A Prayer About the Temptations of Power
This prayer was offered by Rick Barry as part of our August 14 prayer call.
Father,
You have given us new life in your son, promised us a new future without scarcity, without dismay, without insecurity. With all of the affirmation and rootedness and connection and resources and wisdom and comfort and generosity that we could imagine.
We are sorry for our attempts to pursue blessings and security in this world. Please remind us of what is to come and teach us to be satisfied.
You have carried us into this country where we live on a three-hundred-million-person pharaoh committee, sharing our country with people who don’t know you and who don’t live like we live.
We are sorry for trying to make promises on behalf of others. Teach us that it is you who changes people’s hearts, not us.
You have sent us into this world as missionaries to it, as ambassadors of that other future, as exiles in this imperfect kingdom, and as messengers of your promises. You call your church to be living foretastes of the new humanity that is to come.
We are sorry for trying to bind you to a covenant with our country now, the kind of covenant your word says you don’t want to make between Jesus’ resurrection and his eventual return. When we are tempted toward that impulse, remind us that you have scattered your people into every nation, and that the only kingdom you are aligned with is the one that is still to come.
We confess that, for generations, we haven’t taken your calling to live differently seriously in the public square, and our democracy is worse off because we haven’t been listening to your call.
When your people were carried away as exiles in Babylon, the false prophets claimed you would over-turn it. But the true prophet Jeremiah called your exiles to love the mission field you had carried them into, living in it, bolstering it, seeking its shalom.
Instead, we too often resent the mission field you’ve given us. We withdraw from it, or we try to turn it into something else, or, in the case of Christian Nationalism, we try to shut out the neighbors with whom we are called to share it, alongside whom we are supposed to be stewarding it.
We are sorry.
The pattern of our world is to use our limited time and limited energy for the sake of securing the powers and privileges and authority of empire for ourselves. To believe that if another flourishes, it must be at our own expense. To believe that success means taking over, and re-making others in our own image.
But from the calling of Abraham through to the commissioning of the apostles, you commanded your people over and over again to give up our own blessings for the sake of blessing others.
Your son did not consider equality with you a thing to be grasped, but instead took on the form of a servant, and he commanded his apostles to do the same: “The rulers of the gentiles lord it over them,” he said, “but it is not to be so with you. He who would be first must instead make himself a servant of all.”
For us, the temptation to try to rule, to try to lord ourselves and our vision of the good life over others, is too often too great. Some of us praying now have found it so easy to go along with the idea that human flourishing is limited by tribe, and that the church you have called us into is just another interest group competing against all the others for whatever security and affirmation we can get in the here and now.
We are not the only people in this country to be tempted by the promise of power, or authority, or security. We are not the only people in this country to think that it’s frustrating to need to share space with people so different from us.
But we are the only people in this country who know, for a fact, that we will one day share a kingdom with people of every tribe, of every tongue, and that we will do so gladly, singing in concert together in our disparate tongues.
That should make us better at democracy. More enthusiastic about it. Less inclined to try to re-create our neighbors in our own image. It should let us conduct ourselves in ways that seem impossible to our neighbors—and that make them grateful we are here.
Please, please, please drive your son’s promises and commands deeper into the hearts of everyone who bears the name “Christian” in this country. Teach us to engage with the civic square while simultaneously repenting of the desire for power, the desire for authority, the desire for security now.
Our public square desperately needs people who are more concerned for others than for themselves. The promises you have made through your son and the regeneration of your Holy Spirit empower us to do exactly that.
At this intersection of the world’s needs and your church’s commission, let your Son’s presence be seen and felt in the way his people act.
We pray these things in his name.
Amen.
Rick Barry is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Christian Civics.
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