Rage and Hope: 75 prayers for a better world

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 36 Causton Street

London SW1P 4ST www.spckpublishing.co.uk

Copyright © Chine McDonald and Wendy Lloyd 2021

The views in this book do not necessarily represent the views of Christian Aid.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN

ISBN 9780281086238

eISBN 9780281086245

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by The Book Guild Ltd, Leicester, UK

This book is dedicated to the communities around the world with whom Christian Aid has stood together for dignity, equality and justice for 75 years.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Remember

‘Perplexed but not in despair’

Undone

Remembering the power of prayer

Remembering communities facing caste discrimination*

Bearing witness

A prayer for the darkness

Remembering Colombia

Love is rage

The God who hears us

Remember to lament

A humbling lesson

Help us to remember

Listen to my protest

How long?

A thirst for justice

Lest we forget

None is forgotten

Walls and wire

Born of love and anger

Resist

With heavy hearts

A prayer for those who wish to lament the Earth

Long-resisted justice

Instruments of peace and justice

Resisting with lament and gentle protest

Overcome

His unfailing hand

We are the poor

I feel the rage and pain in my own fingers: Daughter Zion voices her anger

Raising our voices in lament

‘Dear God, are you racist?’

How long?

The plight of widows in Africa: Resistance in the struggle for justice

Loss and lament

The yes and no of resistance

Martha and the dragon

God of wisdom and hope

God who protects

Longing for home

Resolve

Resolve implies action

Standing for justice

Worn out

Resolve to restore

Jesus was more than a human rights activist

Resolve in Myanmar

Re-solve

Let me lament

Gracias Por La Esperanza

Speak up

Hope above rage

I dare

Embodied discipleship

Resolve to rebuild

Resolve to be still

Resolve to trade fairly

Resolve to repent

Their strength is my resolve

Resolve to act

Hope requires resolve

Reimagine

Imagination

Catching a glimpse of God

Nothing you can’t do

Where is God in the pandemic?

Crossing the River

Pandemic prayer

Reimagining is recreating

Your kingdom come

Rage and hope for Sri Lanka

Yeast

A prayer for confronting white supremacy

Together only

A prayer for the ‘new normal?’

The Spirit’s power is the power to reimagine

Imagining the end of gender-based violence

Reimagine innocence

Grace upon grace

Afterword

Notes

Foreword

Against a backdrop of global distress and economic uncertainty, we need to hold onto hope. It can be all too tempting to brush over or press down our pain, our rage, our broken hearts and bruised bodies. And yet, the Bible shows us time and time again that the power of lament is not to be overlooked. Indeed, it is lament that can generate covenant and reestablish our hope in the promises God has made.

In the mid-fifth century BCE (about 450 BCE), exiled Jews in Babylon made their way home after their displacement. They were led home by Ezra the scribe and Nehemiah the governor. When they arrived back in Jerusalem, they found a sorry situation of stress and economic distress. Ezra the scribe, in response to their new sorry circumstance, voiced a long prayer (Nehemiah 9:6–37). The prayer touches all the normal bases of conventional prayer including praise and thanksgiving to God for mercy, and confession of sin. The prayer ends in petition and lament. The petition is a bid that God should pay attention to their dire straits: ‘Do not treat lightly all the hardship that has come upon us, our kings, our officials, our priests, our prophets, our ancestors, and all your people, since the time of the kings of Assyria until today’ (v. 32).

The prayer ends with the most pathos-filled of all biblical laments:

Here we are, slaves to this day – slaves in the land that you gave to our ancestors to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts. Its rich yield goes to the kings whom you have set over us because of our sins; they have power also over our bodies and over our livestock at their pleasure, and we are in great distress (vv. 36–37).

The prayer lines out for God the dreadful economic condition of the returned Jews. All of their produce is severely taxed by the Persians (those over us). It is the Persians who enjoy the good produce of the land of promise. No wonder the lament concludes: ‘We are in great distress.’ They are in such great distress that Ezra cannot even muster a good loud demanding imperative to God. The ending of the prayer is more like a helpless whimper.

