Invocation

Okay, I admit it, it was wonderful to do the prayer on Saturday morning at the Martin Luther King Community Youth Breakfast.

I got to pray again. Which we don’t do at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fairbanks.

It gives me second thoughts. About being a UU for the rest of my life, I mean. There are times I miss being one of the Jesus band. I still see him as a magnificent person: gutsy, brave, sweet, smart, audacious, fearless, visionary, hard-working, and with a profound capacity for realism and sorrow without getting drowned by it. And I know I’ll have to lay low with my admiration for Jesus in the UU kingdom as much as I had to lay low with my feminism, environmentalism, or GLBT-ism in the Lutheran corral.

Sigh.

Anyway, it was really a lovely gift that my friend from UUFF, Rebecca Clack, asked me to do the invocation. She gave me a hint at what was possible by saying “sometimes the invocation is more memorable than the featured speaker’s presentation.” Hm.

Most of the week that high expectation had me a little paralyzed. Partly it was because my style with prayer is very personal, I can’t do it unless it both comes from a deep, believing, transforming place in me, and reaches out honestly to the hearts of others. And this has to be accomplished using language that both of us know and love (why it doesn’t work with UU’s), in an nuanced, artful, truthful, heart-to-heart manner. Meaning, in part, that I need to access the awesome images and stories of the tradition without being held accountable for literal belief or others’ projections. I’m not sure if people yesterday were willing to accord me that freedom, and if not, then my effort was, at best, poetry, at worst, speechifying.

The other reason I was anxious was this media back-and-forth going on between Hillary Clinton suggesting that it was President Johnson who was needed to get legislation (the Voting Rights Act 1965) to DO SOMETHING about what Martin Luther King and friends were marching about.

This was clearly a swat at Barack Obama’s exhilarating MLK-esque orations, and his appealing beyond “race” to unify people. The Hillary camp wanted to play the race card, because they know that Obama’s greatest strength is that he’s a candidate who happens to be black, rather than the “black candidate.” I think this did end up playing a role, while not a direct mention, in the prayer.

The gathering at the J.P. Jones center down in South Fairbanks was lively and fun. Families everywhere, teenagers, toddlers, babies. Rebecca was in her element, introducing me around, finding me coffee, staying on top of everything. A spiffily dressed young minister-in-training at the Victory Baptist Chruch, Johnathan Kenney, was the Master of Ceremonies, presiding with an ease and flair beyond his years.

I was up first. “Let us gather our hearts in prayer.”

“We come before you this day O God,
and remember that you long for our love
and our presence
as much as we cry out
for your love and presence.

“You have been our God through the ages,
you are the one who called Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam,
the one who comforted Job, and confronted Ahab,
the one who inspired David who wrote and sang you Psalms
his whole life long,
you are the beloved of Mary, the father of Jesus.

“You brought us out of Egypt, you fed us in the wilderness,
you guided us home across the Jordan,
and opened to us a land of milk and honey.
You brought us back from exile in Babylon,
and helped us rebuild Jerusalem, your beautiful city,
and made it your eternal home, your dwelling place forever.

“When, in this new world, your covenant with us was defiled
by violence, brutality, and injustice, you were filled with rage.
Our desperate cries were met by your righteous thunder,
men and women heard your anguish and they spoke your word,
They risked their lives, they faced death but lifted up hope,
they made liberty their last breath, and truth their enduring legacy.
They lived by acts of unbounded courage, and earth-shaking compassion,
because they had seen your face, and knew you to be their Strong Friend.

“You taught us the way of Justice in the face of oppression,
the way of non-violent loving-kindness
to stop in their tracks those who had sold themselves to militarism.
Your beloved one, Jesus, lived among the poor and oppressed,
and died at the hands of the soldiers of the Roman empire.
They laughed at his weakness,
they mocked his frightened band of followers,
they tortured him to send a message to all who would defy their lord,
the god of War and Power. The God of the Fear of Death.

“And on that desperate hillside
where the earth dripped with blood,
where the women knelt and wept,
there a seed was planted.
A whole new way of life took root.
In the womb of human chaos and fear
God’s way of love was born.

“You raised up men and women who heard and understood.
They saw once and for all
the power of truth and courage against violence and fear.

“They carried that truth with them, they preached it, and lived it.
And even when they forgot,
and their children, and grandchildren became oppressors,
you again confronted them with your story,
with your saints, and with your word.

“Leaders spoke, people marched,
they sat down in the street,
they sat down at the lunch counters,
and in the front of the bus,
they faced the dogs, the fire hoses,
they called up and followed your promises.
They would not forget, they would not give up,
they would not cease to burn with your truth,
your promise, your deep, deep love.

“And so we come before you this day,
remembering the birth of your servant Dr. King,
and how he awakened in this whole suffering land
a sense of hope,
how he gave courage to the least of us,
how he spoke your word which ignited our hearts,
ignited a movement,
ignited a march to freedom that has no end.

“We stand today upon the shoulders of him and of many others.
We can see the horizon because they never ceased to work.
And we pray that we can take the offering of their lives
and consecrate that offering,
by your grace and our determination,
to the creation of a whole new heaven and earth
in which people and God dwell rightly,
in peace, in hope, in loving kindness together.

“But these are not easy times, God, so we come with our hands open,
open to receive the power that comes from the knowledge of your presence,
your longing for us, your joy in our presence.

“Do not abandon us in these challenging days.
Some of us are facing mounting debt,
some of us are sent to fight wars in distant lands,
some of us struggle to find blessing in our families,
some of us have lost our hope for a better future,
some of us are frustrated in our education,
some of us can’t hear what it is, o God,
that you are calling us to do in challenging times,
and empowering us to do, in days that sometimes seem too hard for us.

“Gather us together in these times, O Lord,
and move us toward solutions, toward actions,
toward justice and peace, guide us together as one.
Show us again your loving kindness
so that we might be filled with amazement
at the deeds of our God, at the constancy of the one
who knit us together in the womb.

“Feed us with this meal, feed us with your hope,
strengthen us for all that is to come,
and remind us that you never, never leave us alone.
Amen”

It was long, as usual, but fervent. I felt like this connection was essential, the connection between the ancient stories of people led and blessed, through the more recent stories, of violation, non-violent resistance, and freedom, to this community of folks gathered together to remember, and to act. Making the connection is essential. I know how to talk about it in prayer, in preaching, in a Christian context. The words, the stories, the images keep me engaged, and may also engage some folks.

I suppose it has yet to be shown whether I can find ways to raise similarly important issues with people for whom the biblical images, characters, and metaphors just don’t work.