Our Lives with Gun Violence before God: A Prayer by Walter Brueggemann

In light of another mass shooting this past Monday at a  private school in Nashville that took the lives of three children and three adults, along with the shooter, I am sharing this prayer from Walter Brueggemann’s book Acting in the Wake: Prayers for Justice (WJK, 2023), which speaks to the reality of gun violence in our world. It is a prayer that invites us to act and not remain passive in the face of acts of violence.  

**********

Father of orphans—

     so you are named in the ancient text (Ps. 68:5)—

                You who notices when no one else notices;

                You who treasures when no one else treasures;

                You who guards and protects when no one else is vigilant . . .

Mother who never forgets—

     so you are named in the ancient text (Isa. 59:15)—

                You who remembers tots birthed and lost,

                You who aches to nurse and give comfort,

                You who writes down their names indelibly,

                You who champions forgotten children . . .

 

And we—who so unlike you:

                We are prone to violence in a culture of violence,

                                ready for torture and sex crimes

                                and abuse of the poor,

                We who have our orgies of hate,

                We who have our sprees of anger,

                We who have our seasons of greed and anxiety,

                                carnival of violence.

We are unlike you . . . the father who protects

                                                in a culture of violence,

                                . . . the mother who remembers

                                                in a culture that discards and deletes,

You in your fidelity and staying power,

We in our flimsy disregard and indifference.

 

Before you now we dare three petitions:

·         That you be near to those children lost to us,

     To hold them and their families in your abiding care,

     That you be near to children at risk,

        to enfold them in safety;

·         That you should forgive the perpetrators who

     In a frenzy of rage know not what they do;

     Forgive them even in this culture of revenge and retaliation;

·         That you should transform us and our culture,

                      That we may be a culture of protection that pays attention,

                      That our thirst for hurt may be curbed by a system of laws,

                That mindless violence may be contained by a vision of justice

                       that attends to the vulnerable,

                That we may become a neighborhood of charity and restoration,

                That we reconcile without revenge

                       Our neighbors and our enemies.

 

It boggles our mind that we might govern as you govern;

                That we might forgive as you forgive;

                That we might notice as you notice;

                That we might hope in you amid our hopelessness;

                That we who are unlike you

                May become like you in mercy that heals

                      and in justice that transforms.

 

We pray in the vulnerable name of Jesus

                Who invests in your fatherliness,

                Who remembers and cherishes like the mother you are,

                Who invites the children to him and welcomes them.

We pray in the awareness of his suffering love

                And in the power of his Easter life. Amen

 

                Good Friday 2013 Columbia Theological Seminary

 

Taken from Walter Brueggemann, Acting in the Wake: Prayers for Justice, (WJK Books, 2023), pp. 28-30.