Prayer for a Troubled Family

We are a troubled family, O God.  Surely you must shake your head in dismay at the way your children bicker and fight.  Muslims and Jews – older brothers who were always competing, always running away and coming home, and still hostage-taking and dying in each other’s arms; and Christians, younger siblings always flouting their coat of many colors and winning few sympathies with our smug self-assurance; red and yellow, black, brown and white sisters and brothers constantly wrestling and accusing each other of rifling through our closets and drawers, stealing our favorite sweater and socks; constantly asserting that our parents love us the most.  

Forgive us we pray.  Heal this household so jealous and estranged.  Continue to raise up bridge-builders like Martin Luther King, jr whose birthday we recognize this weekend; peacemakers like Desmond Tutu we recently lost; prophets and poets who name aloud our sin and vividly remind us of and call us back to your vision for all creation.  Heal your troubled family, we pray.

 

Bridge builders, peacemakers and prophets in our own way, may we ever more contagiously model the household you intend – yes, in our own families, but in this household of faith that is your church.  Nudge us in fresh and compelling ways.  

• The covenant still needs binding; 
• the commandments still need following; 
• the gospel still needs preaching; 
• the apostles’ wisdom still needs teaching; 
• community still needs building; 
• your Way still needs exampling “on earth as it is in heaven”... 

...and we would be your people living and serving and bearing witness in precisely such discipling ways.    

 

And so use us, we pray - one small part of your family seeking the kind of household your heart longs for – siblings, no longer spitting in each other’s eye nor dying by each other’s hands, but gathered around your table.  

Reconcile us, heal us, stir us...

...for heaven's sake.  And our own.

Amen.

(Prayed with the disciples who are Runnells Christian Church, January 16, 2021)