We usually try and spread out our encouragements throughout the week with Mondays' Psalms, Wednesdays’ Pastoral Notes, and Fridays’ Collective Prayers. But in light of the unrest and division of our city at this moment, we thought it would be helpful to get a head-start on our prayers together this week.
Earnest Campbell was the long-time pastor of Riverside Church in New York City. Over his years of living and ministering in the city, he crafted dozens of prayers to give voice to the Spirit’s heart for the place and people he loved now compiled in a book titled, Where Cross the Crowded Ways. At the beginning of the collection is a prayer called “A City-Dwellers Prayer.” This is Campbell’s consistent prayer, his trunk from which the prayers that followed branch out and bloom in detailed passion and beauty.
Your Gospel Community leaders have been using this prayer to pray for you and our city since the beginning of the year, and we’d like to invite you to join us. As you pray these words over and over again in the coming days, weeks, months and years; you’ll find the Spirit adding depth and color (names, faces, issues, injustices, hopes, expectations, convictions, and confidence) to particular sections at particular moments, as the Spirit joins our heart with his for our city. We are confident that the Spirit will do so today as well, at this moment, for this place and people we have been given to love. So, let us "city-dwellers" join together in prayer through the Spirit this day and for years to come.
A CITY-DWELLERS PRAYER
O God of every time and place,
prevail among us too;
Within the city that we love
its promise to renew.
Our people move with downcast eyes,
tight, sullen, and afraid;
Surprise us with your joy divine,
for we would be remade.
O God whose will we can resist,
but cannot overcome,
Forgive our harsh and strident ways,
the harm that we have done.
Like Babel’s builders long ago
we raise our lofty towers,
And like them, too, our words divide,
and pride lays waste our powers.
Behind the masks that we maintain
to shut our sadness in,
There lurks the hope, however dim,
to live once more as men.
Let wrong embolden us to fight,
and need excite our care;
If not us, who? If not now, when?
If not here, God then where?
Our forebears stayed their minds on you
in village, farm, and plain;
Help us, their crowed, harried kin,
no less your peace to claim.
Give us to know that you do love
each soul that you have made;
That size does not diminish grace,
nor concrete hide your gaze.
Grant us, O God, who labor here
within this throbbing maze,
A forward-looking, saving hope
to galvanize our days.
Let Christ, who loved Jerusalem,
and wept its sins to mourn,
Make just our laws and pure our hearts;
so shall we be reborn!
Amen.