Many voices crowd together
on this Tuesday in November that You have ordained.
Rejoicing and lament will both take place today,
and tomorrow, and the next day.

We would not like to say so out loud, Lord,
but for many, our most dearly held freedom
is not the freedom we have found from sin and death, in Christ alone,
but the freedom to do as we please.

The psalmist says,
“No one seeks for You,”
and I confess that many days it rings true
in the places in my soul I wish You could not see.

Evil runs rampant in our hearts
and in our streets.
Today is just another outworking of the darkness within
and the darkness without.

We have departed from Your ways, Lord.
We have built our tottering tower to the heavens.

We want to be like You in all the wrong ways –
omniscient, immortal, invincible.
Yet we have no interest in being like You
in the ways You have asked of us –
humble, just, and merciful.

We defy Your command to love our neighbor.
We speak of them with corrupted words
that flow from corrupted minds.

We think we are better –
better than the person who votes for _________;
better than the person who sins
in a different way than we do.

But Your wrath plays no favorites.
I have no leg to stand on,
because the scales of righteousness are already balanced:
You alone are holy,
and we all have fallen short of Your glory.

And yet –
in pride, I wish that Your justice would rain down on them,
but not on me.
I do not hate evil because You hate evil;
I hate it because I want to gloat over those I dislike.

Your mercy on me has been forgotten in the dust,
and I, like Jonah, am sitting on a hill outside the city,
waiting to watch it burn.

My own sin is lost on me;
if the judicial system I have asked for were enacted,
I would be the first to bow under the mighty hand of a Holy God.

Father, You are kind,
and You are patient
so now I plead for Your mercy:
Mercy covering over my sin,
and mercy over this country You have placed me within.
Mercy on those I would not love, if I were god,
but “God so loved the world,”
so Father, please, have mercy on us all.

I confess the sins of my generation;
that we have not cared enough,
but prefer to stand aside in apathy,
while criticizing outcomes.
Our passivity is not from You,
as we bury our heads in the sand.

I confess our fear
and its expression through anger –
that those of us who involve ourselves in political process and events
often care so much that we have placed our entire faith
in a system that can and will fail us,
instead of finding complete confidence in Your sovereign plan.

We have all raised idols in our hearts, Lord;
the evil we claim to despise is within us.

Lord, have mercy.

Today we do not elect our Savior, our King, or our God.
Some trust in parties, and some in presidents,
“but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.”

You are good, and do good.
No plan of Yours can be thwarted.

Would you intervene, Lord God,
and by Your grace allow us, Your church,
to participate actively and with humility,
even as we acknowledge that we are citizens first of a heavenly country,
“from which we eagerly wait for our Savior, the LORD Jesus Christ.”

Jesus, teach us to love our neighbor,
and pray for our enemy,
even as You have loved us,
and prayed for us,
while we were yet Your enemies.

Your kingdom come, Your will be done, O Lord,
on earth, as it is in heaven.

Amen.