In context, however, we can see that even this prayer of lament is not without generative force:

•The lament allows Israel to identify properly its true circumstance without illusion;

•The lament permits Israel to disengage from the ideological hegemony of the Persians;

•The lament allows the returnees to engage in depth with their tradition of faith concerning the God of mercy;

•The lament invites them to a sense of community amid their suffering; and

•The lament authorizes the mustering emotive energy for what has to be done for a viable future.

There is no evidence that God answered the prayer. There is, however, compelling evidence that those who prayed honestly were empowered to act for the sake of a new future.

In the next paragraph it is reported that they made a new covenantal agreement for the sake of organising community power and faith as a community alternative to the Persian hegemony. The new agreement included:

Provision for Sabbath, an assurance that common life would not be reduced to commerce and commodity (10:31).

A provision for debt relief every seven years (as in the Torah provision) thus supplying relief from economic deprivation (10:31); a series of different offerings that no doubt contributed to the common good (10:32–39).

This new covenant was surely evoked and empowered by the truth-telling of the lament. It turns out that the lament of Ezra was not an act of resignation, but an act of new resolve. The public voicing of grief may lead to new social energy. My hunch is that every stirring of emancipatory power among the powerless begins in lament. Where there is no lament, there can only be violence. Where there is vigorous lament, new social energy is released. Ezra’s prayer set in motion new social possibility!

It is my prayer, that as we pause to celebrate 75 years of Christian Aid, these prayers of rage and hope will give you words to frame your lament and stir you to hopeful action for the next 75 years of ministry to come.

Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia. He is the author of The Prophetic Imagination, Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, and Tenacious Solidarity: Biblical Provocations on Race, Religion, Climate, and the Economy.

Introduction

In Christian Aid’s 75th year, the world was going through a global pandemic. Not since the Second World War which sparked our founding had so much of humanity been experiencing a sense of collective trauma at the same time.

We were brought face to face with our mortality, with the inequality and injustice of our world. People were dying in their hundreds of thousands due to COVID-19, too many taken before their time. The coronavirus was novel – something new we had to wrestle with, but there were age-old issues in the background reflecting the brokenness of our world.

Many finally understood the racial injustices that had been perpetrated against black people over centuries through the death of George Floyd and the outpouring sparked by the Black Lives Matter protests. The pandemic also showed in the starkest of terms that inequality kills. Some communities in Britain and Ireland were more affected than others by COVID-19, some countries in the global North were able to buy many more vaccines than they needed, while countries in the global South had nothing, and continued to be faced by crippling debt due to our broken economic system. All of this against a backdrop of our greatest challenge yet – the climate crisis, which for many of the communities we work with is a present reality, not just a distant threat.

In the midst of this, many churches are closed. Yet, faced with seeing all this pain, Christians all over the world continue to pray. Sometimes our prayers are full of hope, an unshakeable trust that things will be put right in the end. But sometimes our prayers reflect our rage and lament. Because we know that God is able to handle our anger and our sadness about the pain and injustices that we see.

There are not many books on prayer that straddle the line between prayers of rage and lament, and those of hope. In 75 years of Christian Aid’s work, we have seen the best of humanity and the worst of it; we have seen that the world is a broken place – its systems unjust and unfair – and yet through it all we have seen glimmers of hope. We believe that our Christian faith should compel each and every one of us to pray authentic prayers to a God who hears us; who invites us to pour out our rage and lament and have the audacity to hope that God is able to do the impossible. We understand the theme of rage and hope to be an expression of lament, a ‘protest so deep that it must become a prayer, for only God can provide the needed hope that justice will prevail and that the future will be different’.¹

This book is not a neat book of prayer. The prayers themselves – written by Christian activists, theologians and church leaders from all over the world – are messy. The authenticity of some will make you uncomfortable. They speak about different issues that we see in our world, from climate injustice to racial injustice, from conflict to gender injustice. The voices of those in this book who rage and lament join together in this tapestry of prayer, as we offer up to God our hopes for how the world ought to be.

Each of the prayers speaks to these themes, however:

Remember – bearing witness to the injustice that causes our rage and lament.

Resist – how our long lament is an act of resistance in the struggle for justice.

Resolve – making clear that our prayers are not resignation but resolution to be part of the solution.

Reimagine – awakening hope-inspired possibilities for the world.

This book is intended for use by individual Christians, engaged in global issues, who want meaningful ways to