Evening

Concluding our Prayers of the People at 10:30 Sunday worship, we have been praying a setting of a prayer for the social order or the human family:

O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us
through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole
human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which
infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us;
unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and
confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in
your good time, all nations and races may serve you in
harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.

Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so
move every human heart [and especially the hearts of the
people of this land], that barriers which divide us may
crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our
divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Our prayer is apt in our Time of division, suspicion and hatred among Americans for and toward each other. The prayer came fully home to me Sunday morning, a couple of days after the horrendous murder of Charlie Kirk as he participated in a public event. Any murder is a terrible act, but the assassination murder of a political figure is all the more so in the sheer arrogance of it presuming to rob the people of free choice of leaders. In my life's memory it first happened with the assassination of President Kennedy. Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy. 

Charlie Kirk's killer seems deranged, as most murderers are. He apparently texted friends that he is sorry: people should have sense enough to think ahead and consider how they are going to feel later if they do something so evil and that cannot be rescinded. 

In our national setting, I cannot imagine how it would be possible to isolate such people and keep them from being a public danger. I have so much sadness that this murder too will fade away into the picture of what we are as a people and a nation, with nothing ever done or even attempted to address the problem among us. We are a nation founded in violence, and apparently the outcome has to include forever being a nation in which violence is a normal, regular, frequent, acceptable aspect of our national character. 

Prayers are natural and normal for us. What we don't seem to get is that God has given us dominion of the Earth: it's up to us to accomplish what we pray God for. 

Sadly,

T90

pic: reusing a sunset photo that a longTime friend sent me Sunday evening as a birthday honor!