Here is a moving prayer by Walter Brueggemann
Our right names
You God toward whom we pray and
about whom we sing, and
from whom we claim our very life.
In your presence, in our seasons of ache and yearning and honesty,
We know our right names.
In your presence we know ourselves to be aliens and strangers.
We gasp in recognition, taken by surprise at this disclosure,
because we had nearly settled in
and taken up residence in the wrong place.
For all of that, we turn out to be
we strangers, unfamiliar with your covenant,
remote from your people,
at odds too much with sisters and brothers,
we aliens, with no hope
without promise
with very little sense of belonging or knowing
or risking or trusting,
It is in your presence that we come face to face with out beset,
beleaguered existence in the world.
BUT
You are the one who by your odd power
calls us by new names that we can
receive only from you and
relish only in your company.
You call us now,
citizens… with all the rights and privileges and
responsibilities pertaining to life in your commonwealth.
You call us now saints, not because we are good or gentle
or perfect,
but because you have spotted us and marked us
and claimed us for yourself and your purposes.
You call us members… and we dare imagine that we belong
and may finally come home.
So with daring and freedom,
we move from our old names known too well
to the new names you speak over us,
and in the very utterance we are transformed.
In the moment of utterance and transformation, we look past
ourselves and past our sisters and brothers here present. And
we notice so many other siblings broken, estranged, consumed
in rage and shame and loneliness, much born of wretched
economics. We bid powerfully that you name afresh all your
creatures this day, even as you name us afresh. We pray for
nothing more and nothing less than your name for us all,
utterly new, restored heaven and earth.
And we will take our new names with us when we leave this place,
treasuring them all day long,
citizen,
saint,
member,
even as we take with us the odd name of Jesus. Amen.
In response to this prayer, I wrote out what hope means for me:
Hope for me is living into that new name, that new creation that Christ has crafted!
Where…
- Shame is vanquished
- Inordinate desires and cravings are quelled
- Howling loneliness, is met with intimacy
- My obsession to produce and perform is transformed into Sabbath rest
- Active and passive prejudice is overwhelmed with reckless compassion for the other
- The swords of the world are beaten into plowshares and spears of my neighbors are converted into pruning hooks
- The grappling of motives, evening the cloaked respectable ones, are purified
- Killing fields are exchanged for the sweet peaceable land of Beulah
- A roaring lion will lie down with a lamb
- I will not be called disappointment, but embraced
- I will not be called wounded, but healed
- I will not be called inadequate, but ample
- I will not be called broken, but whole
- I will not be called unloved, but beloved
- Hopelessness, despair, and desolation are swallowed up in sheer, unfettered HOPE!!!