Lord,
There is an injustice in our land from how we have treated the sons and daughters of slaves. We confess our sins to you and pray for your deliverance from our cold hearts. Turn our iron hearts back to flesh and blood. We confess many years ago, we abandoned your Gospel to enslave people for the benefit of Mammon. We enslaved these people and then justified the enslavement with bogus theories of superiority as if you sanctioned our sin and it was the course of your creation. We perverted your Gospel and claimed our sins were from you. We lied to you and to those we enslaved and to ourselves.
Yes, Lord,
we abandon you in declaring ourselves Gods over them. We, in strife, recognized the evil of our ways in the battle fields of a great and bloody civil war. We knew that pain of loss for the sins of grandfathers, but then Lord, we forsook slavery, but continue in the sin of thinking ourselves better. We oppressed the sons and daughters of the people we enslaved. The blood of Trayvon Martin, or Michael Brown, of those nameless boys lynched in the name of our preserving our justification of the Original Sin. We have tried to escape sins of our fathers and grand-fathers by claiming history and the past. Yet you know the truth, Lord
Lord Jesus,
The slaves heard you call to freedom and justice even as we neglected it for our own selfish desires to escape our culpability in our crimes against you. You said that there is neither male, nor female, slave nor master, Jew nor gentile in you. We claimed you, but claimed the difference between slave and master. We have bashed the heads of their babies as we asked them to sing their songs of joy to you. When claim their anger has no reasons. For this we must ask forgiveness and promise to sin no more for the sins of our fathers and grandfathers which have come to visit us, again, and we must return them to you in in our confessions. For only you can cover our sins with your blood. Only your love can transform our dark hearts. We bow and pray you come to us and transform our violent past and make peace with our brothers and sisters we have wronged for so long. Do not turn you face away, Lord. Come, Lord Jesus, Come.
Amen
