Prayer for the disenfranchised.  Just who are they?  Did I ever feel disenfranchised?  or voiceless?  Like I didn’t really matter to anyone?  When did you or I feel rejected, excluded, or pushed to the outer margins of life?

Maybe when basketball teams were picked in elementary school.  (I was always the second to last chosen.)  Or maybe it was that junior high dance when you sat on the sidelines.  Perhaps it was spending hours on the phone getting authorization from your health insurance company for a medical procedure.  Perhaps in a small way, we have all felt voiceless—and in that we are united.

Despite the best efforts of our secular society to hide them, the voiceless and disenfranchised are all about us, both locally and globally.   And we must thank God that the information age is awakening in us a greater social consciousness.   But, who are these people, who, like Lazarus of the Gospel, are excluded from the banquet of a secure and peaceful life?

• They are our brothers and sisters in Darfur, living on less than $1 per day;
• They are women who are trafficked for the abuse of their bodies;
• They are the elderly, warehoused in nursing homes;
• They are illiterate Third World children working long hours in sweatshops to provide us with cheap imports that clutter our closets,  our landfills and our hearts;
• They are single parents working several minimum wage jobs, without health benefits;
• They are the mentally disturbed, tormented with illnesses such as paranoia and schizophrenia, whom our society chooses to ignore until they brandish weapons on our school campuses or in our office buildings;
• They are the children of generations to come—who will only have the remnants of our beautiful earth because of the devastations of global warming and our regular and rampant raping of the environment;
• They are the 1,961 individuals found to be homeless here in Ventura County on one single day this past January.

If our prayer for the disenfranchised is to be authentic, then, we must reflect  onand embrace the radicality of authentic prayer.  True prayer demands our concrete involvement in trying to bring about what we ask for.  Perhaps our own prayer is empty because it is mere lip-service--rather than the conversion of heart and consistent, radical and countercultural choices that will change the plight of those in need.   I must give skin to my prayer for the voiceless by my concrete actions on their behalf.   

The basic test of the morality of a family/ or of a city/ or of a faith community is this:  “Just how are our most vulnerable members faring?”   How are the children of Darfur faring today?  How are the trafficked women enslaved in our brothels faring today?  How is my lonely great-aunt in the nursing home faring today?   How is the African child without shoes faring today?  How is the paranoid schizophrenic who just purchased a semiautomatic firearm faring today?  Just how are our most vulnerable members faring?   

And so embracing our responsibilities to act on behalf of the disenfranchised, I invite you now to join me in prayer. 

God our Father, we adore you and we thank you for the gift of your all-welcoming, all-embracing, unconditional love.  We pray for the grace to have hearts as wide as the universe.  In our adoration of your divinity, may we experience our solidarity as members of one human family.    May we recognize that our worship incurs obligations which bind us to the voiceless in our midst across the globe and to generations yet to come.

We ask you to forgive us for those times when our attitudes and choices betrayed our weakest brothers and sisters.  Forgive us our foolish worship of the false gods of individualism, power, comfort and wealth.  

Oh God, trouble our consciences when they need to be troubled.  When we waste food, may we think of the 1,000 people who die every hour from starvation.  When we need more room in our walk-in closets, may we realize that some people live in hovels that are smaller than our closets.   When we abuse the earth, may we remember the natural resources that we want our great-great-grandchildren to enjoy.

We ask your blessings on our disenfranchised brothers and sisters around the  world.  We ask for vision, courage and determination to act on their behalf.  Give us the strength to be countercultural when we are tempted by human respect.   As we gather from different faith communities with diverse beliefs, we ask that our corporate commitment to the disenfranchised may unite us to work together for justice for all peoples.

And finally, we ask you to engrave the words of Micah in our hearts: 
“You have been told, O man, O woman what is good,
and what the Lord requires of you:
Only to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”