In All Our Grief, ELW 615
1 In all our grief and fear we turn to you.
O God, you know all that we think or do,
you know the pain we put each other through.
Refrain:
Lord, have mercy, Christ have mercy,
Lord, grant us peace.
2 Help us to put aside the angry word,
the clenching fist, the wish and will to hurt.
Teach us the way in which love best is served.
Refrain
3 You did not even spare your only Son.
He lived our griefs and bore all evil done,
but through his cross, redemption has been won.
Refrain
4 God, when we suffer all that we can bear,
then let us know that you in truth are near
and will not leave us lost in all our fear.
Refrain
Devotion
Vitor Westhelle, in The Scandalous God (2006), says, “A theology of the cross is always the other side of a practice of resurrection, and the other way around: a practice of resurrection can only be exercised in the face of the dismal experience of the cross that in the Shabbat is remembered and thus brought back.”
It is only from within our grief and fear, when we finally realize our own limitations that we can turn to the resurrected Christ with an outcry of “have mercy.” It is only from within the practice of mercy to others, when we realize the helplessness of others, that we can cultivate a sensitivity for the suffering in our midst. We can only learn the way in which love is best served in situations of utter despair and death where we cannot expect any return on what we give. When we suffer all that we can bear, we know that the love of God is near.
Prayer
Holy God, who hovers daily around us in fidelity and compassion, this day we are mindful of another, dread-filled hovering, that of the power of death before which we stand, thin and needful. We dare trust that Friday is never the last day, so we watch for the new day of life. Hear our prayer and be your full self toward us. Amen.
(From a Walter Brueggemann Good Friday prayer in 1991.)