Prayer & Praise

God, Lord, sovereign, judge, king, warrior:

source of power, agent of life, giver of justice.

We bask in your faithfulness,

we live out of your reliability,

we count completely on your graciousness.

When we cast one eye away from you where our vision is deeply fixed to the lived reality of our daily life,

We are astonished at how ragged and unsettled life is,

at how remote our trust in you is from the dailyness,

at how stirred and beset our life is with fear and violence,

with despair and mistrust.

We flee the complexity to your promised clarity, and then discover … as we are tutored by these old poems .. .

that you are God exactly in silence,

in absence,

in violence,

in testy retribution and in important demand.

Give us nerve to be your people in the unsettledness.

Let us have our true home in the end…but in the meantime…

on the way ragged but not jaded,

rejoicing, but not stupid.

You are God in this case as in every case.

Amen

Walter Brueggemann;Anna Carter Florence. Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayers of Walter Brueggemann (Kindle Location 559). Kindle Edition.Walter Brueggemann;Anna Carter Florence. Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayers of Walter Brueggemann (Kindle Locations 557-559). Kindle Edition.