A Prayer For Corporate Worship...

Good Morning to each and everyone of you dear steemit friends. Let's say this prayer... Pondering Charlottesville...

It was your delight, Father, to create the one human nature we share in a multiplicity of races. You taught us that all men and women share in the triune image you bestow on all persons. Yet forces of division fueled by fear, pride, ignorance, and hatred have plagued our minds and hearts from the moment we fell away from your divine community, waging a war from within and without against the colorful diversity and loving oneness you intended for humanity.

Founded on created equality our nation's actual history mars the beauty of our rich racial difference, and denies the full dignity of the divine image in us all; this chasm between our stated ideals and our brutish reality saddens, dismays, and angers us. Cause us to repent of participation in a culture that does violence to the wonderful tapestry of human faces; that tears, scorches, and rends the fabric of human unity. We are one human family under your thrice-holy and ever-enduring Love but our thoughts and actions portray allegiance to the lesser gods of bigotry, injury, apartheid, enmity, and racial supremacy.
Help us renounce apathy and silence wherever there is tolerance for an unholy, limited vision of humanity. Give us courage to speak and act in defense of those most at risk of hostility and harm.

Come by your Spirit and shield all those experiencing injustice, cruelty, and savagery because of race. Come by your Spirit and defend those who protect the oppressed, who guard the dignity of your image in all humans. Bring swift justice to those who embrace threats, terror, and bloodshed; who worship violence and death. May these enemies of our common created goodness be visited by angels and converted to the cause of human flourishing revealed to us in your Son, Jesus Christ, in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither rich nor poor, and in whom we, together with all creation, hope for universal reconciliation with each other by and in you and your All-Holy Spirit. Amen