Brazil elections - Prayer of the name of God taken in vain
Reflecting on Brazil's elections, our Global Theology Advisor Nancy Cardoso shared the following prayer.
We pronounce Your name with care and fear
because you are too present in the oppressor's speech.
Your name is attached to homeland and property.
Your word frames families where we cannot live.
We pronounce Your name with care and fear
because you are too present in the oppressor's speech.
Your name is attached to homeland and property.
Your Word frames families where we cannot live.
Thy will on earth as it is in heaven
is fake news, threat and treachery.
The fragile democracy that was ours
succumbed in the meshes of temptation.
Forty days in the desert of a political campaign
and fascism from the top of the hill promised us,
stones in the place of bread: we ate!
Religious leaders throw themselves vainly
from the top of popular approval and
angels in military uniform hold all honour, glory and power.
How to sing the song of the Lord in a such strange land?
Let us relearn to pronounce Your name.
Fragile and constant in the life of the poor,
we reaffirm that you are love,
that Your Kingdom is not of this world,
not from these men and their ways of torture.
We rediscover Your presence
in this little hope,
on this path of the cross,
in this stubborn faith
and in the voice of prophets.
We are: apprentices of resurrection.
We commit
to speak the truth to the powerful,
to serve on the table of equality against poverty,
to strengthen the hands of women, indigenous people and peasants,
to walk with quilombolas and activists,
for the sake of land, forest, water and rights.
In the joy of liberating solidarity,
deliver us from evil!