Beloved Community
O God, all people are your beloved, across races, nationalities, religions, orientations and all the ways we are distinctive from one another. We are all manifestations of your image; we all bear your divine imprint.
On this day that we celebrate beloved community, we recall, in the words of Dr. King that “we are bound together in an inescapable network of mutuality and tied to a single garment of destiny.”
We give you thanks for the legacy of Dr. King, and those who work tirelessly to keep his legacy alive; for the civil right movement and the voting rights act of 1965 – and the importance of voting rights in our own day; and for the African American inventors whom our children will learn about as they play on new playground equipment.
Guide, us O God, to care for the children of our community, so that they know that black lives and black minds matter. So they receive a quality education, where gaps are eliminated. So they are not profiled, or arrested for minor, childish crimes and activities.
Help us to work together – religious leaders, community activists, politicians, government officials, concerned citizens – to be instruments of your peace, justice, and love – never repaying violence with violence, but transforming adversaries and enemies into friends.
May your image, O God, which is deep within our hearts… radiate into our neighborhoods as we work together to care for creation and not only celebrate, but co-create beloved community in this city. Amen.
Renewing of Our Minds
O God of all, you desire that we love you with our hearts, souls, strength, and minds, and our neighbors as ourselves. We come together this day to celebrate our beloved community and to remember the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. Dr. King proclaimed, paraphrasing the Apostle Paul, “we should be transformed, nonconformist, through the renewing of our minds.”
O God of all, we give you thanks for African American inventors, like McKinley Jones and Valerie Thomas, who transformed our society through the renewing of their minds. We give you thanks for your call to us to be beloved community, where black lives and black minds matter. We give you thanks for the new playground equipment – for the insights, creativity, and the legacy of lived experience that inspired it, and the for children who will renew their minds as they playupon it.
O God of all, guide this community to “lift their voices and sing – sing of the faith that the dark past hast taught, sing of the hope that the present has brought.” Guide us to sing, as African Bishop St. Augustine taught, “not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but to make our journey more enjoyable. Sing,but keep going.”
Guide us, O God of all, to sing and to celebrate, and to keep going – keep re-envisioning our parks; keep closing the educational gaps in our schools; keep loving our neighbors, and our adversaries and enemies too; keep building bridges among our neighborhoods; keep transforming our communities (even through non-violent non-conformity); keep renewing our minds. Amen.