Creator, like other ELCA congregations, embraces our community and generally finds the following: Being a citizen of a country involves all who participate in the ongoing work of a pluralistic democracy, seeking freedom, justice, and belonging for themselves and for others.
ELCA Presiding Bishop Yehiel Curry We Will Not Grow Weary
On Minnesota - What Is Yours To Do?
On the Streets of Minneapolis Bruce Springsteen “There were bullets where mercy should have stood.” Reaction to On the Streets of Minneapolis
Holy One of justice and mercy,
You who hear the cry before it becomes words,
You who know grief before we dare to name it,
We come to You carrying a sorrow that is older than this moment
and sharper because it has arrived again.
You tell us through the prophet:
Learn to do good. Seek justice. Correct oppression.
Bring justice to the fatherless. Plead the widow’s cause.
Not as a slogan.
Not as a metaphor.
But as a way of life.
We confess how often we have wanted grief to be new,
so that we would not have to face its lineage.
How often we have wanted violence to be an exception,
so that we could avoid reckoning with the systems that authorize it?
Forgive us for the comfort we have mistaken for peace.
Grief has found us again.
It has found us in Minneapolis.
It has found us in the names we carry.
Names that refuse to be reduced to statistics,
Names that settle into our bodies and will not let us sleep.
This grief is not only private.
It is communal.
It is ancestral.
It is the grief of those who know what it means
to be watched, targeted, disappeared,
and told that this is the cost of order.
And yet, Holy One,
From this ground of grief, You are calling something forth.
We thank You for protectors,
For those who refuse to stand apart,
Who chooses presence over distance,
who stand shoulder to shoulder in the cold
because abandoning one another is no longer an option.
Bless their courage.
Bless their anger when it is born of love.
Bless their fear when it sharpens care rather than cruelty.
Bless their refusal to let state power have the final word
on whose life matters.
Teach us to understand that protection is holy work.
That standing-with is a form of prayer.
That justice is not an abstraction,
but a practice learned in streets and kitchens,
in shared warmth and shared risk,
in communities that organize not from hierarchy,
but from relationships.
Where empire insists on control,
Teach us connection.
Where law is used to erase dignity,
Teach us to plead the cause of the vulnerable,
not from pity, but from solidarity.
Make us people who do not look away.
People who know that grief can orient us toward responsibility.
People who understand that love, when it becomes communal,
is a force strong enough to interrupt violence.
Give us the imagination to see one another clearly.
Give us the humility to follow the wisdom
of those who have been naming this truth for generations.
Give us the endurance to stay present
long after the headlines move on.
May we learn to do good, not someday, but now.
May we seek justice, not in theory, but in practice.
May we correct oppression, not with silence, but with our bodies,
our voices, our shared life.
And when fear tells us to retreat,
remind us that protection is what love looks like
when it refuses to be alone.
Amen.
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| At the Deathbed. Edvard Munch, 1895. |
My Brother-In-Law Bill Davie Readiing this on his Poetry Break (19:42)
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