With the new Arizona immigration law and a senate candidate who just this week questioned the Civil Rights Act of 1964, perhaps the prayer my father recently shared at a church breakfast couldn't have been more timely. It was originally written by Gordon Ruff, a Presbyterian missionary and parish associate at the church I grew up in, back in the 80's. Funny how our conversations with God never seem to go out of style.
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Lord Jesus, we praise you as one who came long ago to a point in time and in geography, to Bethlehem; we praise you as one who comes to us now in grace through Word, Sacrament, celebration, and encounter; and we praise you as one who will come in judgment and in mercy and in grace in the future.
At your first coming your weakness disturbed the strong; your poverty disturbed the rich; your refusal to be bound by old customs disturbed the religiously correct people.
As we pray for your continued coming into our world, into our church, into our homes, into our hearts, we recognize our own unreadiness to receive you. If you should come as one of a different class, with a different style of life and a different way of reverencing God, we would find it disturbing and upsetting. Forgive our rigidity, our closed minds, our unwillingness to accept new ways and different people. Forgive that we should foreclose the future out of excessive loyalty to the past. Forbid that we should cling to the good so tightly that we miss the best.
Have mercy on us, lest in shutting out all that is different and new and uncomfortable and disturbing we shut out you, O Christ. Amen.
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