A Prayer of Lament & Confession | Christ Presbyterian Church | Cool Springs

Written by Melanie Rainer.
Father God,
We come to you this morning with a mix of exhaustion and hope. We praise you for the advancement of science and medicine that have led us into the third and prayerfully final act of Covid-19. We thank you for the ways you have worked in our lives, in our church, in our community, and around the world in the midst of this global tragedy. We lament the loss of more than 500,000 image bearers in the United States, and the more than 2.5 million worldwide.
We praise you for the new families and friends you have brought to Christ Presbyterian Church in Cool Springs in the past year. We praise you for the 12 new babies we have welcomed since March 2020. We praise you for bringing Christina Brandsma into our midst as our new kids and care coordinator. We praise you for protecting our congregation, for healing those afflicted by Covid-19, and for providing the common grace of technology to allow us to worship together while socially distant.
But God, we lament the fractures our church, our community, and society have felt this year. We lament the increase of violence toward the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. We condemn the use of harmful, hateful rhetoric against them. We specifically praise you for the gift of our AAPI brothers and sisters, especially in our own congregation, and we lament the unjust targeting they have felt as a result of their heritage and race. We condemn racism, sexism, and cultural stereotypes. We weep for the families and friends of the precious 8 lives lost in Atlanta last week as a result of violence, sexism, racism, and disordered sinful patterns. God, we lament the systemic and individual sin that led to those brutal murders. We grieve the lives lost. We grieve the wounds against your beloved image bearing children. We lament disordered and unbiblical perspectives on sex and sexual temptation, and the ugly fruit of those perspectives when it becomes sexual violence, when it turns women into objects to be avoided or eliminated rather than image bearers to be equally respected. We cry out for justice, mercy, healing. We cry out for you to return soon, Jesus.
We lament the ways it is hard to be a woman today. We lament the violent murder of the young woman in Great Britain this week, and the resulting protests in the streets of London. We lament the loss of life of Asian American women in Atlanta. We lament femicide in Latin America, the jailing of womens rights activists in Saudi Arabia, and the fears facing ordinary women in our community. We lament any theology, sociology, or cultural construct that sees women as objects to possess and control rather than full image bearers, heirs to the riches of the kingdom of God. We praise you, the God who sees and loves and trusts and empowers women. You are the God of Hagar, of Marian, of Ruth and Naomi, of Esther, of Deborah and Jael, of Mary the mother of Jesus, of the woman at the well, of the Samaritan Woman, of Phoebe and Lydia and Priscilla. All women who encountered God, all women who acted, taught, loved, and believed in Yahweh or in Jesus, the Messiah. All women who were protected, loved, and saved by God.
God, we confess the many ways our own sin clouds our view of our neighbors. We lament the sin that lives inside us. The sin that causes us to love ourselves more than our neighbors, that causes us to seek our wellbeing above the wellbeing of our city, our country, and our world. We lament the cost of our sin.
We confess it is often easier for us to speak than to listen. It is easier for us to post or retweet than to reflect deeply into our own hearts, our own minds. We confess we often jump on short-term bandwagons rather than doing the long-term work of reordering our hearts and of retraining our minds. We confess that we are quick to dismiss and slow to learn. Father, forgive us. Holy Spirit, work in us. Jesus, be near to us.
We confess our unworthiness, our faithlessness, and our fear. We praise you for the full atoning sacrifice of your son, Jesus, which we will hear more about this morning from Pastor Russ. Give us eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to love you.
In Jesus's name we pray, Amen.