A Prayer for Merciful Elected Officials
This prayer was offered by Rick Barry as part of our May 22 Faith and Politics Prayer Call. You can sign up for future calls at the bottom of this page.
Consider looking up your most local elected officials and praying for them by name as you work your way through this prayer.
“For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peace-loving, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial, free of hypocrisy.”
Good and gracious King,
Our political culture rewards exactly the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that James says lead to all sorts of harmful results.
Those results aren't just harmful for the people who are bound by and subject to the policies that our government develops. Those results can also be harmful for the people who develop them.
We confess that we have been cavalier about the temptations we throw people into when we hire them into public service. We're cavalier about the ways that our political culture can malform the people who inhabit it. We look at our elected officials and political staffers as characters in a story rather than as real people who are subject to the powers and principalities and spiritual forces in the heavenly realms.
You say that, “blessed are the merciful for they shall be shown mercy.” And so we ask you to make the people who inhabit this broken political culture into merciful people.
We want to see them show mercy to others, and we want to see them show more mercy than we would ourselves.
We confess that there are people we naturally don't want to see receive mercy. And we confess that we vote in ways and we lobby in ways and we communicate in ways that make it really easy for our representatives to not show mercy to those people.
So we pray right now for your spirit to empower even the people who work in government who don't know you yet to show mercy even when we don't want them to.
We ask you to lead our elected officials to show mercy to the unemployed, to show mercy to the unmarried, to show mercy to the people who we think of as greedy, to the people who we think of as selfish, to the people who we think of as having voted against our interest or against their own interest.
Those of us who are young, we ask for you to move our elected officials to show mercy to the old. Those of us who are old, we ask you to move our elected officials to show mercy to the young and to the generations we will never see. The Gen Z ask for mercy for the boomers, and the boomers ask for deference and mercy to the Gen Z.
Those of us who were born here ask for mercy for those of us who were not. And those of us who are trying to join this country and feel like the goalposts are being moved on us, we ask for mercy for the inhospitable.
Those of us who have done everything right, we ask for elected officials who would be merciful toward those who we think have done everything wrong.
And we ask for the people who we voted for to actually show mercy to the people we didn't vote for. We ask for the people we vote for to show mercy for the people who didn't vote for them. And we ask for you to move our elected officials to show mercy toward the people who would never, ever vote for them.
We want the people we elected to not just be people who serve us, but people who serve everyone who lives in their jurisdiction. We ask you to turn stone hearts into flesh in city hall, in the state house, and in the Capitol. We ask you to be a God who brings humility to the proud. We ask for you to be a God who brings love for others to the selfish.
We ask you to prepare us to be galled by the way mercy gets shown in our politics.
And we ask you to give us the wisdom and insight and patience necessary to not elect candidates into offices that will malform them.
Help us to see not just whether these people would serve us when we vote for them, but whether they would be well-served by the position. And give us the restraint and the mercy to not vote for our own interests if the person serving those interests wouldn't be well-served by the position.
We pray that we would have mercy when we hire, and that the people we hire would have mercy we could never foresee.
We pray these things in your name and for your glory.
Amen.
Rick Barry is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Christian Civics.
Throughout the 2024 election season, the Center for Christian Civics will be leading twice-monthly prayer calls, featuring guided prayer for the complex relationship between faith and politics in a polarized era. To get reminder emails and login links about these calls, fill out the form below!