I want to tell you about one of my favorite prayers. I have been writing a lot over the last few weeks about loving your enemies and praying for those who hate you. To be clear, I am not naturally inclined to do either of these things – but Jesus clearly and directly commanded his followers to do so, and I am trying to be one of his followers. I’m a baptized Christian and I am trying to take that seriously, to take Jesus seriously, to look at the world through Jesus’ eyes, to believe that the words he says are life-giving.
I don’t really want to love my enemies, and I don’t really want to pray for people who hate me. Who would? But I also don’t want my heart to be filled with hate. I don’t want to fall into the hell of dehumanizing others. I don’t want to let the pettiness, fear, and violence of my heart win. I want to love the world with the same love that God used to create and care for it.
So I guess I’m going to keep trying to love people I find unlovable, and pray for the people who find me unlovable. If you’ve been following along these last few weeks, it’s possible you’re finding me redundant. But, look, for the Christian, love is supposed to be at the center of everything. If you start to think of me as the person who is obnoxiously repetitive about Jesus’ commandment to love, I can live with that.
Anyway, so this prayer I want to tell you about isn’t explicitly praying for our enemies – I’ve given examples of that in past blogs and I know you’re still working your way through memorizing those. This is a prayer from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer called a Prayer for Social Justice. Before I read it, I think it’s important to acknowledge that the term “social justice” is often polemicized in our current culture wars. So please know that it was written almost 50 years ago, and also that, regardless of any political loyalties any of us may have, as Christians we are meant to be creating societies that are just and equitable. So social justice is not supposed to be exclusive to one party or ideology.
Here is the prayer:
Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart, and especially the hearts of the people of this land, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
We have been praying this prayer on Sundays for the last several months. It has seemed appropriate. You’ll notice the prayer doesn’t mention enemies. It moves beyond that into a place that acknowledges that we all belong to each other whether we want to or not – which is something I believe. We all belong to each other. It is a great gift when we will allow it to be, and a great curse when we don’t.
It is God’s hope that we humans – not just Americans, but all of us – will allow the barriers which divide us to crumble. This was in fact how St. Paul saw Jesus: As the one who with magnificent, forgiving love and sacrifice was breaking down the walls that people and cultures had built so that we could experience peace and unity. Does that sound a little idealistic to you? I have that problem too sometimes, thinking that the work of Jesus was idealistic instead of practical.
But praying this prayer has the potential to feel too idealistic, I think, in at least two ways.
The first way this prayer can fall into idealism is in how we might choose to interpret the line that goes, “that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace.” If we’re not careful here, we can mistake this for the idea that all that is keeping us from living in justice and peace are our own disagreements and hardness of heart.
The truth is, some of the barriers we experience are systemic, and they create reason for suspicion and hatred. Sometimes suspicions and hatreds are not themselves the problem, but symptoms of more deeply rooted problems. If I support defunding your child’s school, if I refuse to recognize your gender identity and vote for laws that marginalize you, if I cheer the removal of laws that protect you from discrimination, I have no right to wonder why there is a barrier between us. I have no business pondering why we can’t just disagree and get along.
I have a responsibility to you. I believe that is present in this prayer and must not be overlooked. We are praying that God would move the hearts of the people of our land, that God would move our hearts. The idea being that we want God to help us truly see each other’s humanity and belonging in such a way that we work together to remove the barriers that separate us. This, then, does not have to be idealism: it is the practical application of the command to love your neighbor, to love your enemy. See the humanity in all in such a way that you are moved to tear down the cultural, societal, and socio-economic barriers that separate us.
That brings us to the second possible way that we could make this prayer idealistic, safe, and finally innocuous. We could simply pray it, then sit back and change none of our own behavior, just waiting for God to do the work. Say it’s in God’s hands and call it a day. Friend, this will not work. The thing about our Christian theology is that we say that we are the Body of Christ. And Christ is the one who’s actions heal and reconcile the world. If both of these things are true, then God has incorporated us into the work of healing for which this world longs. We don’t just pray the prayer. We say Amen, get up off our knees, and we get to work helping to make the prayer come true.
I do believe in divine intervention. I believe that if we give up, God will be faithful all the same – faithful to us even if we are apathetic or overwhelmed (or some magical mixture of both). God will be faithful to their promise to bring justice and peace to the world they created, redeemed and sustain in love. And all the while I believe that God chooses to use us as part of the divine intervention. It is only a hazy and narrow perspective of divine action that keeps us from recognizing God working through the lives, words, and actions of our neighbors, of ourselves. What a tragedy it would be if we were to ignore God’s invitation to make the barriers crumble. What a pity it would be if we, who are called to the work of love, instead of rolling up our sleeves and standing next to God, ended up watching from the sidelines as justice and peace are brought to bear.
You and I were not made to sit on the sidelines. We were not made for idealistic pie in the sky prayer. We were not made to live softer lives in simpler times. We were made by God for this time here and now. We were made for love. We were created to participate with God in the moving of hearts, the crumbling of barriers, the disappearance of suspicions, the cessation of hatred. We were created in blessing to answer this prayer.
