(Rev. Eric Folkerth)

Save us, O God, from Doom Scrolling Anxiety.
Save us, O God, from Spin and Alternate Facts.
Save us, O God, from worshipping the gods of 24-hour news, political parties, or nationalistic leaders.
Save us, O God, from eyes that see lurking enemies where there is only a blustering bravado or freefloating fear.
Save us through a daily recommitment to see You in all people, and to work hard to rebuild the respect of civil society.

As always, save us from the one thing that harms us the most: ourselves.

We are Babel.
Our languages are confused.

Can you understand us?
Because we can no longer understand each other.

We seem as strangers.
And then, we decide to be enemies.

Remind us again of the paradox you challenged us to see: That our “neighbor” is always the one we image as our enemy.
Remind us that creating “the enemy” is our Original Sin, not Yours.

Especially, O God, save those of us who foolishly believe we do understand; for those who so believe are truly the most foolish of us all.

Forgive us our hubris as we fail to forgive the hubris of others.
Forgive endless Whataboutisms that keep us from focus on our own ocular “logs.”

Should this day end in uncertainty, O God, allow us to breathe in patience, and exhale trust in process. And, in coming days, O God, save us from a trigger-happy fear that “shoots first” even before questioning itself, much less its targets.

You came to abolish ritual scapegoating —to reject it as unholy— as evidenced in your own resurrection which denied our rituals of death.
But instead of believing this truth we have ever after scapegoated each other in every generation, and every election…and baptized it all in your name.

We have continued to scapegoat the poor, marginalized and disenfranchised. They have a new name every election, but our scapegoats always represent the same old tribalism; seeking to banish, rather than reconcile, all Your children to You.

Save us, O God, from the from theology that “everything is fixed.”

Banish our apocalyptic nightmares and remind us they need not come true. They are only stories we tell ourselves, not timelines of destiny.

Remind us, God, that neither the doomsday clocks of our missile silos, nor the apocalyptic scriptures of our Bible, were ever meant as literal road maps to our literal destruction, but as fear laden warnings of the very destruction we must avoid.

Specifically, remind us that Your Revelation scriptures were about a dangerous and out of control historical Empire, where the people of its time were too afraid to speak plainly to the Powers That Be.

May we never be afraid to speak plainly to the Powers That Be.

God, you once chastised us to not “build bigger barns” in this world. And so, short circuit our own “fear-prepping” for imagined disasters as an unnecessary hoarding born of excessive fear.

On this morning, nothing has fundamentally changed in our world, O God. In fact, to the contrary, both in our politics and church, we seem trapped in apocalyptic dramas we seem doomed to act-out on endless repeat, like some macabre night at the theater with no discernable end; and with we, the nervous audience, apparently certain the stories of doom must somehow be true, and must be somehow be predestined.

Show us they don’t have to be.

You came to banish such fixed thinking, to remind us of your call to us to co-create futures of hope, not narratives of carnage.

We do not deserve Your saving of us.
But save us anyway.

Amen.