(Psalm 71: 1-2)

“Lord, I have come to you for protection;

Never let me be defeated!

Because you are righteous, help me and rescue me.

Listen to me and save me!”

“Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being ‘drawn toward.’ Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.


"Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of (the disenfranchised and), the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. ….

“For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called ‘love.’ Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity -- a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.”
Passion for Justice, the Rev., Dr. Carter Heyward, Episcopal Priest and Howard Chandler Robbins Professor of Theology, Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA.


In the thought of the Hebrew Bible, it is only because God’s intrinsic nature is righteousness (tsaw-dak)—to be just, to bring about justice and to save—that God actively chose us for mutually beneficial and reciprocal relationship. It is only because this loving relationship involves a commitment, a sometimes seemingly irrational one on the part of God, that we have dared across so many millennia to ask that our prayers for protection, victory, help, rescues and salvation be heard.


Let us come this week in prayer. Let our hearts of prayer speak boldly our deepest longings for protection, victory, help, rescue and salvation. Let us pray with the confidence of our faith across centuries of this commitment to the love and healing of broken lives in our broken world. Let us pray with hope, remembering that our faith is an ancient choice made for us by the One whose very essence is very essence is to save us, love us, heal, protect and defend us. Let us pray for the faith to choose to love and heal other broken lives in our broken world. Amen.