Father,
You have instructed yours
to pray for Jerusalem's peace.
Is that today's call , or yesterday's?
The day before the 10,000 rockets reigned,
and the blood of innocence flowed,
In rivers of barbaric pain?
Is the call to pray for a Shalom
beyond the pale of even Your love;
That sees each of 40 baby's hearts
seperated from the promises of sight?
Has Your own grief in the old whose
German Auuswich is now reborn
In a tunnel of dispair,
overwhelmed the Iron Dome
of Your Love?
Assuredly not, for You alone live in between
The cry of Israel's daughters
brutally bludgeoned,
And Gaza's mothers who grieve their sons,
some innocent,
others whose hatred and grievance
now separates them from the very source
of love, their mothers breast
once nurtured.
Father, the righteousness
of Israel's eternal struggle to be,
Unfettered by a sea of cross generational hatred,
now manifestly unleashed,
cuts across all our hearts
as assuredly the nail imprinted wrists
of Your own Son.
So, just as I have no excuse of my own,
sins of spirit and flesh too many
to atone,
I pray Your mercies on Israel and its enemies
to arise before Your throne,
Before Your Justice whose false equivalency
sees into each human heart,
Of victims and vanquished alike,
without the darkness of prejudice's night.
Hear Lord the cry of Your children, lost;
In blood soaked garments of our
humanity past.
Hear O God of Abrahams faith,
The daughter and sons of Jerusalem's night.
Shine by some miracle newly born,
Into our inhumanity,
The grace of Your Son.
I cry for Israel, Father, my own heritage by faith.
I pray for Hammas's deadly vanquish,
Even as I hope for each person's ultimate
redemption when the whole world
looks upon "the One" pierced,
and "grieve for him as one
mourns for an only child,..
for a first born son." 1
So Father, I pray, all Jerusalem's children,
Both far and near.
We pray to The One whose mercies alone
can bring hope from the darkest hell.
I pray as one whose innocence is lost,
But hope renewed in The Son
of Your own exilic grief,
born of centuries burdens,
in that same land.
Forgive us, though our sins are unforgivable,
Allow justice revenge to cut through
To mercies new Dawn.
Allow the Shalom of Your heart to be poured out
Upon Jerusalem's mothers
As surely it must
Take root in Gaza's isolated poverty as well.
Father. You alone can do what we
so miserably fail.
Amen.
Terry
10/12/2023
1 Zechariah 12:10 referenced
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