A Pledge to Pray
A Pledge to Pray
Final Week: January 14, 2011
A message of thanks from City Mission Society's Executive Director, the Rev. June Cooper~
For nearly 12 weeks we have prayed about our hope and visions for peace in the City of Boston and communities every where.
We are grateful for the prayers prayed by the 43 participants--both individual and congregations from Dorchester to Wellesley. Your individual and collective prayers have been a blessing.
For now our Pledge to Pray concludes on the 25th anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a National Holiday.
Rev. King possessed unique gifts of dignity, grace, and eloquence. He inspired and challenged his generation. He held high the torch of non-violence and his dream of unity, justice, and equality for all.
May his words challenge us as we try to make sense of the brutal shootings of our brothers and sisters in Arizona.
May we never permit Dr. King's dream to be an impossible dream.
And, let's continue to pray for hope and never surrender to violence and hatred.
Prayer for Peace
O God, our Heavenly Father, we thank you for this golden privilege to worship you, the only true God of the universe.
We come to you today, grateful that you have kept us through the long night of the past and ushered us into the challenge of the present and the bright hope of the future. We are mindful, O God, that [we] cannot save [ourselves], for [we] are not the measure of things and humanity is not God. Bound by our chains of sins and finiteness, we know we need a Savior.
We thank you, O God, for the spiritual nature of [human beings]. We are in nature but we live above nature. Help us never to let anybody or any condition pull us so low as to cause us to hate. Give us strength to love our enemies and to do good to those who despitefully use us and persecute us.
We thank you for your Church, founded upon your Word, that challenges us to do more than sing and pray, but go out and work as though the very answer to our prayers depended on us and not upon you. Then, finally, help us to realize that [human beings] were not created to shine like stars and live on through all eternity.
Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace, help us to walk together, pray together, sing together, and live together until that day when all God's children, Black, White, Red, and Yellow will rejoice in one common band of humanity in the kingdom of our Lord and of our God, we pray. Amen.
~written by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a "Pastoral Prayer" in 1956.