During last night’s worship service, Grace Downtown Elder Kevin Offner offered a prayer for recent events throughout our country and our world. For anyone looking for help getting started praying for the ebola outbreak, the violence in the Middle East, the police brutality and subsequent racial unrest in the US (and what it means for our city), this may be a helpful way to get started:
Heavenly Father, we acknowledge you as the great creator and sustainer of the whole world. You do not sit idly by as world events unfold—you’re actively, compassionately, intimately involved! Your word tells us that “the king’s heart is like channels of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he wishes.” All the nations of the earth are like a drop in the bucket before you.
So, Lord, we pray for our world and ask that you would show yourself strong. Father, please make yourself known in the way you actively work in contemporary world events.
We pray for those in Liberia and elsewhere who have contracted ebola. Please bring healing and deep, lasting physical relief. Help doctors to figure out how to contain and inoculate against this deadly disease.
We pray for those in Peru and in San Francisco who are affected by recent earthquakes. Please bring them relief and safety.
The Middle East
We pray for the wars in the Middle East: For the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, for the the escalating civil war in Iraq and for the growing tension between Israel and Iran. We ask, Lord, that you will intervene and show yourself strong in those lands, bringing justice and peace. We pray for the many refugees displaced by those wars and for the many helpless, defenseless citizens in these lands who daily cry out to you for help as they watch their loved ones killed all around them. Lord, hear the cry of these, your image-bearers. Please bring relief and an end to all the bloodshed.
Father, we grieve for the family of Jim Foley, who was beheaded very recently, and we grieve, too, for the many Christians who are being specifically targeted for murder because of their faith. Please bring about justice! Please protect the innocent, the vulnerable and the helpless. We ask that the perpetrators of these killings would know that you are real, that you act, and that each of us must one day stand before you and give an account for our lives. We pray that a healthy fear of the Lord might prevail in the middle east.
Ferguson
And then we pray for the injustices in our own country, especially the recent incidents in Ferguson, Missouri, and the fallout from those tragedies.
Father, as your followers who take your word seriously,we know it is your will, your design, that there are people raised up who are to be in authority over other people. We are thankful for presidents, for teachers, for parents, for husbands—and we’re thankful for the police. We know that there are many police officers in our country who wake up each morning and go to work hoping to act justly, hoping to come alongside the needy and the helpless, hoping to use their power for good on their behalf. Please give police officers across our country the courage and wisdom necessary to act justly.
But we also know that human authorities can and do sin. They can misuse the authority you’ve given them in unrighteous ways, ways that don’t please you and that don’t further justice and peace. Father, from the evidence we have before us right now, it seems clear that a white police officer fired several shots at and killed a black man whose arms were raised in surrender. We know that this is very wrong and that it grieves you deeply.
You are a God of justice and we pray that the truth will be made clear and that justice will be meted out on behalf of Michael Brown. And we ask you to act here, not because of any irrational lust for revenge we might have, but because you are a God of justice, you are a God of holiness, and your character is one that longs for wrongs to be made right.
Help us to think through as a nation how to curtail excessive force among our police.
Race in America and DC
And we pray for the ramifications of this Ferguson killing across our country. Father, if there ever was any doubt that racial tensions are as strong as ever in America, it has become clear now. We know that the incident in Ferguson didn’t cause the current upheaval of anger that we’re seeing everywhere today, but it was merely a trigger that brought to light what has been simmering for many decades in our land.
We pray especially for the tensions between whites and blacks in our country. Please expose our racism and give us grace to repent of it. Show us in very practical ways how we can truly, from the core of our hearts, love one another, walk side-by-side with one another, repent to one another, seek the welfare of one another.
Race In Our City and Our Church
We pray for those of us who are part of the white majority culture: Please give us wisdom and courage to live out our lives here in Washington, DC, in intentional ways where we seek justice, fairness, equity and mercy for those in the minority culture. Father, we don’t want to be condescending in our attitudes or actions, but truly compassionate, using the privileges and power that come undeservedly to us in ways that help and encourage everyone.
We pray for those of us in the black minority culture. Please give us a supernatural ability to forgive and to try once again to engage in redemptive cross-cultural dialogue even in the wake of highly visible injustice.
Thank you for how you’ve been stretching us here at Grace Downtown and in the Grace DC network, teaching us to cross racial barriers and truly care for one another. We ask you for continued help here.
And we pray that you’ll lead many of us to action. Many of us need to make decisions about where we’ll move to next in this city. Please give us wisdom and courage to consider living in areas where we can form natural relationships with neighbors of different races and cultures. We know that racism will only be overcome in the deepest way when deep and abiding friendships form between people of different races and cultures. We ask you to make us open to considering this when we think about where we can live.
We pray that you might lead many of us to invest in the public school system of Washington, DC, where the lives of children and families of different backgrounds are brought together daily.
We ask you to be the one who leads us in our choice of close friends. Please guard us from simply spending most of our time and forming most of our friendships with people who are easy or comfortable to be around because they share our cultural background. Give us faith and courage to develop true cross-cultural friendships.
Almighty God, we need you to act strongly in our world on behalf of your great name. Please show yourself as a god of justice, a god of peace, a god of comfort.
In your son’s name we pray.
Amen
Want to join others to pray for Ferguson? Join us on September 4.