“God of grace and God of glory
on thy people pour thy power…
Grant us wisdom
grant us courage
for the living of these days.”
(Hymn, Harry Emerson Fosdick)
Holy God, we sing our hymn of faith with faith, sometimes in the spirit of the modern proverb to “fake it ‘till we make it”. Our hymns, our prayers, our sermon, and teachings and studies, our very worship strive to reach your grace, your glory, your power, your wisdom and your courage, for the living of these days.
Lord God, in these days we have seen the pomp and circumstance in England among President, Queen, and Prime Minister. We hear the echoes of hope and horror from China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square. We remember the sacrifices of D-Day when so many entered the Valley of the Shadow of Death, yearning to end a great evil. We marvel at the exercise in democracy in India, and yet worry about democracy’s fragility in the face of the most strident fears. We watch the migration of hopes and dreams across borders and seas, escaping violence and poverty and oppression. We hear the voices of protest and the response of gunfire in Nicaragua, Sudan, and Venezuela.
Loving God, yes, we see and hear and feel and marvel and worry and watch. And pray. We pray that your Holy presence will be known in every circumstance. We pray that your grace, glory, and power, of which we sing so hopefully, will bless those whose lives are so frail, or empty, or lost.
And we pray that you will grant us wisdom, and grant us courage, for the living of these days. For those in power and those without, for the 1% and not, for the privileged and the denied, for the believers and the doubters, for the whole and the broken, be our Redeemer, our Messiah, our Savior, our Strong Deliverer, our Trinity of all that is Holy. Amen.
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