Contemplating Racial Reconciliation

Dear God of Love and Justice,

1 Peter 5:3 calls leaders not to lord power over others but to lead by example — and Martin Luther knew that true leadership begins on our knees. At the baptismal font, you declared every human being a beloved child, stamped with the imago Dei, the image of God. Yet we confess that the church has too often drawn lines where you drew none, building walls in the very house where you tore the curtain in two.

Lord, open my eyes the way you opened Peter's on that rooftop in Joppa — stunned to discover that what he had called unclean, you had already called holy. Give me the courage of the Lutheran pastors in Birmingham who, in 1963, quietly opened their church doors when others bolted theirs shut, choosing the scandal of welcome over the comfort of silence. They understood what Luther meant when he wrote that a Christian is perfectly free, lord of all — and yet a perfectly dutiful servant of all.

Teach me to lead not from above but from alongside. Where I have benefited from systems that diminish your children, grant me the humility to listen before I speak, to repent before I instruct, and to follow the lead of those who have borne burdens I have never carried.