Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. For your hands are stained with blood, your fingers with guilt. Your lips have spoken lies, and your tongue mutters wicked things.
No-one calls for justice; no-one pleads his case with integrity. They rely on empty arguments and speak lies; they conceive trouble and give birth to evil…Their deeds are evil deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands..
The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths. They have turned them into crooked roads; no-one who walks in them will know peace. So justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We look for light, but all is darkness:”
(Isa 591-4,6&8-9)
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’.”
(Matt 23.37-39)
O Lord, what bitterness and despair come upon us as we consider what is happening today in our world. Nation at war with nation; regimes scheming and manipulating the lives of millions for economic and political ends. Implacable hatreds being fed by rhetoric, biased re-tellings of history, entrenched positions which must be defended and therefore justified at any cost.
The agony and the anger together scream at us through our phones’ newsfeed, our newspaper headlines, and we cannot blot them out. The intractable and utterly tangled webs of history continue to give birth to pain, cruelty, human brutality and all forms of violence and destruction.
The narrative of history is made up of the lives of millions of individuals, each one precious and known to you. The great stories of nations are worked out in the details of my life and the lives of people like me around the world – the small, ordinary ones who never pretended to have authority or to understand the trajectories of power. It is the suffering of the small people which rips the guts out of us. We see ourselves in their faces as they search for loved ones under the rubble of bombed buildings; we see our children in the limp bodies carried from battlefields; we see our elders in the frail forms stumbling from pitiful shelter to shelter in an effort to escape the violence.
Fear and hatred are breeding fear and hatred, as they have always done and will continue to do until you return to bring an end to the pain and darkness… how long, O Lord, will it be? The roots of the troubles lie so far back in history, and are so overgrown with all that has happened through the intervening years – with all its partial truth-telling, and inadequately understood motivations – that in many places there seems no hope of any resolution which can bring peace and justice. Where is your perfect judgement, O Lord? Where is your healing peace?
For all those who today are immersed in conflict, violence and fear, who know you as Lord, and call upon Jesus as their saviour, I pray today. May they be given the courage they need to face whatever happens with faith in you. May they be given the moment-by-moment strength to live for you in their own situation, and to point others to their only hope – Jesus. May they shine as lights in the darkness, and testify to your presence. May they not fear death, since it will bring them home to you. May they be given courage as they watch loved ones suffer, and may their faith not fail.
For all those today who are in positions of power – to authorise or restrain violence; to advise for or against destruction; to act in mercy or to act in ruthlessness – I pray, O Lord. In your sovereignty, work out peace, justice and healing so that the suffering will be ended. May those in power be appalled at what they have let loose, and instead bend all their efforts toward peace, seeking to promote the well-being of their people without violence and with justice.
Lord, God of the nations, it is only by your power at work in human hearts that such things can come about. Of ourselves, we are hopeless and helpless to stem this tide of evil. Your people beg that you will have mercy, that your spirit might move to transform darkness to light and bring peace where there is no peace. Your arm, O Lord, is mighty to save; your heart is full of compassion; let us see your kingdom come!