WORSHIP—THE WORK OF THE PEOPLE

A Prayer For Indigenous People Undoing What Columbus Day Wrongfully Includes Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One: Have mercy on us. Cause your compassion to lead us into healing and wholeness. Today is a time of conflict and confusion, a day when many issues rise to the surface and remind us of the mess we are in. This day calls for . . . repentance doing the work of justice and peace making healing reconciliation and moving into the future where the past does not repeat itself. We confess, O God, that we have taken a land from its native people, we have oppressed the same native people forcing them into a life that is so limited and controlled by our greed and need for power. In the name of empire, we have become and sustained racism, working diligently to keep people in poverty. How can we ever make reparation for all the harm that has been done? Slowly and with great pangs of change, we as a nation have made progress. The progress, however, continues to be met with resistance and conflict at every point. Some days it feels like we are taking steps backward rather than forward. And, to be quite honest, we come together in prayer, praying for those who lives are oppressed by our culture and governmental policies, simply to relieve our sense of guilt. Our actual work and effort to change life in liberation and freedom pales in comparison to the way of Jesus. So, on this day, demand for us, with your powerful presence, that we lift people out of the ways and means by which they are oppressed and harmed. Grant us a new and true ability to see and acknowledge the divine honor and dignity that you have placed within each person. And, let us not rest until all people are equal and share the equity of access to the resources of your creation. May we have the courage and volition to make things right: the need to celebrate Columbus and his discoveries are far less that our need to celebrate the native people of this land. O God, hear our prayer and bring peace with justice. May we have the wisdom and foresight to restructure and change: making reservations not a prison on confinement, and a stewardship of reverence for the sacred places of indigenous history. O God, hear our prayer and bring peace with justice. May we have the strength of mind and spirit to practice what we preach: making human rights the rights of all people, without exception, providing for the health and well-being of every person within this nation. O God, hear our prayer and bring peace with justice. May we have the vision to see what is possible and how possibilities are accomplished: living as a people in a mutuality of caring and sharing, where there is no place for either wealth or poverty. O God, hear our prayer and bring peace with justice. May we have the ability to find the ways of careful solution: giving mind, always, to doing no harm, and including everyone in the healing process that will make us a better people. O God, hear our prayer and bring peace with justice. Finally, O God, we pray your love to embrace each of us in a life that has meaning only in our loving of one another. Free us from the idols we worship. Enable us to honor you in praise and thanksgiving. Remind us that the work of undoing racism . . . patriarchy . . . gender bias . . . ageism . . .  ableness . . . and all forms to dehumanizing others . . . is the job we must do. It must be done by us, and it must be ignited by the spirit of truth. So, as we — on this day — take a good long look at ourselves, may we claim history with all it facts to be our story . . . a story of how easy it is for shadows to overcome the daylight, for the dark night of the soul to overcome what is right, and good, and beautiful, for people to be less than who we were created to be, and to loose the understanding of whose we were created to be. Spirit of God, move upon the chaos and confusion, recreating a world and a people as it is meant to be.