PRAYER FOR AMERICA

Eternal God, who has called us to be your people, you led our forefathers to this great land and granted us abundance, prosperity and freedom. Within their hearts and minds you planted a love of freedom, and within their spirits you placed the lure of the future. We thank you, Lord, for creating us with the capacity for imagination and risk and adventure. We thank you for the chance to start over again, to begin anew, to leave behind the bondage to inadequate ideas or methods, to be released from the guilt of past failure. We thank you for all that is new and good in this land.

However, you know us well, Lord. You know that since we have inherited freedom, we often take it for granted. Recipients of abundance and prosperity beyond our imaginings, our hearts often become hardened with greed. Benefactors of a legacy far beyond our capacity to create or produce, our egos are tempted to pride, to claim that by our own insight and power we have gotten all these things. We acknowledge our pretensions. O Lord, be pleased to forgive us by your mercy.

We ask your blessing for America, this our homeland, the land we love. Save us from the encroachments of collective power within that destroy our individual liberty. Release us from obsession with material goods, so that our spirits might be free. Let justice and truth and wisdom permeate the halls of legislatures, national and state. Grant wisdom to our President and his administration, that our nation might be led wisely and courageously in these perilous times.

O Lord of all history, who sees with the eye of eternity, bless the momentous events of these times that justice and liberty and prosperity might abound more equitably throughout the world. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.