Synod Executive Forrest Claassen shares a prayer following another shooting death in Minneapolis:
Dear God, I don’t know how to pray.
I want to ask your mercy upon the United States. We don’t deserve your mercy. But isn’t that what mercy is, something undeserved?
But what would your mercy look like? A return to a quiet peace at the expense of the suffering? Going back to the comfortable illusion that we are a shining city, and forgetting those whom we have ignored? Your word warns against seeking only peace in our day, or saying peace, peace where there is no peace.
So is your mercy something harder, more painful? A cleansing? A moment of reckoning, when we see the deadly wages of our national sin? Do you have a better, redeemed future in mind for the USA, but we will reach only through floods and fiery trials? Do you mean to purify and temper this country, “our dross to consume and our gold to refine”? O God, give us endurance if you do.
Or is all this just a fool’s errand, to pray for mercy? Americans have thought of the USA as the new Israel, the people of God charged to be a light to the nations. But is it?
What if this country is not your people, whose land you intend to heal if they humble themselves and pray and turn from their wicked ways? What if it is one of the nations, one of those who conspire in vain against you and your anointed, who shall perish from your land? You say that your people’s citizenship is in heaven, not a nation-state of earth. You tell us not to trust in princes. Have we — those who are in fact called by your name — traded our hope in a better country for the paltry promises of this one?
And if the USA is not your people, are we seeing the beginning of the end? Instead of the flush when the fever breaks, instead of the painful spasms right before addiction loses its grip — are these rather the death throes of a failed human endeavor? Is America not Israel, but rather Assyria, Babylon, Persia or Rome — ancient empires lost to time? Is its end what you now intend?
If that, God — O God!, if that — protect the little ones. Even if we burn, defend those who have come to this moment through no fault of their own—those who, perhaps, have suffered at our hands along the way.
Perhaps that is how I will pray, O God. Protect the little ones. Lift the humble up. Defend the poor and needy. Let your kingdom come — and prepare us to welcome it.