The United Campus Ministry is horrified by the recent death of George Floyd, horrified by the long terrible barbaric history of people of color dying and suffering due to white supremacy and racial injustice in our country and around the world. United Campus Ministry stands in solidarity with all people of color, with our partner denominations, with interfaith communities, with all people laboring to abolish racism and to bring an end to its merciless brutal suffering. Jesus Christ calls us to LOVE, to put into action love for one another, the redeeming LOVE God has for all people. We cannot love God, unless we truly love each other. May God give us urgency, wisdom, fortitude and guidance to labor in our local communities and in this nation to end racism NOW, so that our lives together will truly embody God’s peace and justice, God’s heaven on earth. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., a quote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “Justice too long delayed, is justice denied.”

The prayer below is from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) website https://www.presbyterianmission.org/story/resources-for-such-a-time-as-this/

Holy One, whose Spirit is poured out upon all flesh, whose children you empower to prophesy,  whose youth see visions and whose elders dream dreams, we cry out to you with a loud “Hosanna!” Where else shall we go, O Savior? You alone have the words of eternal life.  

You came that we might have life more abundantly, but that abundance eludes too many of us, O God. Our news cycles are filled with despair. Our hearts ache as we wade through a global pandemic, reaching grim milestone after grim milestone. But even as we navigate a new threat, old ones still linger. Communities of color bear the uneven weight of a new disease, yet we see that racialized violence and the systemic injustice undergirding it have by no means given way to the demands of a pandemic. We speak some of the most recent names: Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Tony McDade. We add them to the litany already in our macabre collection: Aiyana and Emmett, Eric and Sandra, Jordan and Rekia, Trayvon, Atatiana and Tamir, and the myriad others in far too long a list. This great cloud has witnessed persistent injustice and our perseverance in the face of it. Yet, how can they rest when so many keep joining their ranks? 

We are slow to confront our complicity and investment in white supremacy and dominance. We live in a world in which Indigenous, Black and Brown siblings are expected and compelled to offer forgiveness at a discount. When the cheeks are turned, they are met with another hand to the face — or knee to the throat. Forgiveness is too infrequently met with repentance. This, O God, we name as sin. It is our sin. Many of us lament and strive against that sin. Help and empower us to continue that work with diligence and faith. Too many of us still waver and are unconvinced that there is a problem. Remove our hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh that are softened toward our siblings. Help us to reckon not only with our personal failings, but also with our institutional history and the ways the church has helped to create systems of inequity. By your Spirit, help us to corporately live into our creeds and confessions and provide sanctuary for all God’s children. When we say that “God, in a world full of injustice and enmity, is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged” and that “the church labors for the abolition of all racial discrimination,” help us to truly mean it. 

We humble ourselves and cry out to you in the hope that you will hear us and heal us. We lift the communities of Louisville, Minneapolis, Glynn County, and all where racialized violence has occurred and unrest has been stirred. Holy God, we recall the words of our ancestor Dr. King, who reminded us that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Open our hearts, minds, and understanding to your movement in the margins, so that when your people speak, they are indeed heard, and when they tell the truth about your deeds of power, they are not dismissed as something other than sober and of a clear mind. In this way, let the fires of uprising give way to the fires of your Spirit, where your people hear the Good News of your kin-dom, hear it with joy, and make haste to take part in it. Let us release our attachment to our current world order and walk bravely into the world you’ve intended for us, even and especially when it costs us something. We are mindful that, as Rev. Dr. Cornell West states, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” 

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus is still Lord. To the one and only God, our Divine Parent, Jesus, our Gracious Sibling, and Holy Spirit, be the honor and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.