window is so I can push them the Hell out of it.
This is the nonsense spawned from bad religion.  And usually when you are grieving and someone says something so vapidly optimistic to you, it’s about them.  It’s about the fact that they simply cannot allow themselves to entertain the finality and pain of death so instead they turn it into a Precious Moments greeting card.
This isn’t exactly uncommon.  In moments of grief and loss we are afraid and doubting and we want answers just like the disciples did 3 days after Jesus died.  But all anyone can really do is be with us and make some casseroles. And when that’s all we have to offer it can feel like not enough but the truth is that is Christianity. Presence and stories and meals and defiantly believing that death is simply not the last word. An episcopal priest once said that Christianity isn’t spiritual, is material.  You can’t even get started without a loaf of bread some wine and a river.
Jesus comes to his followers, then and now, in our grief and loss and doesn’t give answers.  In our fear and disbelief he doesn’t judge, he doesn’t rebuke, he doesn’t try and convince us of the truth…he just offers himself.  See my hands…touch my feet. I am here. Don’t be afraid. Let’s eat.  And as the Body of Christ this is what you do for each other as well and for the world God loves so madly. Your tweets and Facebook messages and texts and emails to Travis while he is grieving in Iowa are a witness.  It is a witness to a God who promises to be with us and in those prayers for our grieving brother we don’t offer any answers, we just claim the promise as our own. What’s been so hard is not being able to also bring him food.  But we can get to that when he gets back here.
We might think that knowing Jesus means not being fearful and not having doubt but you can’t know Jesus by spiritualizing him.  He is made known when we gather and tell the story and share food at his table.  It’s common.  It’s simple.  and it really, really is enough.http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2012/05/a-sermon-on-snacking-and-the-stupid-things-people-say/