You, Beyond Our Weary Selves

You God, Lord and Sovereign,
you God, lover and partner.
You are God of all our possibilities.
You preside over all our comings and goings,
all our wealth and all our poverty,
all our sickness and all our health,
all our despair and all our hope,
all our living and all our dying.
And we are grateful.
You are God of all our impossibilities.
You have presided over the emancipations
and healings of our mothers and fathers;
you have presided over the wondrous transformations in our own lives.
You have and will preside over those parts of our lives that
we imagine to be closed.
And we are grateful.
So be your true self, enacting the things impossible for us,
that we might yet be the whole among the blind who see and
the dead who are raised;
that we may yet witness your will for peace,
your vision for justice,
your vetoing all our killing fields.
At the outset of this day,
we place our lives in your strong hands.
Before the end of this day,
do newness among us in the very places where
we are tired in fear,
we are exhausted in guilt,
we are spent in anxiety.
Make all things new, we pray in the new-making name of Jesus.
Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People
Humph. How about “God be merciful to me, a sinner” – much more to the point.
Yes, that’s certainly an important one, although I don’t think we have to pick between this prayer and Brueggeman’s as if one were to the point and one wasn’t. The cry for mercy resounds throughout Brueggemann’s prayer, as I read it. I think there are as many “points” to prayer as there are pray-ers.