Lord have mercy is my most frequent prayer. It’s what I pray when I don’t know what else to say, when otherwise my prayers would fall apart into incomprehensible groanings (which I also allow space for and spent time this morning doing, as I continued grieving all those killed or injured at the terrorist attack at Club Q this weekend in Colorado Springs).
In the face of the tragic and incomprehensible, we offer what little we have, which colloquially is often expressed as our “thoughts and prayers.”
If thoughts and prayers are sacrilegiously coupled with studied and intentional inaction, politicizing disregard for the lives of LGBTQIA+ people, it is no wonder the response from those grieving and afraid is “don’t give me your thoughts and prayers.”
However, abusus non tollit proprium usus. The abuse of something does not disallow it’s appropriate use. So with prayer, simply because we witness hypocritical prayers does not mean prayer is unimportant or ineffective. Prayer is in fact the most important thing, it is our manner of union with God, which then moves us into action in the world aligned with God.
In fact prayer is in Christian perspective us joining Christ’s prayers in the Spirit out of abiding love for God’s world. Even the lament “don’t give me your thoughts and prayers” is in fact a kind of prayer.
In the current back-and-forth on social media around gun control (we should ban AR-15s today) and our culture’s continued war against LGBTQIA+ people simply existing, perhaps we lose sight of this theological insight. In our grief, in our rage, we may miss that even our own social media posts are themselves prayers.
In a very early series of sermons by the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, he says,
“Prayer is intimacy with God and contemplation (theoria) of the invisible. It satisfies our yearnings and makes us equal with angels. Through it good prospers, evil is destroyed, and sinners will be converted. Prayer is the enjoyment of things present and the substance of things to come… Now I think that, even if we spent our whole life in constant communion with God in prayer and thanksgiving, we should be as far from having made God an adequate return as if we had not even begun to desire making the Giver of all good things such a return.” (Sermon 1; The Lord’s Prayer, Beatitudes, 24-25).
So yes tell it like it is, name the idolatrous prayers of the NRA and Lauren Boebert and politicians backed by the NRA are praying. Those are prayers to their god Moloch and acknowledgement of their willingness to sacrifice queer people at the altar of their god.
But then join Christ in his prayers which he continually brings before God his Father. Use all the prayers at your disposal. Pray the prayers of lament and rage in the Psalms. Pray prayers that good will prosper, that evil will be destroyed, that heard-hearted politicians will be converted, that violent young men considering such hateful actions might turn toward peace and healing.
Pray all those prayers. Then also, and importantly, act. You can do at least the following today. You can write your senators and advocate that they pass the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act.
You can support financially organizations who have been involved over the long haul in promoting gun sense and safety. One of the most active and effective is Moms Demand Action.
You can pray the Litany In The Wake Of A Mass Shooting or organize a group to pray it with you.
You can also challenge bigoted religious communities who still exclude and condemn LGBTQIA+ people, even and especially your own communities. Do the work.
Finally, stop voting into office craven politicians who sacrifice people at the altar of Moloch.
Yes, many in every generation have “sterilize[d] living religion into formula and ritual, where no psalm may be recited in a new form lest it perhaps turn into a genuine prayer” (Dorothee Soelle). But isn’t it precisely our deepest hope that a genuine prayer would emerge? Because a genuine prayer would change everything.
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Reflections from a progressive Lutheran pastor in the South.
I attend an LCMS church and they seem more oppose to the gay community. We need to learn that sexual orientation is not a choice, but a given at birth. I also understand that there is a mistranslation in scripture that refers to pedophilia instead of other sexual activity. It would be nice to explore that. I recently lost a cousin to natural causes, his ministerial father always regretted his orientation. It would have been a comfort if he had known there was nothing to do about that.