This Advent I’m posting a prayer here each week oriented around the theme of that week of Advent. This week, please join me in praying for peace.
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Peace
O Lord, you are the God of peace. You are powerful and dreadful — you enforce peace in the heavens and grant peace on earth as well.
Lord, we acknowledge that you are perfect, and that we in our sinful state are incapable of achieving your perfection. All peace comes from you, but because of our fallenness, we are not at peace — with you, or with each other — and so we entreat you to have mercy on us and grant us your peace.
In a world ravaged by sin and death, on behalf of victims of injustice and civil unrest, we pray to you: for families, communities, and nations torn apart by the spectre of war; for the mothers of children conscripted to serve as militia; for those suffering under oppressive and despotic regimes. For victims of human trafficking, sex slavery, and acts of terrorism. These issues and more we raise to you.
We also lift to you those suffering emotional or personal unrest: those with turbulent family lives, those in abusive relationships, those who have lost loved ones; those who struggle against depression or anxiety, those with unquiet minds, those with mental and emotional disorders.
Lord, we confess our apathy. We seek after comfort and security and selfishly call it “peace,” ignorant of the maelstrom right outside our door. Have mercy on us, Lord, and intervene. Give us a desire for peace that outweighs our desire for comfort at home. Give us the strength and the inclination to take the steps we can take to bring your kingdom to earth. Increase our sense of responsibility, Lord, that we might work for a world free of conflict.
As we pray these things, even as we pray for the strength to push the boundaries of your kingdom ever farther, we acknowledge that there is so much strife and chaos in our world that we sometimes lose hope of there ever being peace on earth. Please remind us of what you spoke through your servant the prophet Isaiah, that a day is coming when wolves shall live with lambs, when leopards shall lie down with goats. God, we yearn wholeheartedly for that day — when swords are beaten into plowshares and all the earth is filled with the knowledge of you.
In this second Advent, while we wait for that day, let us remember the source of our peace. Let us remember you, Christ, who left us your peace. Let us remember you in whose name all oppression shall cease. Let us remember you who will stand as a banner for the peoples, to whom nations will rally, whose resting place will be glorious. Visit us with your peace, Jesus, that we may stand as a beacon, pointing those yearning for peace to the place where you granted us the peace that passes understanding, where you granted us peace for the second Advent, where you granted us the promise of a lasting and permanent future peace: to the cross.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis pecata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis pecata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis pecata mundi, dona nobis pacem
Come quickly, Lord Jesus.
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As before, please feel free to add your own prayers below for the many things I left out above, or for anything that you’d like prayer for during this Advent season.
