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New every morning is your love, great God of light, and all day long you are working for good in the world. Stir up in us desire to serve you, to live peacefully with our neighbors and all your creation, and to devote each day to your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

"A Liturgy for Morning Prayer," Upper Room Worshipbook

Used by permission from the Book of Common Worship, © 2018 Westminster John Knox Press. All rights reserved. This prayer appears in “A Liturgy for Morning Prayer” in Upper Room Worshipbook.

Today's Reflection

CLEARLY, a Christian understanding of peace means more than placidity on a personal level or polite resignation on a cultural level. Such simple-minded notions may even be what the founder of our faith renounced when he said that he did not come to bring peace but a sword. (See Matthew 10:34.) His own understanding of peace was a fierce and realistic one: that peace is nothing less than the sure sign of God’s presence among us, the be-all and end-all of God’s purpose for us.

—Barbara Brown Taylor, The Wondrous Mystery: An Advent Reader (Upper Room Books, 2019)

Today's Question

What do you visualize when you hear the word peace? How do those thoughts connect with the fierce and realistic peace of Christ?  

Today's Scripture

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
—Matthew 10:34 (NRSV)

Prayer for the Week

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Lectionary Readings

(Courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity Library)

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