Your Strange Ways

This prayer was prayed over us on Sunday and a number of people asked about it. What a great way to pray into our weekend.

Holy One,

your Strange ways,

they astound us.

Among the mighty, your Wisdom is called foolish.

While others assert their power with force,

Yours unfolds like an invitation.

You never resort to weapons.

You turn from all paths of domination.

Beauty and truth are your means of persuasion.

Freedom is your promise.

While empire shouts false promises of security,

using fear to turn us against each other,

You whisper things of vulnerability,

of meals at table and sharing what we have,

of solidarity and new life.

When you, the Sacred, took on flesh,

You sought neither thrones nor prestige,

but made your friends among the outcast.

Sex workers.

The imprisoned.

The hungry and the ill.

The fed up and the weary.

Though you were presented with every opportunity

to seek importance among the elite,

to the end, you choose the edges,

making your home among the vulnerable,

living in solidarity with the criminalized and despised.

Abandoning the promises of conformity,

we hope to be strange like you.

Strangers to all that normalizes evil,

to power that corrupts,

to practices that demean or neglect.

Make us faithful to the peculiar calling of Christ.

Unafraid to bear the names of the despised.

Firmly planted in the confidence of your Holy Mystery –

the strange love that calls us to fight with and for each other,

and awakens us to the joy you set before us.

– enfleshed